Black Desert Online: Witchery

As I've been playing Black Desert Online (BDO), I've tried a few different character classes. Hunter, Fighter, Valkyrie, and Witch. Thus far the Witch has been my favorite. She's up to level 31 as I write this (the soft level cap is 50).

As I've mentioned before, you can do a whole lot of non-combat stuff in BDO. For those things, it really makes no difference what class you've chosen. Everyone can equally become a cook, or gather resources, or fish. But combat can be a very different proposition for each class.

Fireball explosion

The Witch is mostly a ranged attacker. The first skill she gets is a fireball, and that is augmented a few levels later with an explosion option. Against average enemies, my standard approach is to run around to gather a small group, then throw a fireball at them and make it explode. Kills many weaker enemies outright, and knocks down most of the others. She also gets a lightning attack which is similar in that you can cast it, then expand it to fry a large area. And there's a giant meteor storm you can cast for massive damage over a wide area, though it takes a while to charge up.

With all that area damage, you'd expect that a Witch uses up mana like crazy, and this is true. She gets a single-target attack to steal mana from an enemy, which is very helpful. Especially when there's just one guy left standing after a big explosion that ate up my mana bar. She's also got an ability to both heal and restore mana, albeit small amounts, which can affect any party members as well as the Witch herself.

Lightning Storm...

There are other utility powers as well. A freezing bolt can put a single enemy in an ice block, handy if you need a respite to recover from something particularly big. There are a couple of area slow effects, too. And bigger party heals, though I haven't done enough group play to really make much use of those.

Many of these combat effects look amazing, as is the case with many of the visuals in BDO. I've been known to stop and just watch the effects while electrocuting a bunch of Orcs with a lightning storm, or freezing a particularly aggressive bear. Admiring the effects isn't great for XP gain rate, but it sure does look pretty.

...and the corpses left afterward.

The biggest weakness thus far that I've run into is enemies that move and attack quickly. The Witch wants to stay out of melee, but she has to stand still to cast her spells. Against slower enemies, that's no problem, since you can just run a little ways away and cast your fireball while they're trying to catch up. If the enemies move quickly, though, you'll get hit while that spell is charging. Enough of that leads to a downed Witch soon enough. I'm still working on proper use of the slow effects and other support abilities to enhance her survival.

Gear is important as well, as with most MMORPGs. My Witch is currently using the Agerian set, which gives her extra casting speed. It's also fairly light in weight, so she can move a bit quicker than someone in heavy armor. Of course, that comes with the trade-off of lower defense, so getting hit can really hurt. Dodging, slowing enemies, and knocking them down is essential against anything dangerous.

On the whole, I'm fairly happy with my Witch's combat abilities. The big area-damage effects are a lot of fun, and the class abilities are well designed to allow you to use them without much downtime. She dies a bit more than I'd like, but that's likely my fault as a mediocre combat pilot, more than anything in the class design.

Black Desert Online: Annoyances

I've said a lot of nice things about Black Desert Online (BDO) recently. Which is all well and good, but we all know nothing is perfect, and MMOs even less so than most things. So here's the things that have most annoyed me thus far.

Crowded dock...all AFK fishing.

There's a lot of downtime while waiting on things to happen. You can try to minimize this by doing multiple things at once - go out gathering wood while waiting for crops to grow, that sort of thing. That only goes so far, though. Gathering materials in particular takes forever, as you move between nodes, spending 10-20 seconds at each one to mine/chop/etc. Using workers can help, but there are some materials workers just can't gather for you.

The game has no teleport-style quick travel, so location-specific tasks (such as turning in completed quests) can be painful. You can use automatic navigation to send your character riding/running to the proper location, but it still takes a while for them to get there. (And occasionally it doesn't work - been stuck a few times on weird terrain.) Travel between towns for trading is particularly slow, at least until you build up your resources to have a decent trade wagon. You have to pay attention to those trade trips, too, or bandits are likely to get you. So the auto-navigate is less useful in the trading sub-game, meaning it's just tedious to get where you're headed.

There's a whole lot of tiny things to micromanage. Tools break, for instance, so you may be well out into the woods and realize you have to run all the way back to town for a new axe. Gathering any significant quantity of materials on your own is painfully slow at first, though that does get better as you improve your skills. Working to increase NPC amity takes forever, and the little mini-game gets old after the first several dozen iterations. Inventory management is just as much of a challenge as in any MMO, and complicated by the fact that each major town has its own separate storage.

