Originally posted by alexl22 So read this thread and apparently if you say something you don't like about this game ankuhumana comes in and tells you how you are wrong, your thinking is wrong, and basically how you should just kill yourself. Got it sign me up
Him and someone else too actually, forget name though.
Oh shit---
Black desert is best MMORPG in history! Beep boop beep.
Immersion and Role Playability is quite high for this title. Personally enjoyed being a Samurai for a bit. Not able to speak for it's PvE or PvP from personal experience. Hoping emotes will be long for the western version and not restricted to limited characters. Likely won't, but it's always a concern when talking about non-western MMOs.
Due to frequent travel in my youth, English isn't something I consider my primary language (and thus I obtained quirky ways of writing). German and French were always easier for me despite my family being U.S. citizens for over a century. Spanish I learned as a requirement in school, Japanese and Korean I acquired for my youthful desire of anime and gaming (and also work now). I only debate in English to help me work with it (and limit things). In addition, I'm not smart enough to remain fluent in everything and typically need exposure to get in the groove of things again if I haven't heard it in a while. If you understand Mandarin, I know a little, but it has actually been a challenge and could use some help.
Also, I thoroughly enjoy debates and have accounts on over a dozen sites for this. If you wish to engage in such, please put effort in a post and provide sources -- I will then do the same with what I already wrote (if I didn't) as well as with my responses to your own. Expanding my information on a subject makes my stance either change or strengthen the next time I speak of it or write a thesis. Allow me to thank you sincerely for your time.
Originally posted by ankhfnkhonsu Originally posted by AxxarGraphics are nice, but the game's fundamental issues ensures there's no chance of me getting it.
What fundamental issues? The poor PvP, the lack of PvE content and the triviality of what little content there is.
Name me one Korean made game that hasn't been rampant with hackers, botters, and spammers when released. I've played a quite a few, and all of them have had this issue, every last one.
If i could sum up BD, it's an open-world pvp game, with optional PvE questing and world bosses.
I wish this was true. But when I tested it there were NO open world PVP. Only PVP was through GvG and it cost way to much having one running when I tested it. So I just stopped cause the rest of the game felt like you played a solo game within a MMORPG. They need to fix ALOT of shit if I'm to test it again. It had so much potential, but as a sandbox lover, I feel like they did a U-turn towards the themepark lovers out there. Like we don't have enough of those... So sad.
Lol. My guild has 4+ guild wars running constantly (we have 800m+ in guild bank....) Also, if you did any kind of research you would know that they added red/blue WORLDWIDE battleground (essentially open world PvP that you have to sign up for..) and outside of the battleground system.. you can PK anyone you want.. you just have to deal with the consequences of your actions and farm back your karma or risk breaking your enchants/droping items.
What's sad is that you spread blatant BS about the game without know what you are talking about. I don't know when you tested the game.. but I have been playing since December. Next time get some credibility.
When I tested the game they had just made a change to where sustaining a war with GvG cost to much and noone did it. There were alot of rage about it. And no, I haven't checked up on the game since I stopped playing, but if what you say is true, then that sure is a step in the right direction. Although signing up for battlegrounds isn't rly what I want. I didn't have much for ESO Cyradiil either. But I might just have to follow the game again if the PvP is back in action.
Have they done anything to the feel of progression. Mostly the feel of the game being a solo game. Having all your workers etc harvest for ya etc. With no trade between players? I know they did it to fight gold seller, but it made the game feel even more like a solo game.
Have they implemented world bosses again, or is it the same boring "summon a boos" and kill it that they put in instead?
I'm sorry, but guild wars have never been too expensive to maintain. I have been playing since December and since January my guild has never been out of war. If you are in a guild of 5 people.. sure.. it may be hard to earn the silver necessary to start and maintain a war.. but if you are in a guild of 5 any guild that is worth warring is going to completely demolish you.
The game doesn't have to be played solo.. the game is what you make of it. Yes.. you can do most of the content alone.. but you can also do it in a group to progress faster. Why do you need player to player trading? You want chat to be spammed with trade messages? You want the economy to be completely ruined by people who dominate the market? I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no reason for player to player trading to be in the game.
Why is summoning a boss boring? What makes world bosses "better" or more "exciting".. it makes absolutely no sense to me. What, do you want to fight over a boss? You want to mix PvE and PvP? Yes, they have added a world boss that takes quite a few people to kill.. is it fun? No not really.. there's usually 100+ people there and it's a lag fest. Is that what you want all bosses to be? I definitely don't.
Weekly bosses and dropped boss scrolls are definitely not soloable until you are in good gear. Early on in the game, most people were partying for bosses, because they couldn't do it on their own. But again, by now most people have outleveled the content.. which means they can focus on other things: crafting, trading, breeding, whaling, PvP, farming, leveling an alt... etc. etc.
Yes. In a sandbox I want the players to set the rules for economy etc. You couldn't set the price you wanted b4. Dunno if that has changed either. I get WHY they are doing it, but it goes against the whole idea of a player driven economy in a sandbox, when DEVs tells us what prices we can and can't set. It's was a big turn off for me at least.
I liked roaming world bosses, cause, well, you know. You run around, and BAM!!! there is this big ass boss that peeps are gathering to fight. It's exiting. I prefer that. Summoning some lame as boss that you can kill yourself or with a small party etc, to miss is just boring and brings nothing new. Just same ol shit as in any other themepark MMO. You prefer that. Fine. I don't get how you can prefer that. It's beyond me. But to each his own.
And don't get me wrong. If they ARE improving the game, and making it more sandboxy, with meaningfull PvP (no I don't wanna grief a n00b. There nothing fun in such PvP for me) I will put it back on my radar.
And while I'm at it. How is the PvP in those battlegrounds or outside? Can you loot anything? It's good with the karma system if you go around killing peeps. I like that. But is there a carrot for those doing it? Do they gain anything from it?
Starting to regret I uninstalled it so I can't check it out now. :P
First of all, just like I have mentioned in many other posts.. if you are going to use the term "sandbox" please tell me what that means to you. Sandbox is a generalization, and to me.. sandbox means a game in which there are many different ways to have fun - i.e. you have a choice in how you want to play the game. With my definition of sandbox.. BDO has that. However, as far as I know.. and I have done a lot of digging.. Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game. That was what other people did. However, in a sandbox - just like the real world - there are rules. You can't fling sand everywhere without your parents getting pissed and punishing you. Rules are necessary. I see the market regulations as a "rule" not as something that detriments the economy or the experience. And just so you know.. the dev's only directly interfere with the economy when there is a need for it - if there is a lot of supply, the min/max prices will fall over time.. and if there is a lot of demand they will go up. The economy is controlled by the game.
That's great in theory, and then when you have people memorizing the spawn times.. figuring out where bosses spawn.. figuring out their rotations.. you quickly learn that that system is utter crap. Instead of running up and "BAM!! there is a big ass boss" it will be running up and "BAM!!! Game is full of lag due to 100 people being there". I'm sorry, but a zerg fest boss is not fun. If you can't see how these types of ideas turn into terrible boring fights.. then there really is no hope for you.
I'm sorry, but what makes "meaningful PvP"? PvP is all about showing your dominance over other players in BDO, or if you are in a guild, then it is about controlling as much of the map.. and maybe.. if your guild is good enough.. claiming a keep and earning a ton of silver. The battleground system is not instanced.. it is per channel, no you cannot loot anything, you don't lose karma by klling people but I'm sure that if you kill someone with negative karma you will still get loot. And yes, there are rewards at the end (each round lasts for 30 minutes I believe).
Pearl Abyss hasn't used the term "sandbox"? 4 realz? Please check out their homepage. At the bottom under the video. How do they describe it? http://www.pearlabyss.com/
To me a sandbox is a open world, where you don't have to do quest to progress, like a themepark where you take the "ride" through quest to lvl up. Like in Mortal Online. You head out into the world in your rags, start hitting a stone, and you gain skill in mining. You bash some1s head with a sword, you get skillpoint into sword etc. No quests required to progress. There is no global auction house. Only regional. Players set the prices all by themselves. No GM interfering. If there is noone selling "gabor"-ore in one time, you can try to sell it for ridiculous amounts and gain a nice profit. Cause you took it upon yourself to get the ore to the town, risking loosing it on the way, cause there is full loot everywhere. No safe zones. Where you become a outlaw (a red) if you kill to many (blue) players, and loose stats if you get killed etc. There is the benefit of full loot in PVP, with the risk of turning yourself red and being hunted by guards in some towns. Had only M.O been developed by a big company, with a huge budget, I would never stop playing it. But now it has many other issues that breaks the game for me and many others. Mostly cause they are a small DEV team of I think 2-3 DEVs workin on it. But for that little crew they sure do a gr8 job. So to me M.O and UO and even EVE is the closest a MMO has comed to a real sandbox in my eyes. Black Desert ain't there yet.
World bosses could easily be coded to spawn at some random places all over the map. Leaving towns outa if for instance. If S.V could have shit spawn randonly in M.O with that crew, I think P.A could code it in. Your to stuck in how it is in most themeparks where bosses spawn at the same place, after the same amounts of minutes etc. But searching for the "sandbox"-term that I linked above, I found this interview. They even say that they might bring them back. So that's a good thing at least. Here's that interview. And yeah, they talk about the game being a open world sandbox there as well. http://black-desert.com/interviews/black-desert-revelation-an-honest-to-god-interview-with-pearl-abyss-on-the-status-quo-of-black-desert/
To me meaningfull PVP is as I mentioned b4. Things being on stake. Like full loot. Or fighting over territory that might give the landowners bonuses from gathering and loot etc like they do in Darkfall Unholy Wars. Not some e-peen trip to show off how good you are at killing peeps. That's totally pointless to me. I could go play CoD for that shit.
Now I leave this thread for this time. But I will keep on checkin up on BDO once more now. I thankyou for that at least, even though I don't think we want exactly the same thing from the game. Byebye for now.
First of all.. they say "sandbox oriented".. open world PvP with full loot does not make a game "sandbox", global auction house does not make a game "sandbox" you are just describing another game that you enjoyed playing and want BDO to be the same game with upgraded graphics. You don't have to do a single quest in BDO if you don't want too.. I did very few and only once I WANTED to do the quests did I actually do them. Hell, you don't even have to level if you prefer to craft, breed horses, go whaling, or do any of the other activities that are in the game. THAT is not a themepark game. A Themepark games suggest linear progression with strict rules to how you play.. you go from point A to point B to point C following the path that is predefined for you. That is not BDO and if that's what you think BDO is then you haven't played the game very long.
You seem to want a very specific game that appeals to a very small niche market. That is not what BDO is and it's not what BDO will ever be. Sorry. You should probably go back to MO.
You said: "Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game". I proved they just used that word. On the very first page of their site as well. Is there a "sandbox" in "sandbox oriented" or not? And isn't "sandbox oriented" a definition?
And I said "NO global AH" makes it more sandboxy to ME. Regional AH makes it more sandboxy to ME (they DID have that in BDO from the get go but changed it to global AH). Cause you can actually play the market then, and check for supply and demand, and make a buck from it. All player driven. NOT GM driven as in BDO now. That's NOT a sandbox feature to ME. Apperantly lvling isn't even a issue anymore cause you can reach lvl 50 within a day now. Yay!!! You asked what makes it a sandbox to me, and I answered.
