PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
... if you want a social life... or any kind of life... at all!
Seriously, I do not think I've been this hooked to a game since the release of WoW, right the way through TBC and most of WotLK.
Honest word of warning though if you do decide to check it out, be prepared for some serious grinding and possibly spending money in the cash shop. You don't HAVE to, but there's a couple of things that make the grind a little bit nicer (pets that loot for you, for example).
Aside from the grind and cash shop, what can you do? Here is a non-exhaustive list:
Quests - Black Spirit (part of the story line), Story, Town, Exploration, Trade, Production and Repeatable
Gathering - Mining, Butchering, Skinning, Sapping (extracting sap from trees), Hoeing (did I just make up a word?), Logging and Bottling
Cooking
Alchemy
Training - To do with horses, the more you ride them, the better they get
Fishing - Fishing can be done whilst AFK, clear your bags, equip your fishing rod, find a spot and hit space, you can even exit the game (kind of, it still runs but in the background and stop using the GPU so saves a bit of power, great for sleeping and at work)
Hunting - Haven't got this yet, but has something to do with whale hunting for rare drops
Trading - Very big part of the game, has a whole eco-system based around traders in different towns, wagons you can make/buy to transport goods between towns, and prices vary depending on the time of day and distance from where you purchased it
Farming - Find a nice area, plop down a fence and grow some crops
You can also increase your skills like breathing (by running/sprinting, increases stamina), strength (by carrying heavy trade packs, increases weight limit) and health (by eating, increases HP). Then there's crafting, which ties in nicely to a massive housing system. You can own multiple houses in multiple cities, each one dedicated to increasing the amount of workers you can hire, storage space in the warehouse in each town or residences for yourself, or you can set them to use for certain crafting choices and put workers in them to make things for you (you cannot craft yourself directly).
An example of some of these things working together would be beer production. As your workers do stuff for you, they drain energy, and beer increases that energy. So set a worker to farm potatoes (easily done at the first town), grab the potatoes from the warehouse, grab a few more ingredients from local vendors (water, sugar and leavening agent, which I think is a poor translation for yeast), run to a residence, plop down your cooking utensil and chuck all the ingredients in (exactly the right amounts, don't worry there's a wealth of information in the game as well as outside containing this, and much more) and start cooking. You'll end up with plenty of beer which you can feed to your workers to recover their energy, and get them farming/gathering many other items for you (food, crafting materials, alchemy components, etc). You can then make stuff to sell on the marketplace, use in houses, or trade with between towns.
There's so much more to do... breed horses, gain knowledge of almost everything in game and use it gain access to more content, PvP (guild vs guild and open world above level 45), join guilds and partake in guild quests, get paid by guilds, enhance equipment and weapons... I think I have run out of what I know so far, and I'm only level 24 despite playing non-stop for about 2 weeks! Do that in WoW and you would be level 100 with an ilvl over 9000!
I am on EU Jordine, hit me up if you're playing or want to play.
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
No-one playing BDO then? Shame, it's an incredibly in-depth game with so many offerings, I literally cannot stop playing it! Think I have some guest passes if anyone wants to take a look without stumping up the cash upfront.
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Not played yet. Sort of interested but a bit wary of the work rate/leaving game on time required. Planning to have a look some time in the future when not occupied by other games ;)
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Does look like a dangerous time-sink, I'm struggling to find 10 minutes for a quick Rocket League match these days, this would ruin me.
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
This and Lost Ark are games I really want to play. I can't though as my GPU is dead. I'm waiting for the Pascal and Polaris GPUs that fit my budget.
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
kalniel
Not played yet. Sort of interested but a bit wary of the work rate/leaving game on time required. Planning to have a look some time in the future when not occupied by other games ;)
You don't absolutely HAVE to do the whole AFK thing, but if you do, you can minimise the game to the system tray which at least stops drawing power from your GPU to conserve a little bit of electricity.
You level up horse riding and stamina by just playing the game normally, fishing can be done manually as well, although I prefer to do that AFK. However, levelling up strength without using AFK will be boring as hell because you're just walking around really slowly.
Plus you're workers will continue to work whilst logged in, meaning your passive income will get a nice boost. :)
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Ouch. You hit the nail on the head there for me. I started playing BDO back in March when it was first released but at the beginning I was quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and lack of tutorial plus I didn't enjoy the combat too much so I played it for a bit and kind of stopped for a month or so until they released Blader. Unfortunately he was a bit boring too but I started doing the other stuff like node management and crafting, horse training etc and got back into it.
Decided to level a Tamer and Maehwa and found them really fun with all their AoE skills.
Just a couple of low level gameplay videos of my Tamer and Maehwa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3xKLbO019Q
What class are you playing Allen?
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
I was interested but I have been looking into this and seen a few youtube vids/reviews/rage vids. Two or three things are stopping me from starting; including the time thing!
No level cap; boss drops proportional to dmg. Endgame dominated by 'professionals'
As i understand it you need to buy the game and get ingame purchases to save grinding.
RNG on everything including crafting.
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Sounds like EverQuest revamped.
Absolute hideous time-sink of epic proportions!
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Domestic_Ginger
I was interested but I have been looking into this and seen a few youtube vids/reviews/rage vids. Two or three things are stopping me from starting; including the time thing!
No level cap; boss drops proportional to dmg. Endgame dominated by 'professionals'
As i understand it you need to buy the game and get ingame purchases to save grinding.
RNG on everything including crafting.
There was a Reddit post about this recently... I can't find it right now but I will try and summarise.
Yes, the game is a time sink, but the videos about people leaving are almost all from the so-called "popular" Youtubers who cannot spend that much time on one game as they need to get videos out or lose viewers. However, the in game population is booming, I never see no other players in game and I'm still levelling.
RNG is annoying yes, but if you got all the best gear straight away you would stop playing. RNG hugely annoyed me in The Division because there was VERY little content, apart from grinding the same things over and over for hundreds of hours to get the gear. This game, there's so much content you will probably never get bored of it.
As for no max level, whilst that is true, the experience needed to level up after 55 is insane. I think the highest character I have heard of after the game being out a few months is 57.
But yeah, this game isn't for everyone, although even if you buy it for €30 and don't do anything after hitting 55 you can have many, many hours of fun with tons of content. You can literally go a whole week without repeating the same thing on any day.
Remember, there's always a 7 day trial, I have some codes left.
Re: PSA: Do NOT play Black Desert Online...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
shaithis
Sounds like EverQuest revamped.
Absolute hideous time-sink of epic proportions!
Or an amazing amount of content? I guess it depends on the way you look at it.