The game's Korean roots show through with some poor translations in some places. Whoever wrote the English translation of NPC dialogue could definitely use some more practice. There's also the usual minor new-launch bugs in quest descriptions and the like. More than once I've had to do a web search to find out what exactly I'm supposed to be doing for a quest or craft skill, only to find that the info in-game is simply wrong. Go use your mining skill in that cave to get a special crystal? Oh, nope, we really meant go kill the goblins in the cave, who will drop the crystal. Turn in two widgets for a reward? Sorry, it's actually five. The errors aren't particularly common, but even one quest in a hundred with wrong information sticks out.

My least favorite annoyance this is the way the game encourages you to leave it running while you go do something else. Energy recovers at a very slow rate when you log out, to the point where it may take days to max it out. Thus, it's fastest to just leave your guy sitting around to recover, while you minimize the game and walk away. Or better, set him up to do some fishing, which can be done with zero player interaction for hours on end. Come back in a few hours and see an inventory full of fish, and a full energy bar. It just doesn't feel right to me, purposely going AFK while my character just sits there. I still do it, though, because that AFK fishing is a huge money-maker in the early going, making your life much easier when pursuing everything else.

I realize all these things could be a lot worse, which is why I'm terming this post "Annoyances" rather than something like "Reasons to never play BDO." I'm still playing despite these issues, and will for a while yet. But when I do decide to give it up, the things mentioned here are likely a major reason why.

Black Desert Online: Not Fighting

After getting to around level 14 in Black Desert Online (BDO) with my first character, I spent a few days playing with almost no progression toward the next character level. For most MMOs, that would be a terrible experience, but in BDO it just means I was busy exploring everything else.

After those first few hours of play, I reached the major hub town of Velia. There's plenty of options for fighting nearby, mostly goblins, but I got distracted by all the other things you can do. Character level in BDO is important in terms of which areas you can safely visit and which monsters to fight, but it doesn't seem to be important for the various gathering and crafting choices. Much more important is how much energy you have, which is a resource used by almost all non-combat actions. It regenerates on its own, but it's fairly slow (especially when logged out). Doing quests can add energy, providing an incentive to keep moving on available quests.

In most MMOs, the most important thing is how well you fight. Anything else you do (like crafting) is clearly secondary and really doesn't matter much if it doesn't improve your battle-readiness. BDO is much more balanced. If you'd like to focus on trading, or gathering raw materials, or one of the crafting skills, there's enough depth to focus almost entirely on those aspects.

The non-player characters in BDO have more depth than I'm used to. Each one has a certain set of interests, usually other NPCs in the area but occasionally monster knowledge or other subjects, and you have the option to increase your "amity" (friendliness, basically) by discussing those interests. Of course, you have to know what you're talking about, so you have to first go meet the other NPCs or defeat the monsters or whatever else the person is interested in. Then you can play a small mini-game to increase amity, and at certain thresholds you'll get new quests, or knowledge, or other bonuses. It's not easy to increase amity by large amounts, and it eats up your energy, so you have to work at getting friendly with each NPC.

The amity system adds depth to each area. Instead of just talking to everyone in an area when I first pass through, then coming back once to turn in quests, I've got incentive to re-visit several times. I can choose where to focus my efforts, rather than just talking to everyone with a quest sign over their heads. For example, if I'm playing a character with interest in cooking, I can spend time to chat up the local NPC cooks, gaining bonuses and cooking info and quest options.

A common problem in MMO crafting is that the gathering of materials becomes extremely repetitive. There's only so many wolves you can skin for furs, or trees to cut down, or rocks to mine, before the player gets tired and looks for something else to do. BDO has all those things, but also provides a way to hire NPC workers to do the grunt work. You can invest "contribution points" in map nodes to gain several benefits, one of which is the ability to assign a worker to harvest resources in that area. Those might be crops or animals on a farm, trees in the woods, ore near a mine, etc. So if you're tired of grubbing your own potatoes to make soup, hire someone to do it for you!

Of course, hiring workers comes with its own set of support tasks, many of which require money and/or contribution points to set up. You have to feed them to keep up stamina (although they seem to do fine on just beer), provide lodging, and make sure they're assigned to tasks. If you want them to do something more than simple gathering, such as making goods from raw materials, you can also provide them with workshop space. Managing your work force can be a whole game in itself, if you choose to pursue it.