I did like taming horses ingame. I must admit that. Now THAT is a sandbox feature. Btw, you can do that in MO as well. You can even breed horses by yourself, and finding horses with good stats in the wild, makes it more likely the foal havin good stats as well etc. But I already said MO has other issues mainly with it coming from them being a small DEV-team, which leads to things taking a long time to get fixed when it breaks etc. And I said I would still play MO if things were smooth sailing there. But it isn't. But I still love what they at least are TRYING to do there compared to what PA is doing to BDO atm.
Found yet another article that describes the concern me and other feels for the changes made to BDO. But you prolly know all this since your such a hardcore fan. But at least you might get why some of us lost hope in it. Mostly due to them doing a u-turn compared to what they first said they would do with the game. Scroll down to the yellow text saying "Let’s start with the Open World, Sandbox features of the game", where they start to go through all the changes that has been made making the game less sandboxy. Also funny to see how they also, just as I, thinks it feels more like a solo game... Who could have guessed that!?!? http://black-desert.com/articles/black-desert-how-we-were-expect-it-to-be-and-how-it-is-now/
Edit. Gonna put in the last part in the article for you to lazy to read it all, and pretty much sums up what me and others feel bout the direction BDO has taken:
"What we would like to see, is the old (initial) BDO start taking form. With open world and real sandbox contents, where you could be someone, someone unique, like a real blacksmith for example, with your house and store. Now, everyone is the same, and everyone can reach almost any point solo. We wish to see again the real party link system, to see some proper coordination and communication between parties and not spamming of skills and potions. We wish to see guilds fighting each other for a reason and not just to have some “PvP”. We wish to see Black Desert as it was originally designed, and not how it eventually became".
Now we can only wait and see if that happens. If it does, or if some changes already HAS happened, then I will download it again. But not until they fix some of these issues.
You said: "Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game". I proved they just used that word. On the very first page of their site as well. Is there a "sandbox" in "sandbox oriented" or not? And isn't "sandbox oriented" a definition?
And I said "NO global AH" makes it more sandboxy to ME. Regional AH makes it more sandboxy to ME (they DID have that in BDO from the get go but changed it to global AH). Cause you can actually play the market then, and check for supply and demand, and make a buck from it. All player driven. NOT GM driven as in BDO now. That's NOT a sandbox feature to ME. Apperantly lvling isn't even a issue anymore cause you can reach lvl 50 within a day now. Yay!!! You asked what makes it a sandbox to me, and I answered.
I did like taming horses ingame. I must admit that. Now THAT is a sandbox feature. Btw, you can do that in MO as well. You can even breed horses by yourself, and finding horses with good stats in the wild, makes it more likely the foal havin good stats as well etc. But I already said MO has other issues mainly with it coming from them being a small DEV-team, which leads to things taking a long time to get fixed when it breaks etc. And I said I would still play MO if things were smooth sailing there. But it isn't. But I still love what they at least are TRYING to do there compared to what PA is doing to BDO atm.
Found yet another article that describes the concern me and other feels for the changes made to BDO. But you prolly know all this since your such a hardcore fan. But at least you might get why some of us lost hope in it. Mostly due to them doing a u-turn compared to what they first said they would do with the game. Scroll down to the yellow text saying "Let’s start with the Open World, Sandbox features of the game", where they start to go through all the changes that has been made making the game less sandboxy. Also funny to see how they also, just as I, thinks it feels more like a solo game... Who could have guessed that!?!? http://black-desert.com/articles/black-desert-how-we-were-expect-it-to-be-and-how-it-is-now/
Edit. Gonna put in the last part in the article for you to lazy to read it all, and pretty much sums up what me and others feel bout the direction BDO has taken:
"What we would like to see, is the old (initial) BDO start taking form. With open world and real sandbox contents, where you could be someone, someone unique, like a real blacksmith for example, with your house and store. Now, everyone is the same, and everyone can reach almost any point solo. We wish to see again the real party link system, to see some proper coordination and communication between parties and not spamming of skills and potions. We wish to see guilds fighting each other for a reason and not just to have some “PvP”. We wish to see Black Desert as it was originally designed, and not how it eventually became".
Now we can only wait and see if that happens. If it does, or if some changes already HAS happened, then I will download it again. But not until they fix some of these issues.
Sandbox-oriented does not mean straight sandbox. In all honestly I believe the term "sandbox" is flawed anyways, I hate when people use it.. it's kind of like the term "stylized" when referring to art - it doesn't actually define anything at all. Additionally, I challenge you to find where they used the term "sandbox" or "sandbox oriented" in an interview, press release, or any statement from the company rather than from some flare text on a 1 page website that has been exactly the same (sans the video) for over 3 years.
Oh yes, another black-desert.com article referencing an interview from 2013 and CBT 1-3 as their source of all things. As I have said, over and over, CBT was for TESTING different ideas they had about how to implement the features they wanted in the game. The Korean player base wanted something different.. so PA changed some features and cut some others. Yes, the game is more casual, less grindy, there isn't fighting over houses and hacks to acquire them (AA), PKing is more punishing, and the broken party link system is gone (speaking of which.. do you even know how it works? 3 people stand around buffing 1 person.. are you kidding me?), player to player trading is gone which prevents gold sellers and botters from dominating the economy, AH is global, and bosses are spawned with scrolls for your party rather than placed in the world.
You know what I have also seen suggested on black-desert.com? A single server for everyone with no channels, PvP starting from level 1 with (like you suggest) full gear drop, limited houses that are not instanced, many months to level to 50, and quite a few others that I can't even remember.
With all this, it would just be another Archeage.. only worse, because now instead of the credit-card masters killing you only in the arena and in the open world.. instead you will have them killing you and taking all your stuff. That just allows them to get richer, feeding their way to the top. BDO gear is not level restricted.. so at level one you could have +20 gear and one shot every player you came across. In a single server with no channel environment, you would be hard-pressed to find mobs to kill.. at least until everyone quit the game.. because everyone would. Let's pretend that you are one of the few players left, perfect.. because now you are a prime target for those P2W players that have top gear.
People are naive about what they are asking, non-instanced housing only promotes hacks and exploiters.. and if you think that an increased tax will keep people from paying real-life money to keep it then you're delusional. Open world housing is terrible, it doesn't work, and it makes the game look incredibly shitty - look at Archeage.
You cannot suggest a game like this and expect it to work with a large dev team. When you have 100+ developers to pay and a publisher taking a cut of your profits you have to appeal to a much wider market than just the niche hardcore PvP market. If you don't appeal to casuals the game will fail, PA will go bankrupt, and Daum will drop the game. Games like Lineage are successful because they are old, don't require a lot of maintenance, and don't require top-tier servers to run.
There is absolutely no way to please everyone, instead, as a developer, you try to find a good middle ground that appeals to a wide audience rather than just a small portion. That is something PA is trying to do and I think they are doing a good job of it. By all means, if you want the game to fail keep pushing for features that will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company.
Originally posted by alexl22 So read this thread and apparently if you say something you don't like about this game ankuhumana comes in and tells you how you are wrong, your thinking is wrong, and basically how you should just kill yourself. Got it sign me up
Yeah that's it, I definitely don't respond to posts that I feel are misrepresentations of the game after my 6 months of experience with it. I use facts about the game, my experience, and outside sources to give examples.. but I guess that a handful of people that played CBT and were dissatisfied with the changes that were made should dominate the conversation? Perfect, got it.
There are plenty of things I don't like about the game, maybe you should look at my review of the game in this forum. However, when someone comes in posting about how the game is "supposed" to be, how the developers have "ruined" the game, or how BDO is doing "terribly" in Korea, I feel the need to come in and correct them. Honestly if someone used a phrase like "I feel" or "in my opinion" I wouldn't bother responding to it. Instead, people seem to believe that everything that comes out of their mouth is fact, most of them have never played the game and only acquired their opinions through other players or watching videos made by level 18 players describing how "terrible" and "linear" the game is. Please.
I think that "trivial" is the wrong term to use when applying it to content that is neither PvP or PvE oriented (breeding, trading, whaling, crafting etc.) because it is far from trivial. Horse breeding + trading (especially when done simultaneously) is very lucrative, whaling can be rewarding with a talented group of individuals and at least one upgraded boat. Crafting produces some of the best resist jewelry in game and allows you to upgrade your gear (through warehouse crafting). Maybe you meant that you don't find it enjoyable? If that's the case, that is fine, but it is definitely not trivial.
I think that "trivial" is the wrong term to use when applying it to content that is neither PvP or PvE oriented (breeding, trading, whaling, crafting etc.) because it is far from trivial. Horse breeding + trading (especially when done simultaneously) is very lucrative, whaling can be rewarding with a talented group of individuals and at least one upgraded boat. Crafting produces some of the best resist jewelry in game and allows you to upgrade your gear (through warehouse crafting). Maybe you meant that you don't find it enjoyable? If that's the case, that is fine, but it is definitely not trivial.
Nice videos that has shown me that their is a lot of skill involved in the PVP. Also its good to hear about the crafting, horse breeding and whaling. Once again the haters are proven wrong. Keep up the good work guys.
Off-topic but....how is everyone who's playing doing so right now? I assume it's on overseas servers with the whole passport/id number thing needed still? I want to play it to get a better idea of how much chatter is real and how much is bs.
Originally posted by Kajidourden Off-topic but....how is everyone who's playing doing so right now? I assume it's on overseas servers with the whole passport/id number thing needed still? I want to play it to get a better idea of how much chatter is real and how much is bs.
You can get an account made for you for $9 @ newgameway or find a nice Korean willing to do it for you free.
Originally posted by Theocritus I'm sorry but until I actually see a Korean game that is even mediocre I am not buying the hype.
that's fine bro. I think expressing that you don't want to play the game is fine. It's when people start listing things that aren't true or spreading misinformation that people get annoyed.
That is from the Russian CBT, PvP enabled at low level, extremely reduced karma, GvG costs reduced to next to nothing.. This went on for the entire duration of the CBT. I watched the streams and it was a shit show. There were guilds of 100 people running around killing anyone they came across. If this happens in NA, I will stick with Korea.. just saying.
This video reminds me a bit of UO and SWG. I cannot tell if this game is Action Combat or not. It kind of looks like SWG type combat with the reticle combat but still being able to tab your target. That would be good. Over all the video looks good.
However with that said here are my major issues with the game.
F2P - you cannot Do F2P Sandbox MMOs it just cannot be done because once the company sees they can have people pay large amounts of money for cash shop stuff like ArcheAge had this game will be a pile of crap.
If this is Action Combat I will not be able to do it and that is a negative for me. I played Action Combat MMOs and being an IT guy already my wrist cannot take the twitch gaming anymore. Thats one reason I dont play Neverwinter even though I love the Neverwinter series.
