My special thanks to NyxVampiria, who kindly offered her guest pass for me to try the game. You got me hooked. Thank you so much! -A

DISCLAIMER: The game played in this review was set to medium overall graphics quality.

A FAIR WARNING, everyone.  This article won't be short, since Black Desert is such a huge game.  Stay with me a while, Watchers, I beg you.  Let me tell you my tale.

Black Desert Online is a Korean action/sandbox MMO from Pearl Abyss and Daum Games Europe, and among online RPG gamers, it might be the hottest thing right now.  We've become so jaded that "MMO" immediately conjures images of scams - cash shop junk, inventories bloated by useless boost items, and the ever-present need to buy more bank space with real money.  In other words, Guild Wars 2.  And you have good reason to be cynical - with those MMO's, what you see is what you get.  You don't have to play all that long before you start feeling like you're lost in Chuck E. Cheese or some third-rate casino.

I expected more of the same, and I was quite mistaken.  Black Desert Online is quite different than any MMO I've ever played.

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The first thing you'll notice is that the character creation system is insane.  When I made my first character, I spent an hour shaping her lips alone.  Sculpting everything else - the length of her limbs, the shape of her boobs, every last detail - took me most of the afternoon.  When I'd finished, I stepped into that beautiful world for the first time...and became a complete badass.

Class and Combat

Killing hordes of enemies in spectacular fashion with lightning-fast moves and bloody combos is, for me, one of the game's high points.  At the moment, the character I've played most aggressively is my ranger.  She's a heartstoppingly hot redhead with girl-next-door freckles and a milkmaid complexion.  She's also one of the deadliest characters I've played in any game.  When whole squads of rebel soldiers or filthy imps step up, my chick is gracefully dancing past killing blows and showering a killing rain of arrows on her enemies.  If they get too close, the daggers come out and I chop them into fine mincemeat.  If I'm feeling snarky, I start kicking.  And by kicking, I mean, like...in the air, Bruce Lee style.  Then I'm doing backflips, the bow is out faster than you can blink, and they're sinking to the muddy ground with three arrows in their throat.  Lining up and trading hits until that mob dies is so 2004.  Combat in Black Desert is entirely about your personal skill, and depending on your class, you may not need to get hit at all.

Every class is as different from one another as apples from turnips.  From the way they play to how they look, everything's different.  The Valkyrie class plays like Cassandra from Soul Calibur 2.  The Maehwa is like a samurai, only so much faster.  Sorceresses teleport around the battlefield, launch powerful clouds of darkness, then lure enemies in to be shredded.  And witches make everything die, explosively, theatrically.

A group of imps attack my sorceress.  Within three seconds, all of them would be dead.

And when I say every class looks different, it's sadly true.  They literally have different face and body meshes, so if you make a character you really like from one class, you can't load the same save file you made before.  And here's where I come to what might be one of Black Desert's strangest quirks: gender-locked classes.

Most of us western RPG gamers find the idea of single-gender classes...odd...to say the least.  Doesn't it make more sense to agonize about your class, leaving gender as a mere afterthought, a box to check and move on?  Countless RPGs say yes.  Pearl Abyss says nope.  The split between Valkyrie and Warrior, Maehwa and Musa, is the best glimpse into this reactionary, very Korean mindset.  Warriors are pretty much what you'd expect...they're tough, they wear armor, they tank, they kill stuff.  But the devs weren't comfortable with the idea of women doing that in the same way as men, like in World of Warcraft or any other MMO you could think of.  So they made the Valkyrie.  She basically does the same thing a warrior does, only a little more fluid, a lot daintier, and with healing spells.  She's a bit like a paladin.  Were you thinking of making a guy paladin?  Or a guy ranger, or sorcerer?  Or a beefy, 7' tall female berserker named Gunnhilda?  You're out of luck for now.  The game seems to have gotten a bit better...a little bit.  Now, with every class they introduce, they include a male and female equivalent.  The Musa (translated really crudely as 'swordsman') is basically a samurai with some AoE capability.  The female equivalent, the Maehwa (translated as - get this - "plum blossom") is more of a single-target DPS class that lacks the AoE abilities of her male counterpart.  See what I mean?  It's a little strange to give one gender class abilities that another doesn't have.

A warrior.  Black Desert's armor is impressive in its level of detail.

But if you can get over the oddness of having to decide between your chosen avatar and the role you want, the game provides you with some of the most enjoyable combat you're likely to experience anywhere.  This is the closest any RPG I've played has come to duplicating the excitement of the fast, visually explosive combat of a fighting game like Soul Calibur.

A maehwa.

