My initial impression is, boy this game sure starts off slow. Lots and lots of running around, and I was level 15 before I fought anything that meaningfully tried to fight back. If a battle where I win at 80% health is a huge step up in "difficulty" from all that came before it, something seems amiss.
Gamepad friendliness seems to be a mixed bag. You can't manually set functions to be combinations of button, which is often a big problem for gamepads, due to not having as many buttons as a keyboard. But some combinations are forced on you, so that if set one button for primary attack and another for secondary attack, both at once does some other attack. So there might not be any need to set 30 different functions due to the forced combinations.
So it's not the highly gamepad friendly UI of Spiral Knights or Elsword, or even FFXIV, which clearly made gamepad support into a priority. But it's more comfortable than TERA, and I expect it to end up in the "gamepads are usable but not ideal" territory of Guild Wars 2 or Neverwinter.
I tried to buy Black Desert on Wednesday, and not only did it fail, but my computer died that night. So I didn't try again until getting situated mixing parts from my new and old computers. Now I'm trying again, and this time the purchase went through. I'm downloading it now. Thank you to everyone for the helpful answers to questions.
I still have some concerns about how gamepad-friendly the game will be, but games that offer keyboard only controls tend to be fine there. Requiring constant mouse usage to choose targets to turn the camera are the big killers for gamepad usage.
I'm sure you will have fun. Explore the node/crafting/housing, it's amazing, I'd even daresay unique. I really hope other MMORPGs will replicate this.
The node system sure looks unique as compared to anything else I've ever seen. That was one of the big attractions of the game for me. Crafting looks like it's trying more for the brute-force complexity of Uncharted Waters Online than the more nuanced depth of FFXIV, but I might change my opinion on that later. Regardless, they're at least trying to have a good crafting system, which is more than can be said of most MMORPGs.
There doesn't seem to be a tutorial to push you toward involvement in the crafting system. The Black Spirit quests that move you along from place to place have made mention of it thus far, and looking ahead a ways, it looks like it doesn't soon, either.
I suppose that the alternative to "there's stuff out there and you're on your own to find it" is something like Uncharted Waters Online's tutorial that throws a ton of stuff at you so fast that you won't understand most of it. Even that ends up ignoring a ton of major game mechanics, but at least you'll see a lot of what's out there and not come away thinking it's a generic "WoW-clone".
On the bright side, this game does handle a 4320x2560 resolution the way you'd hope. Frame rates aren't ideal, but the game does run pretty smoothly. I did have to turn a bunch of graphical settings off, but really only stuff that I wouldn't have particularly wanted on even if there wasn't a frame rate hit.
Thank you for contacting the Black Desert Online Customer Support and your interest in the game. Please forgive me for the late reply. We currently have an increased amount of inquiries which has increased our response time.
We
understand that many players disagree with our latest changes, and we
have been gathering your feedback about this since the announcement. From this feedback, we have adjusted and limited the system to the following: -
Only Pets, Outfits, Horse Gear and the Value Pack can be listed on the
marketplace. Functional costumes will be excluded for trading (Splat
Fisher’s Clothes, Treant Camouflage, Venia Riding, Desert Camouflage,
Venecil Dress, Karki and Canape). - A maximum of 5 Pearl Shop items a week can be registered per account. -
The prices or Pearl items have been capped at a fair price which makes
it hard to gain a high amount of silver by selling them on the
marketplace.
With this change, we attempt to make some of the
cash shop items more accessible to players that are otherwhise unable to
get them. We hope that you are also understanding towards these
players. Ofcourse, we care about all manner of players, regardless of
how they choose to experience the game, so we are doing our best to
adjust this system to be as fair as possible. If you have any more
suggestions for us to improve this, please do leave your feedback in the
following topic on our official forum: August 10th Patch Feedback
As for your refund request, please refer to our following policies: - Pearl item refund policy - Game refund policy Unfortunately,
we cannot operate outside of policy for your request, so if your refund
request is not valid according to the above policies, I'm afraid there
is nothing we can do. If your refund request does fall within our
policies, please do reply to this ticket as a confirmation, and we will
be happy to assist you.
If you have any other issues, or require
further assistance, please do not hesitate to re-open your ticket by
sending in a new reply to this email. I hope you have a wonderful day and continue to enjoy the game."
At this point, I'm inclined to give up on the game. The primary culprit, though not the only one, is that the control scheme is just too awkward on a gamepad.
Relying on mouse movement to turn the camera and aim at mobs is a big problem on a gamepad. It's not a completely insurmountable problem, but a game that goes that route better have something in place to mitigate it if the game is going to be playable on a gamepad.
