With the NA/EU launch approaching, I thought I'd share some tips for your first few hours of Black Desert Online, based on my experiences in closed beta 2. BDO is a fairly open sandbox game, and it has a few unusual mechanics that you are mostly expected to just figure out as you play. This may feel disorienting for players who are used to Western theme park MMOs.
I plan to do some more detailed guides shortly after launch, when I can actually verify things and take screenshots on the live client. But for now, here are six tips for getting the most out of your launch day.
Make some alt characters.
Whether you're the sort of person who likes to try every class before committing, or the sort who picks a character and sticks with it forever, it's useful to have alts right away.
The main advantage you will get when first starting out is energy. When your account is brand-new, your maximum energy is very low. (Your account has a max energy value that is the same on all your characters, and it increases as you gain knowledge.) So, at first it will be fairly easy to run out of energy.
Energy regeneration is time-gated, but having alts can help. If you burn through all your energy on your main, you can switch to an alt and use their energy. Just be aware that energy regenerates much slower for offline characters. While you're playing, your energy regenerates 1 point per 3 minutes. Offline characters only get 1 point per 30 minutes.
You can also make good use of your alts by spreading them out in the world a bit. Unlike many MMOs, the towns in BDO have their own warehouses, stables, etc. If you left an item in storage halfway across the world, it can be a long walk to retrieve it. However, if you have an alt nearby, you can make it a one-way delivery instead of taking your main there and back again.
Alts can also be useful for buying nodes. You might be off doing quests on your main character and gain a contribution point. But you want to spend that point connecting a far-away node. Luckily, your contribution points are shared across characters, so you can use a nearby alt to grab that node.
Do every quest you see, especially your Black Spirit quests.
You may have seen people talk about how grinding in specific locations is the fastest way to level in BDO. This is true, but quick leveling isn't everything.
Quests give you a lot of good stuff. They refill your energy and grant experience toward contribution points, which you will need to connect nodes, use workers, and buy houses. Your Black Spirit quests will get you potions, skills, additional inventory space, and an easy first mount.
Spend energy carefully.
When your account is new, your max energy is low and there are lots of things to spend energy on. You can gather, purchase or upgrade nodes, use workers, or play the conversation mini-game with NPCs. Even using world chat costs energy!
So, until you have a high max energy (and maybe a bunch of alts full of energy too), you'll want to think about what you spend it on. If you really want to build up your empire of workers, you may want to save it for node and worker management. If you'd rather just dabble in crafting, you may want to spend it on gathering. Or maybe you want to bump up the amity of a particular NPC so you can unlock their bonuses.
At the start of closed beta 2, not knowing what I was doing, I made the mistake of wasting all my energy "greeting" NPCs. All this does is raise their amity a point or two. It is much less efficient than the conversation mini-game. So don't be like me: use your energy carefully, at least until you have enough that you don't need to worry about running out quite so easily.
Another easy mistake: training skills outside of town. It's not obvious, but this uses energy. If you go to the skill trainer instead, there's no energy cost.
Explore.
Whenever you're in a town or city, seek out all the NPCs with icons over their heads. The quests are worth doing, but even just talking to them is beneficial - you'll gain knowledge, which increases your max energy by one, and gives you more topics to talk about in the conversation mini game. Plus, if you like getting into deep fantasy worlds, you'll find that there are actually a lot of interesting connections between the characters, and they occasionally give you useful advice or information.
Explore out in the wilderness, too. There are nodes everywhere. Chances are good that if you see an empty space on the map, there's a node there to find. You may find farms or other gathering spots with a particular food that you'll want for cooking or crafting later. If nothing else, the world is gorgeous, and you might just find an amazing view.
Figure out your skill combos.
If you do your Black Spirit quests, you'll get an introduction to combat early on, but it basically just has you hit a couple of keys without explaining what they do. And honestly, you can just spam any skills you want for the first few levels and have little problem killing things.
Around level 10, once you've acquired a few skills, it's worth going through them and figuring out the combos and when they're useful. Which skill can you use to regenerate your mana? Which skills are ranged, and which ones are melee? Which ones are area-of-effect?
You can bind skills to hotkeys to use, but you shouldn't! Skills activated via hotkeys actually use more resources than the same skills activated with key combos. Memorizing the combos takes more work than traditional MMOs, but you'll get used to it quickly. And BDO's excellent keyboard layout for the key combos keeps all the keys you need very close at hand.
Sell items to the right person.
Very early on, you'll start picking up different kinds of items, and it's not necessarily obvious what you should do with them, or even that they're different.
Vendor trash is the easiest type to deal with. These items have no purpose, and can simply be sold to any NPC with a shop. These items descriptions say something like "this can be sold to a vendor for a small amount".
Some items can be sold on the auction house. These have a low and high price listed in the item description in red and green. They can be put up for auction in a town. Usually, even the minimum auction price is many times higher than the price you will get for selling to a vendor. This includes equipment, although it will have to be repaired if it is damaged.
Trade goods are items that can be sold to a trader. There are a number of factors that go into the price you get for trade goods, and I'll probably do an in-depth post in the near future.
Finally there are certain "exchangable" monster drops. These are typically dropped by a specific monster type, and you can trade a certain number of them to a specific NPC for a reward, such as a consumable, or a lot of silver. The item description will say how many you need, who will exchange them, and what reward you will get.
Saving these items up and trading them in is typically much more profitable than just selling them to a vendor. The items that can be exchanged for silver usually give at least
double the silver than if you had vendored them. The down-side is that you have to collect enough of the item to do the exchange.
Have fun!
Hopefully you found some helpful information here. Come back soon; I'll be posting frequently as soon as we're able to get on the servers and play. In the mean time, have fun!