Also a fully Solo MMO where there are not mobs that I would need a group to kill is not going to be enjoyable. I might as well play a Single Player game then. Now I dont need Instances however anyone that played UO will tell you, yes you could solo a Balron, however you might want to bring friends because there was a high risk of dying. Also Champion Spawns could not be done alone. Also with SWG Pre-BUFFS you couldnt kill certain mobs solo you needed a group to do it. Reminds be of the sand people.
I'm enjoying the beta, but I have a lot of the same reservations that I have with a lot of other korean MMOs. I feel the video in the OP is a sort of misrepresentation of it.
1) The world design is just not strong. It is a nice looking world, but you can see that it is a randomly generated land mass - Like Aion, TERA and so on, a lot of the world (from what I have seen) feels copy pasted.
NPCs do the same thing where they talk to the "thin air". When you are walking through a city or village for the first time it feels impressive. If you stand still and just observe for 60 seconds, it begins to dawn on you.
The parkour aspect is really not useful from what I'v seen so far, but I really enjoy the control aspect of it. It's nice to be able to do so much.
2) I'm also in the Russian OBT for Blade and Soul, and unlike that game, the UI is stellar in BDO. The game is also very forgiving with its system requirements. I felt it was quite well-optimized.
3) The spirit that follows you around, is your bread-crumb. You click on it, and a mini cut scene pops up, and it tells you to kill 3 foxes. Then 3 founds. Then 3 trolls. Then 3 trolls and burn a troll symbol. Then 3 troll troll shaman. then 5 bigger trolls and 3 troll totems.
It's not the grind that bothers me. After all, the combat is very visually pleasing. It's the closest I have seen to a Platinium game IN MMO space. (Playing as a Male Blader, I feel a lot of the same fluid animations, seemless transisitions akin to Metal Gear Rising).
What I don't like is the conservative Spawn placements, and the absolutely (even by MMO standards) incompetent A.I. It's very, very similar to how in TERA, Aion and Blade&Soul all the mobs spawn near-instantly within a 10-meter raduis, and they don't move about or do anything. They just go back and forth.
It kills a lot of the immersion for me and takes me out of it. I can't read Hangul, so obviously a lot of the story is lost on me, but there is no way they did a good job on building the eco-system. The world looks nice, but its not very immersive.
4) The character creation actually shook me. Everything you have seen, is basically how it feels like, and it's really nice. However, for some reason it actually turns out that inside the game, a lot of players looked very similar. Very similar. I think it's because (for the Male Blader at least) you only had 4 hairstyles to choose from. The rest are locked behind a paywall. I find that insanely harsh, and limiting. I mean, - There was only 2 of those hairstyles that looked really good, and judging from all the other players I saw they seemed to think so too. So you still ended up with the clone syndrom.
I really hope they lax up on the hairstyles, because it makes no sense to make such an encompassing character creation system and then outfit it with it such few hair options. For some of the female classes, you can choose length and adjust the closeness and volume of the hair, but not on the spiky hair my blader had.
5) The OPs video is a bit trickery with some of its claims. I wanna say that the games social and economic systems are closer to FFXIV than say SWG or Archeage. They really seem to be tight on controlling the economy. They set the prices, so you can't really play the market like you can in "true" player-driven economy based games.
6) The Auto-Run to your destination is a game changer. It really is. The pathing is super. You don't even need to open the map to auto-run to your destination. You can chat with your guild, read your quest logs, check your inventory, whatever, while running. And you can run far. I ran for 5 minutes, with my character intuitively figuring it out by itself. I love this feature.
7) The mount implementation is great. It's always seemed like an after thought to me (an annoying one) when you can just "summon" a horse from your pocket like in WoW. Here you get it from a stable, it actually makes sense. If ArenaNet were ever to put mounts into GW2, This is the only method I would be okay with.
8) There are some cool races (humanoids with deer antlers. Reminding me of Chopper from One Piece) and the art direction is a cool mix of european medieval with traditional asian styles. If weeabo and anime annoy the crap out of you, this is preferable to Blade&Soul.
BDO is also a lot more tasteful than B&S. There is not the same hyper sexualism going on that bothers some people. Music is nice. Haven't tried PvP.
Overall, I've spend less than 30 hours on it and I think it's an impressive game, but it most def has some of the symptomic problems with world building, with its action combat its gameplay philosophies that Blade and Soul and TERA has.
You know.. I just did a 14 day trial of FFXIV a month ago (had never tried FFXIV) and honestly - Outside of its old school auto-attack combat and perhaps very silent community (if your not in a guild) I don't think BDO seems to be superior in UI, optimization, art, controls, graphics, art direction, and it certainly seems to be inferior when it comes to story, monster designs and world design. BDO is much more seamless though.
I don't know. It's just still (like with TERA, C9 and so on..) difficult for me to get super excited about the true action combat MMOs. I love the combat systems. I'm all about the Chilvary/For Honor/Jedi Knight/Mount&Blade-type combat systems, but in these MMOs, they are paired with these horrid A.I systems that doesn't invoke a sense of challenge for the player or makes good use that combat system, and in BDO it's really apparant.
You get amazing chained combos, secondary flashing tae-kwondo-ish spinning back kicks, sommersault parries and other amazing stuff. It's choreography is befitting of Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden, but the enemies are dumber than a Sims. They stand still, they are predictable. It's just not that fun going bananas keyboard faceroll on enemies that don't fight back intelligently.
Sorry for the debbie downer impressions here. I really like the game. I want it (and Blade & Soul) to do well. I really want them to good. I think every MMO in existence has serious flaws, and basically the best you can do as a player is to pick your poison instead growing angry and bitter about some make-pretend notion of a game finally being perfect.
BDO has problems. That is clear. It makes perfect sense that the game is not top tier number 1 in Korea. Nothing looks so cool and amazing without trade-offs. And the OPs video really lacks that other perspective. I hope people anticipating BDO will go into it with realistic expectations.
This video reminds me a bit of UO and SWG. I cannot tell if this game is Action Combat or not. It kind of looks like SWG type combat with the reticle combat but still being able to tab your target. That would be good. Over all the video looks good.
However with that said here are my major issues with the game.
F2P - you cannot Do F2P Sandbox MMOs it just cannot be done because once the company sees they can have people pay large amounts of money for cash shop stuff like ArcheAge had this game will be a pile of crap.
If this is Action Combat I will not be able to do it and that is a negative for me. I played Action Combat MMOs and being an IT guy already my wrist cannot take the twitch gaming anymore. Thats one reason I dont play Neverwinter even though I love the Neverwinter series.
Also a fully Solo MMO where there are not mobs that I would need a group to kill is not going to be enjoyable. I might as well play a Single Player game then. Now I dont need Instances however anyone that played UO will tell you, yes you could solo a Balron, however you might want to bring friends because there was a high risk of dying. Also Champion Spawns could not be done alone. Also with SWG Pre-BUFFS you couldnt kill certain mobs solo you needed a group to do it. Reminds be of the sand people.
So far PA/Daum have done a relatively good job with the cash shop. Yes you can sell stuff in exchange for silver which gives you an advantage, and until recently the max price for cash shop items was so low that hardly anyone did it. However, they recently raised the prices (one of my biggest complaints about the game) moving it more into P2W territory. Still, I can make more money in a month of playing than someone can make selling cash shop items exclusively - the amount of money you can spend on BDO is capped. I estimate I make about 300-400m a month assuming I played 4 hours a day, selling cash shop items I would guess around 250-300m if you hit the cap every month. That being said, nothing is flat out P2W - nothing from the cash shop provides combat bonuses.
The game is very much action combat, however, some classes have it easier than others in terms of "twitch" factor. I would say the combat is closer to Neverwinter than to SWG.
I would comment on the solo combat stuff but if you read through this post you can find everything I have to say about it.
I'm enjoying the beta, but I have a lot of the same reservations that I have with a lot of other korean MMOs. I feel the video in the OP is a sort of misrepresentation of it.
1) The world design is just not strong. It is a nice looking world, but you can see that it is a randomly generated land mass - Like Aion, TERA and so on, a lot of the world (from what I have seen) feels copy pasted.
NPCs do the same thing where they talk to the "thin air". When you are walking through a city or village for the first time it feels impressive. If you stand still and just observe for 60 seconds, it begins to dawn on you.
The parkour aspect is really not useful from what I'v seen so far, but I really enjoy the control aspect of it. It's nice to be able to do so much.
2) I'm also in the Russian OBT for Blade and Soul, and unlike that game, the UI is stellar in BDO. The game is also very forgiving with its system requirements. I felt it was quite well-optimized.
3) The spirit that follows you around, is your bread-crumb. You click on it, and a mini cut scene pops up, and it tells you to kill 3 foxes. Then 3 founds. Then 3 trolls. Then 3 trolls and burn a troll symbol. Then 3 troll troll shaman. then 5 bigger trolls and 3 troll totems.
It's not the grind that bothers me. After all, the combat is very visually pleasing. It's the closest I have seen to a Platinium game IN MMO space. (Playing as a Male Blader, I feel a lot of the same fluid animations, seemless transisitions akin to Metal Gear Rising).
What I don't like is the conservative Spawn placements, and the absolutely (even by MMO standards) incompetent A.I. It's very, very similar to how in TERA, Aion and Blade&Soul all the mobs spawn near-instantly within a 10-meter raduis, and they don't move about or do anything. They just go back and forth.
It kills a lot of the immersion for me and takes me out of it. I can't read Hangul, so obviously a lot of the story is lost on me, but there is no way they did a good job on building the eco-system. The world looks nice, but its not very immersive.
4) The character creation actually shook me. Everything you have seen, is basically how it feels like, and it's really nice. However, for some reason it actually turns out that inside the game, a lot of players looked very similar. Very similar. I think it's because (for the Male Blader at least) you only had 4 hairstyles to choose from. The rest are locked behind a paywall. I find that insanely harsh, and limiting. I mean, - There was only 2 of those hairstyles that looked really good, and judging from all the other players I saw they seemed to think so too. So you still ended up with the clone syndrom.
I really hope they lax up on the hairstyles, because it makes no sense to make such an encompassing character creation system and then outfit it with it such few hair options. For some of the female classes, you can choose length and adjust the closeness and volume of the hair, but not on the spiky hair my blader had.
5) The OPs video is a bit trickery with some of its claims. I wanna say that the games social and economic systems are closer to FFXIV than say SWG or Archeage. They really seem to be tight on controlling the economy. They set the prices, so you can't really play the market like you can in "true" player-driven economy based games.
6) The Auto-Run to your destination is a game changer. It really is. The pathing is super. You don't even need to open the map to auto-run to your destination. You can chat with your guild, read your quest logs, check your inventory, whatever, while running. And you can run far. I ran for 5 minutes, with my character intuitively figuring it out by itself. I love this feature.
7) The mount implementation is great. It's always seemed like an after thought to me (an annoying one) when you can just "summon" a horse from your pocket like in WoW. Here you get it from a stable, it actually makes sense. If ArenaNet were ever to put mounts into GW2, This is the only method I would be okay with.
8) There are some cool races (humanoids with deer antlers. Reminding me of Chopper from One Piece) and the art direction is a cool mix of european medieval with traditional asian styles. If weeabo and anime annoy the crap out of you, this is preferable to Blade&Soul.
