So as of the 2nd of July pre-orders will start officially for the PlayStation version of black desert online. I’m going to cover what you can expect from the game.
I’ve been playing black desert since the initial launch on PC I’ve played it on and off. I’ve also been here since day one on the Xbox version of the console.
Table of Contents
What is Black Desert Online?
So if you have been living under a rock, here’s a quick rundown of BDO. The game itself is an action-based MMORPG with a persistent open world that allows you to literally be whoever you want to be.
Life Skilling System
There is an expansive crafting system, also known as a life skilling system that covers everything from fishing, horse training to being a farmer, gatherer, cooking alchemy and more. If you love crafting in other games, you’ll love BDO. Many people chose to only do life skilling and nothing else, as there is just so much to do.
Now not only can you craft and gather yourself but you can also create a worker empire. You can literally hire people to go out there and do your dirty work for you.
The worker empire is created by connecting a series of different nodes with various different gatherable materials to towns, cities, outposts. This then allows you to purchase buildings to turn into craftable workstations, into extra storage, into stable slots. There’s really a whole host of different things that you can do in BDO.
PvP
Black Desert is ultimately a PvP focused game, as a result, there’s no structured endgame PvE; you won’t see any raid bosses or any dungeons for you to group or clear together. What you will see instead is there are a couple of world bosses that predominantly people will turn up to. They do run on a schedule to kill the bosses to collect the loot and then go about their business.
Grinding
Most people’s time in black desert will be spent over through the life skilling system or grinding to make more money. The endgame goal of black desert is essentialy to improve your gear so that you can better perform in PvP.
There are people that will find other ways to enjoy the game.
Now a low solo PvP is fun the real coach of this comes from the group PvP and the guild system. If you’re in a guild your goal is to conquer and hold one of the regions either the castles or just the open regions.
These, in turn, allow you to tax that region and you get some of the money back from the sales this goes into the guild which can then be distributed to the guild members and helped to grow their wealth which then increases their ability to improve their gear.
On top of this, you can also summon some bosses with the guilds however these bosses aren’t really challenging they do constitute another side to the PvE in the game.
Pearl Shop
Now there are a couple of things that people consider a negative in this game, first, the pearl shop. So the pearl shop is essentially the cash shop for black desert in this pearl shop although you cannot directly buy extra power or increases to your power.
You can buy convenience items that allow you to either sell these on the central marketplace. Turn them into more useful items within the game to progress your character that can’t otherwise be gained in-game.
There are also a lot of these Pearl Shop items that can be sold in-game. So some of the more convenient items things like the costumes that give 10% experience bonus, the pets that automatically loot for you and are almost mandatory in this game and a couple of other things such as combat experience books and item Dropboxes can all be sold on the marketplace.
This means that people with real money to invest are able to sell these on the central market for people who aren’t paying real money to the purchase.
Now I’m not saying that this is easy or something that happens all the time; however, there is enough of an economy that this is something that will happen, and you will be able to benefit from this as a free-to-play player.
Is Black Desert Pay To Win?
However, if you are completely against pay2win there will always be some people that will invest thousands upon thousands to further their gear quicker than you can.
Fortunately, there is a significant level that you can get to in gear where you cannot progress any further and also people will invest thousands upon thousands to get there the gear difference between that level and something realistically obtainable by the rest of the player base isn’t massively different.
Yes, they will have a benefit, but no they will not make a significant enough difference on their own to make this game completely pay to win. That being said it is something you need to be aware of before you pick up black desert because if you’re a completely anti pay to win you’re not gonna have a good time in this game.
Enhancing Black Desert
Ok so next up is the enhancing system and this is pretty much the one significant reason that most people will quit. Personally, though I think this is one of the most fun features of the game, I can see why many people don’t like it. When you finally succeed at a high enhancement, the rush feels awesome!
Enhancing is the way to progress your gear. Unlike in other MMOs enhancing in black desert has a chance to fail. During the lower levels, this isn’t significant because all you have to do is repair the maximum durability on an item.
However, once you start to get to the higher tiers of gear and you’re looking to progress there is a constant fear that your gear will downgrade if you fail in enhancement or in the case of accessories you will completely lose the accessories you’re enhancing.
This can be a huge setback now when you couple this with the enhancement percentages being incredibly low so for example if you were going from pet to pen which is the absolute highest level in-game at the moment you’re looking at around the 2 percent chance to succeed.
That means there’s a 98 percent chance that you’re going to go backward in your gear progression. The enhancement system is a significant factor and why a lot of people quit the game. Being forewarned about this means that you’re armed and ready for this when you do start playing black desert.
Bypass Enhancing By Buying Items From Central Market
That being said, you can bypass the enhancement system if you’re patient, and you’re willing to save up the money to buy things from the marketplace. For 90% of the player population, this is the best way to do things because you remove the failure chance from the items.
Now unlike what a lot of people will tell you end game equivalent gear with reasonably high to extremely high enhancement levels will start to sell on the marketplace.
It did take around 100 days for a lot of these things to become more common in the marketplace from Xbox. However, they are there now, so there are ways to work around this enhancement system.
In BDO, enhancing is one of the reasons that I often burn out and have to take breaks from the game.
Fortunately, though there are things that make up for this and the PvP for me personally is exactly this.
How To PvP in BDO
Now the PvP doesn’t start in the game until you hit level 50, and to become level 50, you have to accept and complete a quest at level 49; this means that. If you do not complete that quest, you will never be subjected to open-world PvP, it is very viable if you want to purely life skill in the game to stay at level 49.
Enjoy the game at that level. If you do on a brave level 50 and start to PvP, this is where the game starts to shine. If you are worried about being griefed in the open world, there is a karma system.
So the more that you’re killed or randomly killed by people who have flagged their PvP on, the more frequent they will lose. If they get to a low enough karma that they go negative, they can freely be attacked by anybody in the game world without any consequence to them.
This essentially means that if somebody wants to grief you continuously they’re going to make themselves a walking talking target not only that but they won’t be able to access towns and cities which means trying to repair sell items just becomes an absolute nightmare.
The PvP and black desert are really fun the action combat on the controller at least from the Xbox point of view feel really fluid and intuitive and it’s really fun to play now I’m fully expecting the ps4 version to be a lot bigger in terms of population than the Xbox version was.
The Xbox had more than enough PvP and still does it’s a fantastically fun and enjoyable aspect of the game and it’s something that is lacking from consoles.
Conclusion
Black Desert brings a new take in the MMOs scene that hasn’t really been seen on the console so far. If you’re completely new to the series I would highly recommend giving this game a shot. If you are somebody that’s coming from PC and looking to start on ps4 make sure that you’re giving everybody the chance to learn the game and have some fun.
Don’t just go out there crushing everybody and becoming toxic like we have seen some people on the Xbox keep in mind that the player base is new it is fresh and be willing to help people. So if you are completely new to the game and completely new to this site, there will be some new content coming soon. Specifically targeted at the beginner players and giving that a lot more information on how you can handle a lot of the overwhelming systems that you’re going to experience when starting in black desert.