It doesn't care, for instance, if you go climbing and pulling yourself over the scenery just because you want to get to the top of a really big thing in the distance, and it rewards you with some stunning scenery - albeit with an unfortunate 'vibrance' filter on by default. What surprised me was how much more Black Desert Online wraps around this system, and in particular how much it patterns itself after more single-player RPG customs. Over the course of the very short beta test, there wasn't really the time to get to a point where enemies felt like more than that, though the dodging and combo systems do seem solid. Whatever class you've picked, there's a lot of stuff to be beaten around the face until it falls over and drops some form of reward and a quick dopamine squirt. So it's proved to be, at least as far as the combat is concerned. Combat is solid for an action MMO, though as ever, not close to the same level as single-player hack and slash games can reach.
Black Desert Online felt like it was going to be of the Tera school, with lots of very pretty action-combat that isn't half as good as you can get in a single-player game, but definitely beats just clicking on an enemy and pressing shortcut buttons until it falls over. About that.Īt this point, it's not too hard to predict, roughly, what new MMOs are going to play like.
Wait, what's that? There's a game here too? Oh! Right. Make the character of your dreams, as long as they can more or less fit into an anime style Korean RPG. It's powerful enough to have been made its own download, a world away from just putting Head One onto Body One, or Boobs Two in the case of half the characters in most MMOs.
There's no arguing, Black Desert Online has one of the finest character creation screens of any genre.