BDO is also a lot more tasteful than B&S. There is not the same hyper sexualism going on that bothers some people. Music is nice. Haven't tried PvP.
Overall, I've spend less than 30 hours on it and I think it's an impressive game, but it most def has some of the symptomic problems with world building, with its action combat its gameplay philosophies that Blade and Soul and TERA has.
You know.. I just did a 14 day trial of FFXIV a month ago (had never tried FFXIV) and honestly - Outside of its old school auto-attack combat and perhaps very silent community (if your not in a guild) I don't think BDO seems to be superior in UI, optimization, art, controls, graphics, art direction, and it certainly seems to be inferior when it comes to story, monster designs and world design. BDO is much more seamless though.
I don't know. It's just still (like with TERA, C9 and so on..) difficult for me to get super excited about the true action combat MMOs. I love the combat systems. I'm all about the Chilvary/For Honor/Jedi Knight/Mount&Blade-type combat systems, but in these MMOs, they are paired with these horrid A.I systems that doesn't invoke a sense of challenge for the player or makes good use that combat system, and in BDO it's really apparant.
You get amazing chained combos, secondary flashing tae-kwondo-ish spinning back kicks, sommersault parries and other amazing stuff. It's choreography is befitting of Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden, but the enemies are dumber than a Sims. They stand still, they are predictable. It's just not that fun going bananas keyboard faceroll on enemies that don't fight back intelligently.
Sorry for the debbie downer impressions here. I really like the game. I want it (and Blade & Soul) to do well. I really want them to good. I think every MMO in existence has serious flaws, and basically the best you can do as a player is to pick your poison instead growing angry and bitter about some make-pretend notion of a game finally being perfect.
BDO has problems. That is clear. It makes perfect sense that the game is not top tier number 1 in Korea. Nothing looks so cool and amazing without trade-offs. And the OPs video really lacks that other perspective. I hope people anticipating BDO will go into it with realistic expectations.
I agree with everything except what I have highlighted.
Each "zone" or area actually has a theme associated with it. The starting area is meant to be forest, so you will see a lot of trees and dense woodland areas. Media, the 50-55 area is the plains, it is the transition from forest to desert. Valencia is the desert area. I'll try to find a map of the entire continent to share, but it is much larger than what is currently released. I don't feel that anything is copy pasted (I don't use my map anymore.. I can tell where I am by looks).
Market min/max values change based on supply and demand. This does prevent people from playing the market, it also prevents market bots (something that was prevalent in GW2, I knew a guild dedicated to it)
This is promoting 30-day premium access, you get premium + 30 days of unlimited character modifications. When your premium expires you can keep your modified look. I much prefer pay to look good than pay for combat bonus, so I see this as a sign that PA/Daum is going in the right direction with their cash shop.
Yes, AI is weak. Outside of bosses at high level mobs the first 50 levels is full of dull mobs that have no real AI and are just grouped together in large packs. That being said, it has always been 1-50 is more of a tutorial than the true game. I feel like you haven't played the game into the upper level 50's. They did a much better job with Media (in terms of world building) and I am expecting similar if not better results with Valencia when that launches (hopefully next week). PvP is where the combat truly shines. It is much faster than TERA and very punishing when you make mistakes, something that I enjoy.
That being said, I appreciate a well thought out and well written review that is different than mine. People trashing the game endlessly that have never played it gets very tiresome.
You said: "Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game". I proved they just used that word. On the very first page of their site as well. Is there a "sandbox" in "sandbox oriented" or not? And isn't "sandbox oriented" a definition?
And I said "NO global AH" makes it more sandboxy to ME. Regional AH makes it more sandboxy to ME (they DID have that in BDO from the get go but changed it to global AH). Cause you can actually play the market then, and check for supply and demand, and make a buck from it. All player driven. NOT GM driven as in BDO now. That's NOT a sandbox feature to ME. Apperantly lvling isn't even a issue anymore cause you can reach lvl 50 within a day now. Yay!!! You asked what makes it a sandbox to me, and I answered.
I did like taming horses ingame. I must admit that. Now THAT is a sandbox feature. Btw, you can do that in MO as well. You can even breed horses by yourself, and finding horses with good stats in the wild, makes it more likely the foal havin good stats as well etc. But I already said MO has other issues mainly with it coming from them being a small DEV-team, which leads to things taking a long time to get fixed when it breaks etc. And I said I would still play MO if things were smooth sailing there. But it isn't. But I still love what they at least are TRYING to do there compared to what PA is doing to BDO atm.
Found yet another article that describes the concern me and other feels for the changes made to BDO. But you prolly know all this since your such a hardcore fan. But at least you might get why some of us lost hope in it. Mostly due to them doing a u-turn compared to what they first said they would do with the game. Scroll down to the yellow text saying "Let’s start with the Open World, Sandbox features of the game", where they start to go through all the changes that has been made making the game less sandboxy. Also funny to see how they also, just as I, thinks it feels more like a solo game... Who could have guessed that!?!? http://black-desert.com/articles/black-desert-how-we-were-expect-it-to-be-and-how-it-is-now/
Edit. Gonna put in the last part in the article for you to lazy to read it all, and pretty much sums up what me and others feel bout the direction BDO has taken:
"What we would like to see, is the old (initial) BDO start taking form. With open world and real sandbox contents, where you could be someone, someone unique, like a real blacksmith for example, with your house and store. Now, everyone is the same, and everyone can reach almost any point solo. We wish to see again the real party link system, to see some proper coordination and communication between parties and not spamming of skills and potions. We wish to see guilds fighting each other for a reason and not just to have some “PvP”. We wish to see Black Desert as it was originally designed, and not how it eventually became".
Now we can only wait and see if that happens. If it does, or if some changes already HAS happened, then I will download it again. But not until they fix some of these issues.
Sandbox-oriented does not mean straight sandbox. In all honestly I believe the term "sandbox" is flawed anyways, I hate when people use it.. it's kind of like the term "stylized" when referring to art - it doesn't actually define anything at all. Additionally, I challenge you to find where they used the term "sandbox" or "sandbox oriented" in an interview, press release, or any statement from the company rather than from some flare text on a 1 page website that has been exactly the same (sans the video) for over 3 years.
Oh yes, another black-desert.com article referencing an interview from 2013 and CBT 1-3 as their source of all things. As I have said, over and over, CBT was for TESTING different ideas they had about how to implement the features they wanted in the game. The Korean player base wanted something different.. so PA changed some features and cut some others. Yes, the game is more casual, less grindy, there isn't fighting over houses and hacks to acquire them (AA), PKing is more punishing, and the broken party link system is gone (speaking of which.. do you even know how it works? 3 people stand around buffing 1 person.. are you kidding me?), player to player trading is gone which prevents gold sellers and botters from dominating the economy, AH is global, and bosses are spawned with scrolls for your party rather than placed in the world.
You know what I have also seen suggested on black-desert.com? A single server for everyone with no channels, PvP starting from level 1 with (like you suggest) full gear drop, limited houses that are not instanced, many months to level to 50, and quite a few others that I can't even remember.
With all this, it would just be another Archeage.. only worse, because now instead of the credit-card masters killing you only in the arena and in the open world.. instead you will have them killing you and taking all your stuff. That just allows them to get richer, feeding their way to the top. BDO gear is not level restricted.. so at level one you could have +20 gear and one shot every player you came across. In a single server with no channel environment, you would be hard-pressed to find mobs to kill.. at least until everyone quit the game.. because everyone would. Let's pretend that you are one of the few players left, perfect.. because now you are a prime target for those P2W players that have top gear.
People are naive about what they are asking, non-instanced housing only promotes hacks and exploiters.. and if you think that an increased tax will keep people from paying real-life money to keep it then you're delusional. Open world housing is terrible, it doesn't work, and it makes the game look incredibly shitty - look at Archeage.
You cannot suggest a game like this and expect it to work with a large dev team. When you have 100+ developers to pay and a publisher taking a cut of your profits you have to appeal to a much wider market than just the niche hardcore PvP market. If you don't appeal to casuals the game will fail, PA will go bankrupt, and Daum will drop the game. Games like Lineage are successful because they are old, don't require a lot of maintenance, and don't require top-tier servers to run.
There is absolutely no way to please everyone, instead, as a developer, you try to find a good middle ground that appeals to a wide audience rather than just a small portion. That is something PA is trying to do and I think they are doing a good job of it. By all means, if you want the game to fail keep pushing for features that will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company.
You dont like it, but that's what they were using. You can try to twist and turn it til your head pops off. You said they never used"sandbox". I proved you wrong. Live with it.
And ofc peeps will get expectation on the game from what they've read from interviews with DEVs, and then also from what they heard was ingame in CBT1 and 2. Duh... And OFC we will get disapointed when they change alot what they said was going to be ingame. Duh... Your love for this game isn't healthy cause your stuck in your little lovebubble and can't see the other sides view on it. "Nonono!!! It never was a sandbox. PA never said it was!!!". But is says so on their front page. "Nonono. That "sandbox" isn't really sandbox. That means carrots. And I don't eat corrots". Fanboism 101 right here.
They said in interviews that there were suppose to be only ONE server. But they went back on that as well, and introduced channels. So nothing new there. All good if they go back to what they once set out to put out for us. And player to player trading increases interaction between players, and local AH with prices set by players not GMs makes it a world run by players not GMs. Hence a sandbox.
And there IS ways to balance drops etc from PvP. They were on their way to do it with the karma system, but then punished peeps for doing so to much, making it completly pointless to even do it. They had you drop some items first, more if you had bad karma standings etc. And peeps would think twice PKing peeps if they knew they would loose stats/XP/more equipment when they die. Going back to MO. If your red and die there, your stats in str, dex etc goes down. And you will have to train them up again. Not so fun to do. It can be balanced correctly, and apperantly it was good in BDO in CBT1 according to most who played it then.
And you shouldn't skip out on systems cause there might be hacks. There will be hacks in BDO as well. Don't worry bout that. And speaking of open world and Archeage. You say ArcheAge looks terrible? There might be many things bad with AA. But the open world and their housing system sure isn't one of them. Yeah, it's crowded etc, but I sure as hell prefer that over what BDO offers now.
And what says BDO would be less successfull with the vision they first said they were gonna give us? Is the game doing well now in Korea? No. It's not even in the top 100. It has fallen like a brick down the charts. So don't tell me it's doing fine now. Hopefully they go back to their original vision of the game, and it can start climbing back up the charts. I come back here if that happens and point to this post. Til then, enjoy your themepark or whatever you wanna call it.
You said: "Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game". I proved they just used that word. On the very first page of their site as well. Is there a "sandbox" in "sandbox oriented" or not? And isn't "sandbox oriented" a definition?
And I said "NO global AH" makes it more sandboxy to ME. Regional AH makes it more sandboxy to ME (they DID have that in BDO from the get go but changed it to global AH). Cause you can actually play the market then, and check for supply and demand, and make a buck from it. All player driven. NOT GM driven as in BDO now. That's NOT a sandbox feature to ME. Apperantly lvling isn't even a issue anymore cause you can reach lvl 50 within a day now. Yay!!! You asked what makes it a sandbox to me, and I answered.
