Alright, if you started at the official BDO launch, it hasn't been a week yet. Actually, even if you did get early access, it hasn't been a week yet. Still, I think it has been long enough to get some first impressions.
The Launch
First, there were a few problems with the launch. People who pre-ordered were sometimes waiting days to get their bonus items. Some people selected one server to create a character, and later found out it had been created on an entirely different server. Some of them sent all their pre-order bonus items to servers where they now had no characters.
Overall, these launch issues were pretty standard stuff for an MMO and were largely confined to the "soft-launch". Daum addressed them, to the satisfaction of some players, and the dissatisfaction of others. There wasn't an excessive amount of downtime or major issues. I think the launch was relatively successful. I wasn't hit by any of the bugs though, so that obviously affects my perspective.
Every server and most channels seem to be very busy continuously since launch. They haven't announced any additional servers (a la Blade and Soul). You can take that as a lack of success, or just good/lucky planning.
There seem to be a lot of players having a good time. There are also a lot of people in channel chat, asking questions about a wide variety of things. The depth of the game seems to have hooked a lot of players.
On the other hand, every 5-10 minutes, someone feels the need to shout about how utterly terrible the game is on channel chat. Some are probably just trolling for reactions. However, I think this will be one of those love-it-or-hate-it games that generates a lot of internet name-calling.
My Impressions
I will say right up front - I am one of the people who loves the game. It is not without flaws, but the good parts have been outshining them for me.
There is a huge variety of things to do. Not just quests and killing things, but building your empire of production and workers, trading, farming and gathering. You'd be hard-pressed to find another MMO with so many things to do that don't require you to kill a single monster. It's incredibly refreshing.
As a result of this, it's easy to get distracted. I've played quite a bit, and I admit I haven't gotten a character to level 20 yet. I keep telling myself I should go kill something. And then I end up building a raft, or running from quest to quest for hours.
Quests and Flow
Some people have claimed that the abundance of quests and having an actual storyline disqualify Black Desert Online from being a "sandbox" MMO. I think this is misguided.
In World of Warcraft and the many "theme park" games that have followed its example, the tutorials and quests grab you and push you through the game. You complete each quest hub in sequence and the game leads you to the next.
BDO certainly has quests that lead you around and teach you things about the game, but it hardly feels like you're being led around by the nose. In fact, everything is spread out, and if you try to do all the quests, you quickly feel like you are being pulled in a hundred different directions.
There are
so many quests. They have far more variety than most MMOs. And a ton of them are repeatable daily. It's quite possible to just run quest after quest after quest until they fill all your available play time. I had to make a rule for myself to only do the "main" quests, and ignore (most) repeatable quests. BDO is laid out like a banquet of activities, and it's largely up to the player to pick what interests them and pursue it.
The game doesn't hold your hand. If you're used to the "theme park" tutorials guiding you, you will start out feeling like you don't understand most of what's going on. The supposed tutorial is short and barely teaches you anything. However, you'll have some quests to follow, and you'll start learning. You might find something that really interests you. Maybe you get excited about the idea of taming a horse, or making a boat. And you can ask channel chat, or do a few google searches, and start figuring that out.
If you just keep exploring, doing some quests, and trying new things, the game will teach you. It's not a focused tutorial. Instead, it requires you to seek it out. However, over the course of a couple days, I've found quests that walked me through farming, gathering various resources, production, workers and nodes, cooking, making tools, building boats, trading, fishing, conversation, and how to use my skills. Even the ambient spoken dialog of the NPCs often gives you really helpful hints about how to play!
Black Desert Online gives you everything you need to learn how to play. It just doesn't shove it down your throat. It doesn't point you in a particular direction. It lets you pick the direction, and then helps you a little bit along the way.
This is going to turn a lot of people off of the game. It's perfectly understandable - not everyone wants to go through the confusing bits to get to the meat of the game. That's okay. BDO seems to have a great sense of what it is, and who it's for. It sticks to its guns, instead of trying to please everyone. This necessarily limits the audience, but it also creates a more focused game that is going to satisfy the people who like what's on offer.
Leveling
There are a lot of different "levels" in Black Desert Online. You have a skill level for different crafts, for trade, horsemanship, farming, etc. You gain separate experience points for skills, for contribution, and for your "main" level (which mostly only relates to combat). Splitting all of these things apart facilitates that feeling that you have a lot of different options. You can spend a lot of time working on your cooking and get really good at it. Then you can look at all your other experience bars and levels and let them guide you in other directions.
The downside though, is that "main" level, combat level, is still put front and center. It has a bigger number and a bigger experience bar than the others. People still feel like this level is the true indicator of your character's progress (especially if they come from the world of "theme park" MMOs).