There are two examples that I've seen that worked on a gamepad in spite of mouse control of the camera. One is Neverwinter, and the only reason it worked is that it offered extremely versatile control options. Most critically, it offered console commands where you type particular commands in chat and it rotates the camera by some fixed amount. That alone isn't sufficient; it also offers the ability to map keys to send arbitrary console commands at the press of a button. And it critically allows you to map combinations of keys to functions, which is hugely important with the limited number of buttons on a gamepad.
The other example is Trove, which is playable largely because of its simplicity. You could map combinations of keys to commands, and you didn't need a ton of commands. A gamepad in Trove basically meant no strafing, but I could get access to everything I really needed. And neither Neverwinter nor Trove were ever really comfortable, but they were at least playable.
Not so for Black Desert. It doesn't have Neverwinter's console commands, so you have to map something on the gamepad to move the mouse. It doesn't have Trove's simplicity, so you need a ton of things mapped to keys. And the real killer is that you can't map combinations of keys to actions.
Bizarrely, Black Desert has a lot of skills mapped to combinations of keys. But you don't get to pick which combinations of which keys. They're hard-wired into the game and not changeable. You do get to change the base keys, but skills are forced on you to use particular combinations of the base keys, with no apparent regard paid to whether those combinations are awkward. Even with keyboard+mouse, I can't imagine that working well.
Now, you can assign many skills to your hotbar, but that uses a weakened version of the skill. And that makes the number of buttons you need greatly proliferate, which just breaks everything because a gamepad doesn't have that many buttons. You can conjure up a lot more buttons available if you allow assigning arbitrary combinations of buttons, but Black Desert simply doesn't allow that.
Meanwhile, Black Desert claims to have official gamepad support. I find that baffling considering how little thought seems to have gone into making a gamepad-friendly control scheme. It's understandable that not all games are intended to be playable on a gamepad, but why offer official gamepad support if you're in that camp?
I said that the control scheme was the primary culprit, but not the only one. Another problem is that the combat is just awful. Even up through level 18, the only mobs that meaningfully fight back are the occasional ones marked "violent". The rest seem to just stand there and wait to die. A lot of games have the very first mobs that you face fight back better than that. Maybe it picks up at higher levels, but level 18 is awfully high for mobs to still be standing there waiting to die. Level 4 is awfully high for that.
Bad combat is a big problem in a game that is primarily about combat. Black Desert does offer a lot of side features, and I appreciate that. So bad combat isn't as deadly of a problem as it would be in a game that is almost exclusively about combat, which describes a lot of MMORPGs. But it's heavy enough on combat that just ignoring combat entirely cuts you off from broad swaths of the game.
I also didn't like how heavy the game is on making you run back and forth repeatedly. It seems like the bulk of my time in the game was spent starting to run somewhere, then not paying attention for a while. If that wasn't an outright majority of my time, it was an awfully large fraction.
And then there is the energy system. I don't mind having a fixed amount of energy per day. I don't like the game expecting you to constantly be logged in. They do let the game minimize to the tray nicely, which mitigates it somewhat, as you can get plenty of other use out of the computer without straining the CPU and GPU from a game running in the background. But I want to play games when I'm ready to play, and not be penalized for the time I'm ready not matching the time the game wants.
If not for the awkwardness of the controls, I'd give the game more of a chance. I might have even liked it quite a bit. But the controls are really awkward now, and it's only going to get worse as I level up and need easy access to more things.
Interesting. I did not realise you can't rebind keys.
If memory serves me well, the game has soft targeting. You actually need to aim at the stuff you want to hit. You can't simply swing and hope for the best. This would make it less ideal for a gamepad.
The reason I left is because of the "stay online" design. I presume this is tailored to the Asian market. I've never seen it in a Western game. The more you get into it, the more you encounter all these arbitrary design decisions, forcing you to be online. The energy regeneration you mention is a great example.
After a month of intense playing, I realised 90% of the time, the game is playing for me (or is minimised).
Interesting. I did not realise you can't rebind keys.
If memory serves me well, the game has soft targeting. You actually need to aim at the stuff you want to hit. You can't simply swing and hope for the best. This would make it less ideal for a gamepad.
The reason I left is because of the "stay online" design. I presume this is tailored to the Asian market. I've never seen it in a Western game. The more you get into it, the more you encounter all these arbitrary design decisions, forcing you to be online. The energy regeneration you mention is a great example.
After a month of intense playing, I realised 90% of the time, the game is playing for me (or is minimised).
You can rebind keys to some extent, but it's limited. For example, by default, your main attack is the left mouse button and your secondary attack is the right mouse button. A third attack will be both of these buttons at once, at least for some classes.