I did like taming horses ingame. I must admit that. Now THAT is a sandbox feature. Btw, you can do that in MO as well. You can even breed horses by yourself, and finding horses with good stats in the wild, makes it more likely the foal havin good stats as well etc. But I already said MO has other issues mainly with it coming from them being a small DEV-team, which leads to things taking a long time to get fixed when it breaks etc. And I said I would still play MO if things were smooth sailing there. But it isn't. But I still love what they at least are TRYING to do there compared to what PA is doing to BDO atm.
Found yet another article that describes the concern me and other feels for the changes made to BDO. But you prolly know all this since your such a hardcore fan. But at least you might get why some of us lost hope in it. Mostly due to them doing a u-turn compared to what they first said they would do with the game. Scroll down to the yellow text saying "Let’s start with the Open World, Sandbox features of the game", where they start to go through all the changes that has been made making the game less sandboxy. Also funny to see how they also, just as I, thinks it feels more like a solo game... Who could have guessed that!?!? http://black-desert.com/articles/black-desert-how-we-were-expect-it-to-be-and-how-it-is-now/
Edit. Gonna put in the last part in the article for you to lazy to read it all, and pretty much sums up what me and others feel bout the direction BDO has taken:
"What we would like to see, is the old (initial) BDO start taking form. With open world and real sandbox contents, where you could be someone, someone unique, like a real blacksmith for example, with your house and store. Now, everyone is the same, and everyone can reach almost any point solo. We wish to see again the real party link system, to see some proper coordination and communication between parties and not spamming of skills and potions. We wish to see guilds fighting each other for a reason and not just to have some “PvP”. We wish to see Black Desert as it was originally designed, and not how it eventually became".
Now we can only wait and see if that happens. If it does, or if some changes already HAS happened, then I will download it again. But not until they fix some of these issues.
Sandbox-oriented does not mean straight sandbox. In all honestly I believe the term "sandbox" is flawed anyways, I hate when people use it.. it's kind of like the term "stylized" when referring to art - it doesn't actually define anything at all. Additionally, I challenge you to find where they used the term "sandbox" or "sandbox oriented" in an interview, press release, or any statement from the company rather than from some flare text on a 1 page website that has been exactly the same (sans the video) for over 3 years.
Oh yes, another black-desert.com article referencing an interview from 2013 and CBT 1-3 as their source of all things. As I have said, over and over, CBT was for TESTING different ideas they had about how to implement the features they wanted in the game. The Korean player base wanted something different.. so PA changed some features and cut some others. Yes, the game is more casual, less grindy, there isn't fighting over houses and hacks to acquire them (AA), PKing is more punishing, and the broken party link system is gone (speaking of which.. do you even know how it works? 3 people stand around buffing 1 person.. are you kidding me?), player to player trading is gone which prevents gold sellers and botters from dominating the economy, AH is global, and bosses are spawned with scrolls for your party rather than placed in the world.
You know what I have also seen suggested on black-desert.com? A single server for everyone with no channels, PvP starting from level 1 with (like you suggest) full gear drop, limited houses that are not instanced, many months to level to 50, and quite a few others that I can't even remember.
With all this, it would just be another Archeage.. only worse, because now instead of the credit-card masters killing you only in the arena and in the open world.. instead you will have them killing you and taking all your stuff. That just allows them to get richer, feeding their way to the top. BDO gear is not level restricted.. so at level one you could have +20 gear and one shot every player you came across. In a single server with no channel environment, you would be hard-pressed to find mobs to kill.. at least until everyone quit the game.. because everyone would. Let's pretend that you are one of the few players left, perfect.. because now you are a prime target for those P2W players that have top gear.
People are naive about what they are asking, non-instanced housing only promotes hacks and exploiters.. and if you think that an increased tax will keep people from paying real-life money to keep it then you're delusional. Open world housing is terrible, it doesn't work, and it makes the game look incredibly shitty - look at Archeage.
You cannot suggest a game like this and expect it to work with a large dev team. When you have 100+ developers to pay and a publisher taking a cut of your profits you have to appeal to a much wider market than just the niche hardcore PvP market. If you don't appeal to casuals the game will fail, PA will go bankrupt, and Daum will drop the game. Games like Lineage are successful because they are old, don't require a lot of maintenance, and don't require top-tier servers to run.
There is absolutely no way to please everyone, instead, as a developer, you try to find a good middle ground that appeals to a wide audience rather than just a small portion. That is something PA is trying to do and I think they are doing a good job of it. By all means, if you want the game to fail keep pushing for features that will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company.
You dont like it, but that's what they were using. You can try to twist and turn it til your head pops off. You said they never used"sandbox". I proved you wrong. Live with it.
And ofc peeps will get expectation on the game from what they've read from interviews with DEVs, and then also from what they heard was ingame in CBT1 and 2. Duh... And OFC we will get disapointed when they change alot what they said was going to be ingame. Duh... Your love for this game isn't healthy cause your stuck in your little lovebubble and can't see the other sides view on it. "Nonono!!! It never was a sandbox. PA never said it was!!!". But is says so on their front page. "Nonono. That "sandbox" isn't really sandbox. That means carrots. And I don't eat corrots". Fanboism 101 right here.
They said in interviews that there were suppose to be only ONE server. But they went back on that as well, and introduced channels. So nothing new there. All good if they go back to what they once set out to put out for us. And player to player trading increases interaction between players, and local AH with prices set by players not GMs makes it a world run by players not GMs. Hence a sandbox.
And there IS ways to balance drops etc from PvP. They were on their way to do it with the karma system, but then punished peeps for doing so to much, making it completly pointless to even do it. They had you drop some items first, more if you had bad karma standings etc. And peeps would think twice PKing peeps if they knew they would loose stats/XP/more equipment when they die. Going back to MO. If your red and die there, you stats in str, dec etc goes down. And you will have to train them up again. Not so fun to do. It can be balanced correctly, and apperantly it was good in BDO in CBT1 according to most who played it then.
And you shouldn't skip out on systems cause there might be hacks. There will be hacks in BDO as well. Don't worry bout that. And speaking of open world and Archeage. You say ArcheAge looks terrible? There might be many things bad with AA. But the open world and their housing system sure isn't one of them. Yeah, it's crowded etc, but I sure as hell prefer that over what BDO offers now.
And what says BDO would be less successfull with the vision they first said they were gonna give us? Is the game doing well now in Korea? No. It's not even in the top 100. It has fallen like a brick down the charts. So don't tell me it's doing fine now. Hopefully they go back to their original vision of the game, and it can start climbing back up the charts. I come back here if that happens and point to this post. Til then, enjoy your themepark or whatever you wanna call it.
You spent a lot of time in your post attacking me rather than my arguments, that's a sign of anger and lack a factual response. That's fine, I will continue to attack your argument.
We need to get some definitions set in stone here, because we disagree on what "sandbox", "sandbox oriented", and "true sandbox" means. Some people would say sandbox means open world with no zones, others have more expectations. I have given you my definition of sandbox and you have given me yours. But beyond that flare text, PA has never uttered the word "sandbox" in an interview. Maybe the Korean word for sandbox is poorly translated into English and vice versa, that could very well be the case.
"Q. When Black Desert was introduced to us back in 2012, it was introduced as an Open World Sandbox MMO, unfortunately we can’t consider it as an Open Word nor Sandbox anymore due to the heavy restrictions and due to the removal of the Open World (World Bosses etc.) content that Closed Beta 1 & 2 used to have. Will there be any chance that this content will be added again in the English version?
A. World Bosses on fields are certainly possible systems. Modifications of some systems are also possible, but they could be different from our 1st and 2nd CBT"
So bosses placed in the world is how you define "Open World" and "Sandbox"? That is completely different than what you mentioned before of what "true sandbox" is. That might also be different than what PA's definition of what "sandbox" is. Who knows, they never directly acknowledged the term "sandbox".
You keep listing a bunch of things that I addressed in my post. They were testing things for the Korean market.. not for the US market, not for the EU market.. the Korean market. And again, someone else mentioning how BDO has "fallen off the Korean charts", I will assume you are referencing gamenote.com - as I have mentioned before in a previous post, these "charts" are determined by participating PC Bang rooms (gaming cafes) and the "statistics" are based on who is playing the games at this locations. Additionally, it's not out of the "top 100", go look right now. Please.
I can see everyone's other side, I just think YOUR expectations of what the game "SHOULD" be are completely unrealistic and as I said before "will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company"
It's fine, we get it, you want BDO to be more like the Russian version. Perfect, go play in Russia then, I posted videos to that which you can look at.
Edit:
Player to player trading and AH prices defined by players also leads to economic collapse due to botters, exploiters, and gold sellers. RMT gold prices get lower and lower while rare/wanted items get higher and higher in price. Eventually the price differences are so extreme that it becomes impossible for casual players to afford items and can never be competitive. This causes them to quit, it also causes the "semi-hardcore" players and "hardcore" players that don't want to invest money in the game to be constantly under geared compared to the whales that invest tons of money into the game. I would be fine with them adding player to player trading with AH prices defined by players if the majority of items were nodrop or account bound.. but that is not how it is.
You said: "Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game". I proved they just used that word. On the very first page of their site as well. Is there a "sandbox" in "sandbox oriented" or not? And isn't "sandbox oriented" a definition?
And I said "NO global AH" makes it more sandboxy to ME. Regional AH makes it more sandboxy to ME (they DID have that in BDO from the get go but changed it to global AH). Cause you can actually play the market then, and check for supply and demand, and make a buck from it. All player driven. NOT GM driven as in BDO now. That's NOT a sandbox feature to ME. Apperantly lvling isn't even a issue anymore cause you can reach lvl 50 within a day now. Yay!!! You asked what makes it a sandbox to me, and I answered.
I did like taming horses ingame. I must admit that. Now THAT is a sandbox feature. Btw, you can do that in MO as well. You can even breed horses by yourself, and finding horses with good stats in the wild, makes it more likely the foal havin good stats as well etc. But I already said MO has other issues mainly with it coming from them being a small DEV-team, which leads to things taking a long time to get fixed when it breaks etc. And I said I would still play MO if things were smooth sailing there. But it isn't. But I still love what they at least are TRYING to do there compared to what PA is doing to BDO atm.
Found yet another article that describes the concern me and other feels for the changes made to BDO. But you prolly know all this since your such a hardcore fan. But at least you might get why some of us lost hope in it. Mostly due to them doing a u-turn compared to what they first said they would do with the game. Scroll down to the yellow text saying "Let’s start with the Open World, Sandbox features of the game", where they start to go through all the changes that has been made making the game less sandboxy. Also funny to see how they also, just as I, thinks it feels more like a solo game... Who could have guessed that!?!? http://black-desert.com/articles/black-desert-how-we-were-expect-it-to-be-and-how-it-is-now/
Edit. Gonna put in the last part in the article for you to lazy to read it all, and pretty much sums up what me and others feel bout the direction BDO has taken:
"What we would like to see, is the old (initial) BDO start taking form. With open world and real sandbox contents, where you could be someone, someone unique, like a real blacksmith for example, with your house and store. Now, everyone is the same, and everyone can reach almost any point solo. We wish to see again the real party link system, to see some proper coordination and communication between parties and not spamming of skills and potions. We wish to see guilds fighting each other for a reason and not just to have some “PvP”. We wish to see Black Desert as it was originally designed, and not how it eventually became".
