The Korean MMO “Black Desert” is coming in 2016. Over the weekend, it was briefly mentioned as 2015, but that was said to be “translation errors.”
It’s quite a hassle with these Asian MMOs. At the end of last week, it was reported that publisher Daum held a press conference where they announced a release of Black Desert for 2016 in the West. Nothing new. That was the schedule that had been announced earlier.
Then the Koreatimes reported in an article something completely different. Publisher Daum wants to hurry to take advantage of the good mood in the West and release the game here in 2015. The largest Black Desert fan site confirmed this with the developers as well. The original source of the news, the Asia MMO specialty site steparu, corrected accordingly: Black Desert is set to be brought to the West in the second half of 2015.
Today, a reversal: Publisher Daum said 2016 and meant it. There must be misunderstandings.
Korean-English seems to cause problems
In our own matter: A few months ago, we had the case that we were probably the only MMO magazine to watch a live stream from Nvidia at noon (it was just 3:00 AM in the USA), where a Korean-speaking developer from NCSoft, subtitled in English, casually stated, that Blade & Soul should come to the West in 2014. A huge deal actually. But this also turned out to be a mistake. Somehow they had mis-captioned him. He had said something completely different.
It’s a struggle with these Korean-English translations.
The language and cultural barrier is real. The rather flowery Black Desert Facebook account is also making a name for itself.
Perhaps this will change in the coming months when NCSoft has established an office in the USA for Blade & Soul and fills corresponding positions, and when publisher Daum has also established itself here in the West for Black Desert. Until then, we will probably have to live with one or another misunderstanding, even though it is annoying.