One difference you'll quickly find between MMO staples like WoW and avant-garde games like BDO is the combo system.  See, you're not just limited to hotbar rotations anymore.  Depending on what's happening in combat - and no two fights are ever the same - you'll need to change how you fight.  Each class has its own button combinations that feel oddly natural to use.  As a ranger, holding down shift and pressing your left mouse button fires explosive arrows over and over.  That's super easy to do while you're in the flow of dodging a heavy blow and getting in position to launch a powerful attack by pressing another two buttons.  It sounds complex but it becomes second nature.  If you're absolutely uncomfortable with not using your number keys to unleash special attacks, many classes offer you the ability to bind your fun skills to those number keys.

Your Profession, Open Worlds, and Solo Play

Black Desert Online is a bit overwhelming, I won't lie.  The steep bitterness of the learning curve seen in games like EVE Online is made far easier to swallow by loads of in-game videos and easy tutorial quests.  BDO isn't just twitchy combat and pretty avatars.  Once you emerge from the forest foliage of the beginner area - which doesn't take long - a vast world opens before you.  BDO is a lot of things, but what it becomes is a very open-ended experience that lays a lot of possibilities before you.  Do you want to become a simple farmer, living in a quaint country cottage?  Do you want to become a merchant, traveling long distances to get the best deal?  What about a professional cabinet maker?  Woodcutter, tanner, chef, alchemist, wagonwright, horse trainer, hunter, or adventurer?  It won't take long to get set up doing any of these things.  The secret is all in what are known as Contribution Points.

Contribution points are things you get from completing quests and other activities.  Basically, it's how much ability you have to influence the world.  These points are used to buy houses, properties for industry, personal storage, or worker lodging, or even renting nice equipment.  Yep, you can rent gear from NPCs by investing contribution points, returning it later to get them back.   You can then take those same points and invest in a corn or potato farm.  Hire a worker to farm it and you're on your way to becoming an agribusiness tycoon.  You can do the same with mines and other resources.  Take the raw materials, set up another building making products from those materials, like furniture or armor or weapons, then sell those goods for a tidy profit.  I started out as a brewer.  Beer is the one resource that can replenish your workers' stamina, so it's always in demand.  You can withdraw your contribution points anytime you want, freeing them up for other activities.

The thing I love the most about Black Desert Online is that it is effectively a single-player game.  As one reviewer noted, other players in the world are effectively NPCs with really good AI.  This is especially true if you go into settings and turn off everyone's name other than your own.  I have yet to find any task in the game - aside from the marketplace, of course - that can't be managed all on your own.  Even the "co-op" bosses can be soloed.  As someone who really prefers solo play, this is one thing I've come to adore.

Morning in the town of Heidel.

Welcome Home

Are you the type of player (like me) who likes having a place to live in your game?  I've always had this thing about cozy places in games.  I'll see a pretty house I like and I'll think to myself, "I wonder what it's like to live there.  I'd live right in that house."  But in most games, they're just static meshes placed in the world for atmosphere and flavor.

Not in Black Desert.  If you see a house you like, literally almost any house in the game, you can live in it.  No joke.  Open your map, find and select a house you like, and decide what you want to do with it.  You can assign it to storage, which will open up more slots in the town bank...or to act as a workshop to make clothes or furniture...or as a residence.  Another great thing is that when you walk into that house - either your version of it or someone else's, there's no load time whatsoever.  The world is absolutely seamless.

When you get a house, you can open the Place Mode to drop your furniture in.  This works a bit like The Sims - it's fairly straightforward.  There are no clumsy "hooks" like in the outdated model Lord of the Rings Online uses.  Put your stuff where you want, how you want it.  It's that simple.

The decorations aren't just for flavor, either.  You actually have to use crafting stations in order to cook, do alchemy, and craft in general.

The Place Mode allows you to customize your home with surprising ease.

A simple country farmhouse serves as a cheery abode for my low-level ranger, equipped with an alchemy station, a cooking stove, and a rocking chair by a roaring fireplace.

Crafting

Black Desert's crafting system is one of its more interesting features.  You don't need to specialize - you can be a jack of all trades; you simply level your skills by using them.  Crafting is broken down into three categories - gathering, processing, and crafting.  Mining, butchering, skinning, and harvesting herbs are all considered gathering.  Processing is the act of preparing your raw materials for use, whether that's making dough or ingots or drying sea water to make salt.  Crafting itself is broken into categories like cooking, alchemy, and so on.

You can make many goods yourself, or hire workers and set up workshops to manufacture them.

The crafting possibilities are staggering.  Here, my sorceress filters a bottle of river water she collected, producing purified water for use in alchemy.

RPG Mechanics

BDO has some interesting RPG mechanics missing from many MMOs.  Many NPCs will only give you quests based on how much you know about a specific topic, or how well they know you.  This means you'll have to talk to other NPCs and learn certain things before unlocking content or even having the option to converse with them.  Once you're able to have a conversation with them, you have to talk to them and raise their opinion of you before they'll sell you certain items or give you certain quests.  The knowledge you gain also shows up in a kind of game codex you can access, much like Dragon Age.