Now we can only wait and see if that happens. If it does, or if some changes already HAS happened, then I will download it again. But not until they fix some of these issues.
Sandbox-oriented does not mean straight sandbox. In all honestly I believe the term "sandbox" is flawed anyways, I hate when people use it.. it's kind of like the term "stylized" when referring to art - it doesn't actually define anything at all. Additionally, I challenge you to find where they used the term "sandbox" or "sandbox oriented" in an interview, press release, or any statement from the company rather than from some flare text on a 1 page website that has been exactly the same (sans the video) for over 3 years.
Oh yes, another black-desert.com article referencing an interview from 2013 and CBT 1-3 as their source of all things. As I have said, over and over, CBT was for TESTING different ideas they had about how to implement the features they wanted in the game. The Korean player base wanted something different.. so PA changed some features and cut some others. Yes, the game is more casual, less grindy, there isn't fighting over houses and hacks to acquire them (AA), PKing is more punishing, and the broken party link system is gone (speaking of which.. do you even know how it works? 3 people stand around buffing 1 person.. are you kidding me?), player to player trading is gone which prevents gold sellers and botters from dominating the economy, AH is global, and bosses are spawned with scrolls for your party rather than placed in the world.
You know what I have also seen suggested on black-desert.com? A single server for everyone with no channels, PvP starting from level 1 with (like you suggest) full gear drop, limited houses that are not instanced, many months to level to 50, and quite a few others that I can't even remember.
With all this, it would just be another Archeage.. only worse, because now instead of the credit-card masters killing you only in the arena and in the open world.. instead you will have them killing you and taking all your stuff. That just allows them to get richer, feeding their way to the top. BDO gear is not level restricted.. so at level one you could have +20 gear and one shot every player you came across. In a single server with no channel environment, you would be hard-pressed to find mobs to kill.. at least until everyone quit the game.. because everyone would. Let's pretend that you are one of the few players left, perfect.. because now you are a prime target for those P2W players that have top gear.
People are naive about what they are asking, non-instanced housing only promotes hacks and exploiters.. and if you think that an increased tax will keep people from paying real-life money to keep it then you're delusional. Open world housing is terrible, it doesn't work, and it makes the game look incredibly shitty - look at Archeage.
You cannot suggest a game like this and expect it to work with a large dev team. When you have 100+ developers to pay and a publisher taking a cut of your profits you have to appeal to a much wider market than just the niche hardcore PvP market. If you don't appeal to casuals the game will fail, PA will go bankrupt, and Daum will drop the game. Games like Lineage are successful because they are old, don't require a lot of maintenance, and don't require top-tier servers to run.
There is absolutely no way to please everyone, instead, as a developer, you try to find a good middle ground that appeals to a wide audience rather than just a small portion. That is something PA is trying to do and I think they are doing a good job of it. By all means, if you want the game to fail keep pushing for features that will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company.
You dont like it, but that's what they were using. You can try to twist and turn it til your head pops off. You said they never used"sandbox". I proved you wrong. Live with it.
And ofc peeps will get expectation on the game from what they've read from interviews with DEVs, and then also from what they heard was ingame in CBT1 and 2. Duh... And OFC we will get disapointed when they change alot what they said was going to be ingame. Duh... Your love for this game isn't healthy cause your stuck in your little lovebubble and can't see the other sides view on it. "Nonono!!! It never was a sandbox. PA never said it was!!!". But is says so on their front page. "Nonono. That "sandbox" isn't really sandbox. That means carrots. And I don't eat corrots". Fanboism 101 right here.
They said in interviews that there were suppose to be only ONE server. But they went back on that as well, and introduced channels. So nothing new there. All good if they go back to what they once set out to put out for us. And player to player trading increases interaction between players, and local AH with prices set by players not GMs makes it a world run by players not GMs. Hence a sandbox.
And there IS ways to balance drops etc from PvP. They were on their way to do it with the karma system, but then punished peeps for doing so to much, making it completly pointless to even do it. They had you drop some items first, more if you had bad karma standings etc. And peeps would think twice PKing peeps if they knew they would loose stats/XP/more equipment when they die. Going back to MO. If your red and die there, your stats in str, dex etc goes down. And you will have to train them up again. Not so fun to do. It can be balanced correctly, and apperantly it was good in BDO in CBT1 according to most who played it then.
And you shouldn't skip out on systems cause there might be hacks. There will be hacks in BDO as well. Don't worry bout that. And speaking of open world and Archeage. You say ArcheAge looks terrible? There might be many things bad with AA. But the open world and their housing system sure isn't one of them. Yeah, it's crowded etc, but I sure as hell prefer that over what BDO offers now.
And what says BDO would be less successfull with the vision they first said they were gonna give us? Is the game doing well now in Korea? No. It's not even in the top 100. It has fallen like a brick down the charts. So don't tell me it's doing fine now. Hopefully they go back to their original vision of the game, and it can start climbing back up the charts. I come back here if that happens and point to this post. Til then, enjoy your themepark or whatever you wanna call it.
You know, they call them "betas" for a reason, nothing is set in stone. PA didn't promise you or anyone anything. XD
PA had a plan, they told you what their plan was. They executed that plan and it turned out that the korean market didn't like it and/or certain features didn't work out well. SO, they changed it. You keep referencing other games but sadly BDO is not those games. This is BDO.
You want sandbox? Well, judging by the definition I just gave you. That would be a game that is open world with character progression(not limited to level might I add) that is not forced down a certain path. Mini-games, side quests etc. All of which BDO has. Fishing, trading, hunting, mining, crafting, etc.
It even points out that despite this some 'sandbox' mmos and/or games(doesn't have to be an mmo to be a sandbox) continue to impose restrictions at certain stages of the game's environment. Which BDO actually does not do. This definition focuses more on the fact that the world is free to roam and is not restricted at any level of play. Doesn't say much about any of the features you claim are 'sandboxy'. Sounds like BDO is shaping to be pretty sandboxy if you ask me.
So regardless of whether or not PA said or didn't say the word sandbox... PA still hasn't taken anything away from you that is deemed a 'sandbox' element.
One more thing, at the end of the day. Unless you live in Korea, Japan or Russia; none of the versions of BDO are meant for you. Nor are you supposed to be playing them; technically. It was stated that the different versions of the game would be tailored to what the majority wanted for each region. Didn't Russia get their pk, lvl 30(or whatever lvl) pvp features back? With that said why the hell are you complaining about a version of the game that's not meant for you. Why don't you save your ideas and complaints for when the NA version comes? Strangely, the game is still in beta WHO KNEW!? Nothing is set in stone. Seriously, if you haven't understood this much...
Ok so there has been a lot of typing from a few people.
Personally I think it sucks that its action combat. Sorry Folks but action combat means more twitch gaming which I cannot do anymore. It was great when I was younger now that I am 35 already had one wrist I already had surgery on and the other will need it in the next year or 2. So Twitch gaming is a big no, hell I cannot even play flight sims as well as I did years ago.
While they are looking to control the cash shop and what not I personally cannot see a company who has a F2P game saying NO I DO NOT WANT JOHN SMITH TO SPEND $5000 THIS MONTH TO BE THE BEST CRAFTER ON THIS SERVER! Nope sorry I cannot accept F2P Sandboxes period. I played UO and SWG and when I crafted I had made a killing on crafts because I prices stuff right and made good crafts (Rocket Launchers in SWG). No real world money involved just PURE skill. So no I cannot accept someone who can spend $5000 being a better crafter than me. Yes RMT do happen, however getting a perma ban from the game for it makes up for it. Yes SWG and UO Ban people for buying gold, I have known people that have been ban.
Sad that 2 key things that will kill a game for me is in this one. Not being Negative about the game itself, some people WILL like it. I just refuse to play certain games. F2P, B2P Nope, Cash shop Sandbox MMOs nope, Action Combat Nope, Full Loot Sandbox MMOs Nope, PVP focused MMO nope. Again different strokes different folks
Originally posted by austriacus Its a grinding game. You grind mobs non stop without quests from 50-60 (its the most cost effective way of leveling and making money) and get higher and higer gear to pvp with. Thats it.
You just described every Asian MMO past, present, and future with that lol.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Comments
Him and someone else too actually, forget name though.
Oh shit---
Black desert is best MMORPG in history! Beep boop beep.
The combat will make or break this game for a lot of people.
The other thing that will ultimately kill this game is the reliance on potions for PvP.
Potions in PvP = BAD. Always.
Immersion and Role Playability is quite high for this title. Personally enjoyed being a Samurai for a bit. Not able to speak for it's PvE or PvP from personal experience. Hoping emotes will be long for the western version and not restricted to limited characters. Likely won't, but it's always a concern when talking about non-western MMOs.
The poor PvP, the lack of PvE content and the triviality of what little content there is.
You said: "Pearl Abyss has never used the term "sandbox" to define their game". I proved they just used that word. On the very first page of their site as well. Is there a "sandbox" in "sandbox oriented" or not? And isn't "sandbox oriented" a definition?
And I said "NO global AH" makes it more sandboxy to ME. Regional AH makes it more sandboxy to ME (they DID have that in BDO from the get go but changed it to global AH). Cause you can actually play the market then, and check for supply and demand, and make a buck from it. All player driven. NOT GM driven as in BDO now. That's NOT a sandbox feature to ME. Apperantly lvling isn't even a issue anymore cause you can reach lvl 50 within a day now. Yay!!!
You asked what makes it a sandbox to me, and I answered.
I did like taming horses ingame. I must admit that. Now THAT is a sandbox feature. Btw, you can do that in MO as well. You can even breed horses by yourself, and finding horses with good stats in the wild, makes it more likely the foal havin good stats as well etc. But I already said MO has other issues mainly with it coming from them being a small DEV-team, which leads to things taking a long time to get fixed when it breaks etc. And I said I would still play MO if things were smooth sailing there. But it isn't. But I still love what they at least are TRYING to do there compared to what PA is doing to BDO atm.
Found yet another article that describes the concern me and other feels for the changes made to BDO. But you prolly know all this since your such a hardcore fan. But at least you might get why some of us lost hope in it. Mostly due to them doing a u-turn compared to what they first said they would do with the game. Scroll down to the yellow text saying "Let’s start with the Open World, Sandbox features of the game", where they start to go through all the changes that has been made making the game less sandboxy. Also funny to see how they also, just as I, thinks it feels more like a solo game... Who could have guessed that!?!? http://black-desert.com/articles/black-desert-how-we-were-expect-it-to-be-and-how-it-is-now/
Edit. Gonna put in the last part in the article for you to lazy to read it all, and pretty much sums up what me and others feel bout the direction BDO has taken:
"What we would like to see, is the old (initial) BDO start taking form. With open world and real sandbox contents, where you could be someone, someone unique, like a real blacksmith for example, with your house and store. Now, everyone is the same, and everyone can reach almost any point solo. We wish to see again the real party link system, to see some proper coordination and communication between parties and not spamming of skills and potions. We wish to see guilds fighting each other for a reason and not just to have some “PvP”. We wish to see Black Desert as it was originally designed, and not how it eventually became".