You can rebind your main attack to A and your secondary attack to B, but if you do this, it's forced on you that the third attack is A+B. You cannot rebind keys to combinations of keys, so your main attack can't be Ctrl+A, for example.
FFXIV did a good job of making the game gamepad friendly, as you could bind things to combinations of keys. You could have A as one skill, Shift+A as another, Ctrl+A as a third, and Shift+Ctrl+A as a fourth skill. That way, you only need two buttons to be Shift and Ctrl, and then every other button can be four different things. A lot of games let you do combinations of two keys, which is usually enough.
FFXIV went further than this by making many (all?) menus navigable by keys. That means that you don't have to constantly set down the gamepad and grab the mouse to mess with the UI. It might be possible to play FFXIV purely with a keyboard without touching a mouse. That was really nice, but it's not really essential.
Soft targeting isn't a complete killer for gamepad usage, though it is awkward. Neverwinter and Trove both do that. Games like Spiral Knights and Elsword are very gamepad-friendly even though combat there is you attack in some direction and hit whatever is there. But those game are fundamentally 2D, not 3D.
Comments
Too bad for those 50 people.
Gamepad friendliness seems to be a mixed bag. You can't manually set functions to be combinations of button, which is often a big problem for gamepads, due to not having as many buttons as a keyboard. But some combinations are forced on you, so that if set one button for primary attack and another for secondary attack, both at once does some other attack. So there might not be any need to set 30 different functions due to the forced combinations.
So it's not the highly gamepad friendly UI of Spiral Knights or Elsword, or even FFXIV, which clearly made gamepad support into a priority. But it's more comfortable than TERA, and I expect it to end up in the "gamepads are usable but not ideal" territory of Guild Wars 2 or Neverwinter.
There doesn't seem to be a tutorial to push you toward involvement in the crafting system. The Black Spirit quests that move you along from place to place have made mention of it thus far, and looking ahead a ways, it looks like it doesn't soon, either.
I suppose that the alternative to "there's stuff out there and you're on your own to find it" is something like Uncharted Waters Online's tutorial that throws a ton of stuff at you so fast that you won't understand most of it. Even that ends up ignoring a ton of major game mechanics, but at least you'll see a lot of what's out there and not come away thinking it's a generic "WoW-clone".
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"Greetings Adventurer,
Thank you for contacting the Black Desert Online Customer Support and your interest in the game.
Please forgive me for the late reply. We currently have an increased amount of inquiries which has increased our response time.
We understand that many players disagree with our latest changes, and we have been gathering your feedback about this since the announcement.
From this feedback, we have adjusted and limited the system to the following:
- Only Pets, Outfits, Horse Gear and the Value Pack can be listed on the marketplace. Functional costumes will be excluded for trading (Splat Fisher’s Clothes, Treant Camouflage, Venia Riding, Desert Camouflage, Venecil Dress, Karki and Canape).
- A maximum of 5 Pearl Shop items a week can be registered per account.
- The prices or Pearl items have been capped at a fair price which makes it hard to gain a high amount of silver by selling them on the marketplace.
With this change, we attempt to make some of the cash shop items more accessible to players that are otherwhise unable to get them. We hope that you are also understanding towards these players.
Ofcourse, we care about all manner of players, regardless of how they choose to experience the game, so we are doing our best to adjust this system to be as fair as possible. If you have any more suggestions for us to improve this, please do leave your feedback in the following topic on our official forum:
August 10th Patch Feedback
As for your refund request, please refer to our following policies:
- Pearl item refund policy
- Game refund policy
Unfortunately, we cannot operate outside of policy for your request, so if your refund request is not valid according to the above policies, I'm afraid there is nothing we can do.
If your refund request does fall within our policies, please do reply to this ticket as a confirmation, and we will be happy to assist you.
If you have any other issues, or require further assistance, please do not hesitate to re-open your ticket by sending in a new reply to this email.
I hope you have a wonderful day and continue to enjoy the game."
Relying on mouse movement to turn the camera and aim at mobs is a big problem on a gamepad. It's not a completely insurmountable problem, but a game that goes that route better have something in place to mitigate it if the game is going to be playable on a gamepad.
There are two examples that I've seen that worked on a gamepad in spite of mouse control of the camera. One is Neverwinter, and the only reason it worked is that it offered extremely versatile control options. Most critically, it offered console commands where you type particular commands in chat and it rotates the camera by some fixed amount. That alone isn't sufficient; it also offers the ability to map keys to send arbitrary console commands at the press of a button. And it critically allows you to map combinations of keys to functions, which is hugely important with the limited number of buttons on a gamepad.