All tasks, from gathering to learning about topics, requires that you spend energy.  You gain that energy from running around, completing tasks, and generally progressing in the game.  It's an interesting system.

A lot of the grind is taken out, too, since any armor can be worn at any level, and that armor doesn't usually "soulbind" to your character.  So you can wear it, repair it, then sell it on the marketplace when you're done with it.

It's still a buy-to-play MMO, which means you get the typical people in any MMO filling the chat with garbage.  Turn off most of the chat and system notifications and it almost feels like you're playing by yourself.  To me, this is an absolute necessity.

Oh, and handholding?  Totally optional.  You can change how the game points you toward your quest objectives, or turn it off entirely and find them on your own.

What About Real Money?

You can fully enjoy Black Desert Online without spending a dime over the price of the game.  This was a huge worry for me, too, but the game doesn't put loads of pressure on you to buy necessities with real money.  The game will give you free rewards on occasion (such as leveling milestones, crafting skill milestones, etc.) but if you're good about managing your inventory, it won't be a problem.  Quest rewards often include extra bag space, and you can buy extra bank slots in any given town with contribution points you've earned from questing, simply by buying buildings for storage.  You also get "loyalty points" for logging in, and those loyalty points can be saved to buy extra inventory space, bank space, or even character slots.  It's a nice system.

Currently, real money is only used for cosmetic armor, designer mounts, things like that.  It's still tempting, considering that the premium mounts and cosmetic gear are really pretty, and your character's default gear doesn't really change much over the course of the game.  The problem is that the cosmetics in Black Desert are absurdly expensive.

What About the World PvP Thing?

Bad news - (Most) unfortunately, BDO currently features world PvP as a feature.  The good news is that you can't be attacked at all before level 45 and in towns.  The castle and node siege mode is being rolled out soon as another PvP feature.

Most BDO players aren't happy with the world PvP model in the game, preferring PvE activities in the massive sandbox world.  There's huge pressure on Daum Games to implement a PvP flagging system, or even dedicated PvE servers.  The developers haven't ruled this out.

Storyline and Immersion? Missing.

Black Desert Online is a flawed gem.  Lovable, but flawed.

As RPG gamers, we often play our favorite games to get lost in the world for a while, to live the adventure, to get immersed, to follow a gripping narrative.  You can definitely get lost in BDO, but sadly, you might not get the other things you want.

BDO is a little too alt-friendly.  When you meet NPCs, learn knowledge, or discover a new locale, those things stay learned across all the characters on your account.  It's great if you tried out one class then switched to another one you like better, but it's no fun at all if you leave the game for a while and decide you want to come back and enjoy the discovery all over again.  The game will deny you the thrill of rediscovery.

Black Desert's depth also seems to lie entirely in its systems, its customization, and its combat, leaving little for your character's story.  It's good, in a way...there's nothing you're really forced to do.  But should you want to feel like your role in the world is a little heavier...it only goes so far.  The main storyline is something about a black spirit...some demon you made a pact with before you got amnesia.  It follows you around, sending you on quests, and looking increasingly more disturbing as the game goes on.  But the quests never give you the grim sense of purpose that many RPGs inspire.  The writing often comes off as strange or awkwardly-worded, giving you the sense that it was translated directly from Korean and not really rewritten, like Final Fantasy XIV did.  A game's music often plays a big role in making the game feel stronger, and while the game has a few memorable tracks, BDO's soundtrack is definitely weak compared to its lifelike graphics.

The game's bugs appear in odd places, such as certain key service NPCs randomly not being there.  This can usually be remedied by switching channels.

The game's main flaw seems to be its draconian restrictions on player-to-player trading.  If your friend decides to start playing, you can't walk up and give them some money to get started.  You also can't just give them stuff out of your inventory, and there's no option to mail items to other players, either.  It's harsh.  Ostensibly, the reason is that it hampers gold spammers, bots, and real money trading.  If that's what it's for, then it's doing a good job - the game is miraculously clean of all that stuff.  On the plus side, it's pretty easy to make money in BDO...and it's fun.

The rain-slick streets of Calpheon after a passing storm.

Conclusion

This review has become a novel, and I've only talked about half the game's most notable features.  But overall, despite its flaws, Black Desert Online is an absolutely unexpected MMO and a stunning RPG in its own right.  Usually, I'm fairly lukewarm about MMOs but Black Desert has managed to reel me in and keep me hooked for well over 100 hours, and I feel like I've just gotten started.  As said elsewhere, it thrives by reinventing many of the tired, overdone MMO staples and giving you a fresh, beautiful, invigorating experience that doesn't feel like a scam.

I can easily recommend this game for fans of heart-racing combat, intricate crafting, trading, house hunters, solo players, and screenshot photographers.  And it's got sound RPG mechanics.  If you like your combat slow and measured, this might not be the game for you.

Black Desert Online has a little something for everyone.  I'm having a blast with it, and I don't think I'll be quitting anytime soon.

-Aubrielle