Sandbox-oriented does not mean straight sandbox. In all honestly I believe the term "sandbox" is flawed anyways, I hate when people use it.. it's kind of like the term "stylized" when referring to art - it doesn't actually define anything at all. Additionally, I challenge you to find where they used the term "sandbox" or "sandbox oriented" in an interview, press release, or any statement from the company rather than from some flare text on a 1 page website that has been exactly the same (sans the video) for over 3 years.
Oh yes, another black-desert.com article referencing an interview from 2013 and CBT 1-3 as their source of all things. As I have said, over and over, CBT was for TESTING different ideas they had about how to implement the features they wanted in the game. The Korean player base wanted something different.. so PA changed some features and cut some others. Yes, the game is more casual, less grindy, there isn't fighting over houses and hacks to acquire them (AA), PKing is more punishing, and the broken party link system is gone (speaking of which.. do you even know how it works? 3 people stand around buffing 1 person.. are you kidding me?), player to player trading is gone which prevents gold sellers and botters from dominating the economy, AH is global, and bosses are spawned with scrolls for your party rather than placed in the world.
You know what I have also seen suggested on black-desert.com? A single server for everyone with no channels, PvP starting from level 1 with (like you suggest) full gear drop, limited houses that are not instanced, many months to level to 50, and quite a few others that I can't even remember.
With all this, it would just be another Archeage.. only worse, because now instead of the credit-card masters killing you only in the arena and in the open world.. instead you will have them killing you and taking all your stuff. That just allows them to get richer, feeding their way to the top. BDO gear is not level restricted.. so at level one you could have +20 gear and one shot every player you came across. In a single server with no channel environment, you would be hard-pressed to find mobs to kill.. at least until everyone quit the game.. because everyone would. Let's pretend that you are one of the few players left, perfect.. because now you are a prime target for those P2W players that have top gear.
People are naive about what they are asking, non-instanced housing only promotes hacks and exploiters.. and if you think that an increased tax will keep people from paying real-life money to keep it then you're delusional. Open world housing is terrible, it doesn't work, and it makes the game look incredibly shitty - look at Archeage.
You cannot suggest a game like this and expect it to work with a large dev team. When you have 100+ developers to pay and a publisher taking a cut of your profits you have to appeal to a much wider market than just the niche hardcore PvP market. If you don't appeal to casuals the game will fail, PA will go bankrupt, and Daum will drop the game. Games like Lineage are successful because they are old, don't require a lot of maintenance, and don't require top-tier servers to run.
There is absolutely no way to please everyone, instead, as a developer, you try to find a good middle ground that appeals to a wide audience rather than just a small portion. That is something PA is trying to do and I think they are doing a good job of it. By all means, if you want the game to fail keep pushing for features that will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company.
Yeah that's it, I definitely don't respond to posts that I feel are misrepresentations of the game after my 6 months of experience with it. I use facts about the game, my experience, and outside sources to give examples.. but I guess that a handful of people that played CBT and were dissatisfied with the changes that were made should dominate the conversation? Perfect, got it.
There are plenty of things I don't like about the game, maybe you should look at my review of the game in this forum. However, when someone comes in posting about how the game is "supposed" to be, how the developers have "ruined" the game, or how BDO is doing "terribly" in Korea, I feel the need to come in and correct them. Honestly if someone used a phrase like "I feel" or "in my opinion" I wouldn't bother responding to it. Instead, people seem to believe that everything that comes out of their mouth is fact, most of them have never played the game and only acquired their opinions through other players or watching videos made by level 18 players describing how "terrible" and "linear" the game is. Please.
I don't disagree with the PvE, hopefully Valencia will release a bunch of new PvE content that is exciting and fresh.
However, let's look at some of the "poor" PvP:
Group PvP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en6upYQZOsM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yRENTbu4cU
Solo PvP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLZBLxhEhMU
I think that "trivial" is the wrong term to use when applying it to content that is neither PvP or PvE oriented (breeding, trading, whaling, crafting etc.) because it is far from trivial. Horse breeding + trading (especially when done simultaneously) is very lucrative, whaling can be rewarding with a talented group of individuals and at least one upgraded boat. Crafting produces some of the best resist jewelry in game and allows you to upgrade your gear (through warehouse crafting). Maybe you meant that you don't find it enjoyable? If that's the case, that is fine, but it is definitely not trivial.
Nice videos that has shown me that their is a lot of skill involved in the PVP. Also its good to hear about the crafting, horse breeding and whaling. Once again the haters are proven wrong. Keep up the good work guys.
You can get an account made for you for $9 @ newgameway or find a nice Korean willing to do it for you free.
that's fine bro. I think expressing that you don't want to play the game is fine. It's when people start listing things that aren't true or spreading misinformation that people get annoyed.
Oh by the way, if anyone was curious about what BDO would look like with the changes that people have suggested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOQrcejaBII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxUdo7RL9dw
That is from the Russian CBT, PvP enabled at low level, extremely reduced karma, GvG costs reduced to next to nothing.. This went on for the entire duration of the CBT. I watched the streams and it was a shit show. There were guilds of 100 people running around killing anyone they came across. If this happens in NA, I will stick with Korea.. just saying.
This video reminds me a bit of UO and SWG. I cannot tell if this game is Action Combat or not. It kind of looks like SWG type combat with the reticle combat but still being able to tab your target. That would be good. Over all the video looks good.
However with that said here are my major issues with the game.
F2P - you cannot Do F2P Sandbox MMOs it just cannot be done because once the company sees they can have people pay large amounts of money for cash shop stuff like ArcheAge had this game will be a pile of crap.
If this is Action Combat I will not be able to do it and that is a negative for me. I played Action Combat MMOs and being an IT guy already my wrist cannot take the twitch gaming anymore. Thats one reason I dont play Neverwinter even though I love the Neverwinter series.
Also a fully Solo MMO where there are not mobs that I would need a group to kill is not going to be enjoyable. I might as well play a Single Player game then. Now I dont need Instances however anyone that played UO will tell you, yes you could solo a Balron, however you might want to bring friends because there was a high risk of dying. Also Champion Spawns could not be done alone. Also with SWG Pre-BUFFS you couldnt kill certain mobs solo you needed a group to do it. Reminds be of the sand people.
I'm enjoying the beta, but I have a lot of the same reservations that I have with a lot of other korean MMOs. I feel the video in the OP is a sort of misrepresentation of it.
1) The world design is just not strong. It is a nice looking world, but you can see that it is a randomly generated land mass - Like Aion, TERA and so on, a lot of the world (from what I have seen) feels copy pasted.
NPCs do the same thing where they talk to the "thin air". When you are walking through a city or village for the first time it feels impressive. If you stand still and just observe for 60 seconds, it begins to dawn on you.
The parkour aspect is really not useful from what I'v seen so far, but I really enjoy the control aspect of it. It's nice to be able to do so much.
2) I'm also in the Russian OBT for Blade and Soul, and unlike that game, the UI is stellar in BDO. The game is also very forgiving with its system requirements. I felt it was quite well-optimized.
3) The spirit that follows you around, is your bread-crumb. You click on it, and a mini cut scene pops up, and it tells you to kill 3 foxes. Then 3 founds. Then 3 trolls. Then 3 trolls and burn a troll symbol. Then 3 troll troll shaman. then 5 bigger trolls and 3 troll totems.
It's not the grind that bothers me. After all, the combat is very visually pleasing. It's the closest I have seen to a Platinium game IN MMO space. (Playing as a Male Blader, I feel a lot of the same fluid animations, seemless transisitions akin to Metal Gear Rising).
What I don't like is the conservative Spawn placements, and the absolutely (even by MMO standards) incompetent A.I. It's very, very similar to how in TERA, Aion and Blade&Soul all the mobs spawn near-instantly within a 10-meter raduis, and they don't move about or do anything. They just go back and forth.
It kills a lot of the immersion for me and takes me out of it. I can't read Hangul, so obviously a lot of the story is lost on me, but there is no way they did a good job on building the eco-system. The world looks nice, but its not very immersive.
4) The character creation actually shook me. Everything you have seen, is basically how it feels like, and it's really nice. However, for some reason it actually turns out that inside the game, a lot of players looked very similar. Very similar. I think it's because (for the Male Blader at least) you only had 4 hairstyles to choose from. The rest are locked behind a paywall. I find that insanely harsh, and limiting. I mean, - There was only 2 of those hairstyles that looked really good, and judging from all the other players I saw they seemed to think so too. So you still ended up with the clone syndrom.
I really hope they lax up on the hairstyles, because it makes no sense to make such an encompassing character creation system and then outfit it with it such few hair options. For some of the female classes, you can choose length and adjust the closeness and volume of the hair, but not on the spiky hair my blader had.
5) The OPs video is a bit trickery with some of its claims. I wanna say that the games social and economic systems are closer to FFXIV than say SWG or Archeage. They really seem to be tight on controlling the economy. They set the prices, so you can't really play the market like you can in "true" player-driven economy based games.
6) The Auto-Run to your destination is a game changer. It really is. The pathing is super. You don't even need to open the map to auto-run to your destination. You can chat with your guild, read your quest logs, check your inventory, whatever, while running. And you can run far. I ran for 5 minutes, with my character intuitively figuring it out by itself. I love this feature.
7) The mount implementation is great. It's always seemed like an after thought to me (an annoying one) when you can just "summon" a horse from your pocket like in WoW. Here you get it from a stable, it actually makes sense. If ArenaNet were ever to put mounts into GW2, This is the only method I would be okay with.
8) There are some cool races (humanoids with deer antlers. Reminding me of Chopper from One Piece) and the art direction is a cool mix of european medieval with traditional asian styles. If weeabo and anime annoy the crap out of you, this is preferable to Blade&Soul.
BDO is also a lot more tasteful than B&S. There is not the same hyper sexualism going on that bothers some people. Music is nice. Haven't tried PvP.
Overall, I've spend less than 30 hours on it and I think it's an impressive game, but it most def has some of the symptomic problems with world building, with its action combat its gameplay philosophies that Blade and Soul and TERA has.
You know.. I just did a 14 day trial of FFXIV a month ago (had never tried FFXIV) and honestly - Outside of its old school auto-attack combat and perhaps very silent community (if your not in a guild) I don't think BDO seems to be superior in UI, optimization, art, controls, graphics, art direction, and it certainly seems to be inferior when it comes to story, monster designs and world design. BDO is much more seamless though.
I don't know. It's just still (like with TERA, C9 and so on..) difficult for me to get super excited about the true action combat MMOs. I love the combat systems. I'm all about the Chilvary/For Honor/Jedi Knight/Mount&Blade-type combat systems, but in these MMOs, they are paired with these horrid A.I systems that doesn't invoke a sense of challenge for the player or makes good use that combat system, and in BDO it's really apparant.