The other example is Trove, which is playable largely because of its simplicity. You could map combinations of keys to commands, and you didn't need a ton of commands. A gamepad in Trove basically meant no strafing, but I could get access to everything I really needed. And neither Neverwinter nor Trove were ever really comfortable, but they were at least playable.
Not so for Black Desert. It doesn't have Neverwinter's console commands, so you have to map something on the gamepad to move the mouse. It doesn't have Trove's simplicity, so you need a ton of things mapped to keys. And the real killer is that you can't map combinations of keys to actions.
Bizarrely, Black Desert has a lot of skills mapped to combinations of keys. But you don't get to pick which combinations of which keys. They're hard-wired into the game and not changeable. You do get to change the base keys, but skills are forced on you to use particular combinations of the base keys, with no apparent regard paid to whether those combinations are awkward. Even with keyboard+mouse, I can't imagine that working well.
Now, you can assign many skills to your hotbar, but that uses a weakened version of the skill. And that makes the number of buttons you need greatly proliferate, which just breaks everything because a gamepad doesn't have that many buttons. You can conjure up a lot more buttons available if you allow assigning arbitrary combinations of buttons, but Black Desert simply doesn't allow that.
Meanwhile, Black Desert claims to have official gamepad support. I find that baffling considering how little thought seems to have gone into making a gamepad-friendly control scheme. It's understandable that not all games are intended to be playable on a gamepad, but why offer official gamepad support if you're in that camp?
I said that the control scheme was the primary culprit, but not the only one. Another problem is that the combat is just awful. Even up through level 18, the only mobs that meaningfully fight back are the occasional ones marked "violent". The rest seem to just stand there and wait to die. A lot of games have the very first mobs that you face fight back better than that. Maybe it picks up at higher levels, but level 18 is awfully high for mobs to still be standing there waiting to die. Level 4 is awfully high for that.
Bad combat is a big problem in a game that is primarily about combat. Black Desert does offer a lot of side features, and I appreciate that. So bad combat isn't as deadly of a problem as it would be in a game that is almost exclusively about combat, which describes a lot of MMORPGs. But it's heavy enough on combat that just ignoring combat entirely cuts you off from broad swaths of the game.
I also didn't like how heavy the game is on making you run back and forth repeatedly. It seems like the bulk of my time in the game was spent starting to run somewhere, then not paying attention for a while. If that wasn't an outright majority of my time, it was an awfully large fraction.
And then there is the energy system. I don't mind having a fixed amount of energy per day. I don't like the game expecting you to constantly be logged in. They do let the game minimize to the tray nicely, which mitigates it somewhat, as you can get plenty of other use out of the computer without straining the CPU and GPU from a game running in the background. But I want to play games when I'm ready to play, and not be penalized for the time I'm ready not matching the time the game wants.
If not for the awkwardness of the controls, I'd give the game more of a chance. I might have even liked it quite a bit. But the controls are really awkward now, and it's only going to get worse as I level up and need easy access to more things.
If memory serves me well, the game has soft targeting. You actually need to aim at the stuff you want to hit. You can't simply swing and hope for the best. This would make it less ideal for a gamepad.
The reason I left is because of the "stay online" design. I presume this is tailored to the Asian market. I've never seen it in a Western game. The more you get into it, the more you encounter all these arbitrary design decisions, forcing you to be online. The energy regeneration you mention is a great example.
After a month of intense playing, I realised 90% of the time, the game is playing for me (or is minimised).
You can rebind your main attack to A and your secondary attack to B, but if you do this, it's forced on you that the third attack is A+B. You cannot rebind keys to combinations of keys, so your main attack can't be Ctrl+A, for example.
FFXIV did a good job of making the game gamepad friendly, as you could bind things to combinations of keys. You could have A as one skill, Shift+A as another, Ctrl+A as a third, and Shift+Ctrl+A as a fourth skill. That way, you only need two buttons to be Shift and Ctrl, and then every other button can be four different things. A lot of games let you do combinations of two keys, which is usually enough.
FFXIV went further than this by making many (all?) menus navigable by keys. That means that you don't have to constantly set down the gamepad and grab the mouse to mess with the UI. It might be possible to play FFXIV purely with a keyboard without touching a mouse. That was really nice, but it's not really essential.
Soft targeting isn't a complete killer for gamepad usage, though it is awkward. Neverwinter and Trove both do that. Games like Spiral Knights and Elsword are very gamepad-friendly even though combat there is you attack in some direction and hit whatever is there. But those game are fundamentally 2D, not 3D.