As a result, you can spend a lot of time doing something like cooking. You can really enjoy it and honestly make a lot of progress. But if you're stuck in the habit of worrying about that "main" level, you may feel like your accomplishment is hollow. I don't think the game encourages this kind of thinking a lot, but it might take a change of mindset for some players.
Itemization
Black Desert Online has a lot of items, but not necessarily in the right places to satisfy players.
There are tons of items involved in the crafting system, and this gives it a lot of depth. For the person who loves crafting, it's satisfying to mine ore, chop wood, refine and combine ingredients, possibly using your army of workers, and eventually build all that stuff up into a boat or a wagon. This is the sort of thing BDO is great at.
For those who like trade or collecting, there are a lot of good options too. The way fishing feeds into the trade system is nice. The variety of items dropped by monsters is nice too. You get some vendor trash to sell at shops, some trade items, and some items that can be saved up and traded in bulk for money or other items. There's a nice variety.
For the folks who love combat, the itemization is lacking. There isn't a wide variety of gear. Even worse, many players feel like the equipment available in-game looks terrible, and you're basically forced to spend $20 or more in the cash shop if you want your character to not look homeless or stand out from the crowd of other homeless characters. This seems to be a general trend in MMOs - I've seen the same arguments in GW2 (although it's much less of a problem there). Game companies are going to have to figure out how to address this and still make money.
Combat
This is perhaps the biggest item I am not qualified to talk about in detail. I've only scratched the surface of the combat system. That said, I like it. I think it's one of the best combat systems in MMOs today.
The combos can feel a little daunting when you're used to just tapping the number keys. Additionally, if you haven't memorized the combos for your skills and don't have a good idea when to use different skills, the combat feels clunky and slow. This will probably cause some people to leave the game fairly early on.
However, as you begin to get the hang of it, the combat becomes fast and smooth. You learn how to dodge away from enemies, do big, slow hits and small, quick hits, and you learn how to refill your MP or HP on the fly and when you need to use potions.
There is a big, ugly learning curve, but the combat feels progressively better the more time you put into it. Once you get the hang of it, the Black Desert combat system is equal to, or better than any other action-combat MMO on the market today.
Little Things
- Leaderboards are awesome - It's a small thing, but it 's cool to see how you compare to the rest of the population in particular areas. The fact that I am fairly high up on farming (despite doing very little actual farming) tells me that most of the players haven't so much as touched a seed or a fence. It's also cool (or maybe disheartening?) to see how rich I am compared to the rest of the players. Not rich. Not rich at all...
- Clumsy characters are awesome - Of course, some people will hate this. It sure ain't Assassin's Creed. Players can climb, but they need a lot of ledges to do it, and it's easy to fall, or almost fall. Horses are also challenging to handle. I've witnessed people launch themselves off cliffs by accident. This can be annoying, but I think it adds to the feeling of playing a real person in a real world. You can't scamper up the side of a building like a squirrel. You can't fly like superman around town. Magic and combat prowess aside, you're largely an ordinary person. Hopping on that horse for a high-speed jaunt feels good, but not over-the-top. Climbing to a high place can feel rewarding because it's not terribly easy to find the right footholds or make the jumps.
- The knowledge system is great. Yes, it mostly boils down to the sorta-kinda-interesting conversation mini-game, and increasing your maximum energy. But knowledge is just so well integrated into all aspects of the game. You learn new pieces of knowledge by killing monsters, or butchering and skinning animals, or talking to people, completing quests, discovering new areas, and crafting new things. Everything you would consider to be a piece of knowledge is pretty much represented as such in the game, from soup recipes to geography to politics.
So, is the Game Dead Yet?
That's right. Once you get about a week in, it's about time for the internet trolls to come out of the woodwork and start proclaiming the death of the game. They'll be wrong, as they usually are. The game community feels big and healthy. People have complaints of course, because the game certainly isn't perfect, and people are people.
Honestly, I think there will be a pretty big chunk of players who leaves within the first month. Maybe more than the average MMO. A lot of people are going to get past the challenging surface of the game, into the fun of the deep systems. And some people will get there and just not like those systems.
I suspect the game will have a lot of staying power too, though. It scratches an itch that a lot of people have been feeling. A good-looking, modern sandbox MMO. It has some new and interesting ideas. It eschews a lot of the core ideas of theme park MMOs, and WoW specifically. Also, interestingly, ArcheAge seems to have primed this community, only to let them down with blatent pay-to-win mechanics, so those players are flocking to Black Desert in droves. From what I've heard, they all seem to love it.
I think that's enough analysis for now. I need to weed my farm and check on my workers. I'll do an update in a couple weeks, once the "honeymoon" period is over and we see how people have settled into the game. Until then, expect more guides, tips, and assorted BDO fun. See you in the game.