You get amazing chained combos, secondary flashing tae-kwondo-ish spinning back kicks, sommersault parries and other amazing stuff. It's choreography is befitting of Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden, but the enemies are dumber than a Sims. They stand still, they are predictable. It's just not that fun going bananas keyboard faceroll on enemies that don't fight back intelligently.
Sorry for the debbie downer impressions here. I really like the game. I want it (and Blade & Soul) to do well. I really want them to good. I think every MMO in existence has serious flaws, and basically the best you can do as a player is to pick your poison instead growing angry and bitter about some make-pretend notion of a game finally being perfect.
BDO has problems. That is clear. It makes perfect sense that the game is not top tier number 1 in Korea. Nothing looks so cool and amazing without trade-offs. And the OPs video really lacks that other perspective. I hope people anticipating BDO will go into it with realistic expectations.
So far PA/Daum have done a relatively good job with the cash shop. Yes you can sell stuff in exchange for silver which gives you an advantage, and until recently the max price for cash shop items was so low that hardly anyone did it. However, they recently raised the prices (one of my biggest complaints about the game) moving it more into P2W territory. Still, I can make more money in a month of playing than someone can make selling cash shop items exclusively - the amount of money you can spend on BDO is capped. I estimate I make about 300-400m a month assuming I played 4 hours a day, selling cash shop items I would guess around 250-300m if you hit the cap every month. That being said, nothing is flat out P2W - nothing from the cash shop provides combat bonuses.
The game is very much action combat, however, some classes have it easier than others in terms of "twitch" factor. I would say the combat is closer to Neverwinter than to SWG.
I would comment on the solo combat stuff but if you read through this post you can find everything I have to say about it.
I agree with everything except what I have highlighted.
Each "zone" or area actually has a theme associated with it. The starting area is meant to be forest, so you will see a lot of trees and dense woodland areas. Media, the 50-55 area is the plains, it is the transition from forest to desert. Valencia is the desert area. I'll try to find a map of the entire continent to share, but it is much larger than what is currently released. I don't feel that anything is copy pasted (I don't use my map anymore.. I can tell where I am by looks).
Market min/max values change based on supply and demand. This does prevent people from playing the market, it also prevents market bots (something that was prevalent in GW2, I knew a guild dedicated to it)
This is promoting 30-day premium access, you get premium + 30 days of unlimited character modifications. When your premium expires you can keep your modified look. I much prefer pay to look good than pay for combat bonus, so I see this as a sign that PA/Daum is going in the right direction with their cash shop.
Yes, AI is weak. Outside of bosses at high level mobs the first 50 levels is full of dull mobs that have no real AI and are just grouped together in large packs. That being said, it has always been 1-50 is more of a tutorial than the true game. I feel like you haven't played the game into the upper level 50's. They did a much better job with Media (in terms of world building) and I am expecting similar if not better results with Valencia when that launches (hopefully next week). PvP is where the combat truly shines. It is much faster than TERA and very punishing when you make mistakes, something that I enjoy.
That being said, I appreciate a well thought out and well written review that is different than mine. People trashing the game endlessly that have never played it gets very tiresome.
You dont like it, but that's what they were using. You can try to twist and turn it til your head pops off. You said they never used"sandbox". I proved you wrong. Live with it.
And in interviews with Pearl Abyss, such as this one: http://black-desert.com/interviews/black-desert-revelation-an-honest-to-god-interview-with-pearl-abyss-on-the-status-quo-of-black-desert/ when being confronted about them going from a open world sandbox like they announced in 2012, he sure doesn't say that that was never the case. So once again...
And ofc peeps will get expectation on the game from what they've read from interviews with DEVs, and then also from what they heard was ingame in CBT1 and 2. Duh... And OFC we will get disapointed when they change alot what they said was going to be ingame. Duh... Your love for this game isn't healthy cause your stuck in your little lovebubble and can't see the other sides view on it. "Nonono!!! It never was a sandbox. PA never said it was!!!". But is says so on their front page. "Nonono. That "sandbox" isn't really sandbox. That means carrots. And I don't eat corrots". Fanboism 101 right here.
They said in interviews that there were suppose to be only ONE server. But they went back on that as well, and introduced channels. So nothing new there. All good if they go back to what they once set out to put out for us. And player to player trading increases interaction between players, and local AH with prices set by players not GMs makes it a world run by players not GMs. Hence a sandbox.
And there IS ways to balance drops etc from PvP. They were on their way to do it with the karma system, but then punished peeps for doing so to much, making it completly pointless to even do it. They had you drop some items first, more if you had bad karma standings etc. And peeps would think twice PKing peeps if they knew they would loose stats/XP/more equipment when they die. Going back to MO. If your red and die there, your stats in str, dex etc goes down. And you will have to train them up again. Not so fun to do. It can be balanced correctly, and apperantly it was good in BDO in CBT1 according to most who played it then.
And you shouldn't skip out on systems cause there might be hacks. There will be hacks in BDO as well. Don't worry bout that. And speaking of open world and Archeage. You say ArcheAge looks terrible? There might be many things bad with AA. But the open world and their housing system sure isn't one of them. Yeah, it's crowded etc, but I sure as hell prefer that over what BDO offers now.
And what says BDO would be less successfull with the vision they first said they were gonna give us? Is the game doing well now in Korea? No. It's not even in the top 100. It has fallen like a brick down the charts. So don't tell me it's doing fine now. Hopefully they go back to their original vision of the game, and it can start climbing back up the charts. I come back here if that happens and point to this post. Til then, enjoy your themepark or whatever you wanna call it.
You spent a lot of time in your post attacking me rather than my arguments, that's a sign of anger and lack a factual response. That's fine, I will continue to attack your argument.
We need to get some definitions set in stone here, because we disagree on what "sandbox", "sandbox oriented", and "true sandbox" means. Some people would say sandbox means open world with no zones, others have more expectations. I have given you my definition of sandbox and you have given me yours. But beyond that flare text, PA has never uttered the word "sandbox" in an interview. Maybe the Korean word for sandbox is poorly translated into English and vice versa, that could very well be the case.
"Q. When Black Desert was introduced to us back in 2012, it was introduced as an Open World Sandbox MMO, unfortunately we can’t consider it as an Open Word nor Sandbox anymore due to the heavy restrictions and due to the removal of the Open World (World Bosses etc.) content that Closed Beta 1 & 2 used to have. Will there be any chance that this content will be added again in the English version?
A. World Bosses on fields are certainly possible systems. Modifications of some systems are also possible, but they could be different from our 1st and 2nd CBT"
So bosses placed in the world is how you define "Open World" and "Sandbox"? That is completely different than what you mentioned before of what "true sandbox" is. That might also be different than what PA's definition of what "sandbox" is. Who knows, they never directly acknowledged the term "sandbox".
You keep listing a bunch of things that I addressed in my post. They were testing things for the Korean market.. not for the US market, not for the EU market.. the Korean market. And again, someone else mentioning how BDO has "fallen off the Korean charts", I will assume you are referencing gamenote.com - as I have mentioned before in a previous post, these "charts" are determined by participating PC Bang rooms (gaming cafes) and the "statistics" are based on who is playing the games at this locations. Additionally, it's not out of the "top 100", go look right now. Please.
I can see everyone's other side, I just think YOUR expectations of what the game "SHOULD" be are completely unrealistic and as I said before "will drive away casual players and lower revenue for the company"
It's fine, we get it, you want BDO to be more like the Russian version. Perfect, go play in Russia then, I posted videos to that which you can look at.
Edit:
Player to player trading and AH prices defined by players also leads to economic collapse due to botters, exploiters, and gold sellers. RMT gold prices get lower and lower while rare/wanted items get higher and higher in price. Eventually the price differences are so extreme that it becomes impossible for casual players to afford items and can never be competitive. This causes them to quit, it also causes the "semi-hardcore" players and "hardcore" players that don't want to invest money in the game to be constantly under geared compared to the whales that invest tons of money into the game. I would be fine with them adding player to player trading with AH prices defined by players if the majority of items were nodrop or account bound.. but that is not how it is.
You know, they call them "betas" for a reason, nothing is set in stone. PA didn't promise you or anyone anything. XD
PA had a plan, they told you what their plan was. They executed that plan and it turned out that the korean market didn't like it and/or certain features didn't work out well. SO, they changed it. You keep referencing other games but sadly BDO is not those games. This is BDO.
Sandbox? Here. http://www.techopedia.com/definition/3952/sandbox-gaming
You want sandbox? Well, judging by the definition I just gave you. That would be a game that is open world with character progression(not limited to level might I add) that is not forced down a certain path. Mini-games, side quests etc. All of which BDO has. Fishing, trading, hunting, mining, crafting, etc.
It even points out that despite this some 'sandbox' mmos and/or games(doesn't have to be an mmo to be a sandbox) continue to impose restrictions at certain stages of the game's environment. Which BDO actually does not do. This definition focuses more on the fact that the world is free to roam and is not restricted at any level of play. Doesn't say much about any of the features you claim are 'sandboxy'. Sounds like BDO is shaping to be pretty sandboxy if you ask me.
So regardless of whether or not PA said or didn't say the word sandbox... PA still hasn't taken anything away from you that is deemed a 'sandbox' element.
One more thing, at the end of the day. Unless you live in Korea, Japan or Russia; none of the versions of BDO are meant for you. Nor are you supposed to be playing them; technically. It was stated that the different versions of the game would be tailored to what the majority wanted for each region. Didn't Russia get their pk, lvl 30(or whatever lvl) pvp features back? With that said why the hell are you complaining about a version of the game that's not meant for you. Why don't you save your ideas and complaints for when the NA version comes? Strangely, the game is still in beta WHO KNEW!? Nothing is set in stone. Seriously, if you haven't understood this much...
Ok so there has been a lot of typing from a few people.
Personally I think it sucks that its action combat. Sorry Folks but action combat means more twitch gaming which I cannot do anymore. It was great when I was younger now that I am 35 already had one wrist I already had surgery on and the other will need it in the next year or 2. So Twitch gaming is a big no, hell I cannot even play flight sims as well as I did years ago.
While they are looking to control the cash shop and what not I personally cannot see a company who has a F2P game saying NO I DO NOT WANT JOHN SMITH TO SPEND $5000 THIS MONTH TO BE THE BEST CRAFTER ON THIS SERVER! Nope sorry I cannot accept F2P Sandboxes period. I played UO and SWG and when I crafted I had made a killing on crafts because I prices stuff right and made good crafts (Rocket Launchers in SWG). No real world money involved just PURE skill. So no I cannot accept someone who can spend $5000 being a better crafter than me. Yes RMT do happen, however getting a perma ban from the game for it makes up for it. Yes SWG and UO Ban people for buying gold, I have known people that have been ban.
Sad that 2 key things that will kill a game for me is in this one. Not being Negative about the game itself, some people WILL like it. I just refuse to play certain games. F2P, B2P Nope, Cash shop Sandbox MMOs nope, Action Combat Nope, Full Loot Sandbox MMOs Nope, PVP focused MMO nope. Again different strokes different folks
You just described every Asian MMO past, present, and future with that lol.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"