The aforementioned contribution points are also used to make trade connections, by investing in connected map nodes. Once you've connected two nodes, you can make trips between them with trade goods, usually turning a fairly decent profit. It's pretty slow at first, as you have to walk from one city to the other carrying all your inventory in a backpack. Before long, though, you can afford to get a donkey for heavy lifting, then a horse, then a horse-drawn cart, and so on. Just look out for bandits on the road! The trading system can also be a whole game in itself.

Yet another use of contribution points is to expand your storage space. Each town has its own storage, but it's pretty limited at first. You can add to it by choosing to use various spaces around town (and in the surrounding farms) as storage space. Those are the same spaces that are used to set up workshops and other processing facilities, so you have to be careful which ones you use. It's nice to see a game where the expansion of storage facilities is integrated into the game world, not some add-on purchase option.

BDO encourages the use of multiple characters by sharing contribution point investments and storage space. Each character has their own energy level and skills, so you can specialize. As an example - I created a second character and parked him in Velia to serve as coordinator for my workers. He cooks up their food (that is, beer) and gathers up the inventory, to sell on the marketplace or ship off to other cities. If my main character out of energy or otherwise not available, I can take a few minutes to switch over to him to feed the hungry workers or otherwise manage the work force.

Between hiring a work force, learning crafting skills, doing some trading travel, and talking to NPCs, I spent most of a couple of days in BDO without making any appreciable progress along the main quest line or gaining character levels. And it was still plenty of fun, despite there being some annoyances along the way (more on that later). That's a well-designed sandbox-style game.

Black Desert Online: First Impressions

Black Desert Online (BDO) has just recently gone live with their North America/Europe release. Being the MMO addict that I am, I decided to give it a try.

BDO is a buy-to-play game, meaning that you buy it once, then play with no recurring fee. That doesn't mean you never spend any more money, of course - such games usually have extras available through in-game stores and expansions. But at least you're not paying a set fee every month. I like this model, because 1) it means I don't feel like I'm wasting my money if I decide to take a break from the game for a while, and 2) the spend-some-money-now nagging is much less noticeable than in free-to-play games.

When creating a new character, you have to choose a server, which is locked in for that character. When you log in, you choose a channel within that server. Which means you can play together with friends on the same server, and you shouldn't have to worry about it being overcrowded - both of you can just switch to a different channel if needed. Unfortunately, I have friends playing on two different servers (L is playing, and so are the New Outriders folks). I wish MMOs would figure out the scaling necessary to develop a single-server system, or free movement for characters between servers. The closest I've seen is the megaserver system of Guild Wars 2, but even that has limitations. Anyway, I'll probably end up playing mostly with L on his server.

BDO doesn't go out of its way to help you manage your social contacts. There's a friends list, but it took me several tries to add L despite knowing both his family and character names. I'm never sure if he's actually online or not, since the list doesn't seem to update properly. You can talk directly in a one-on-one chat window, but it doesn't have keyboard shortcuts and often scrolls the text up out of view. We ended up creating a clan (the no-cost version of a guild) just so that we'd have a usable chat channel to communicate with.

Unlike most MMORPGs, BDO allows you to choose a class, but not a race. All Hunters are female Elves, all Wizards are male Humans, etc. It's a bit of an odd limitation, but it does make things a bit simpler. There are a lot of options for customizing your character's face and body, so not everyone in a class looks exactly the same. Just about all the new characters look very similar in the early going, though, since your clothes depend on your equipped items (as opposed to costume choices), and starter gear is the same for everyone.

Plenty of effort went into making BDO look good. The graphics are top-notch and the environments look great. My NVidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost graphics card is a few years old, but it still manages to run the game pretty well on Medium settings. I imagine those with top-of-the-line graphics hardware are getting some really impressive visuals.

The first 2-3 hours spent in BDO are pretty standard tutorial/introduction MMO play. There's not a lot of emphasis on story, beyond some vague talk about some "Black Energy" causing problems in the world. Your character carries some of that black energy, and there's a black shadow-creature that appears only to you. There's the usual assortment of "go beat up harmless woodland creatures" quests to start out, eventually moving on to imps and goblins. You meet some NPCs with various interests of their own, but it all seems fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Quite a difference from many RPGs (MMO and single player) that toss your character directly into some kind of huge conflict right away.

Your personal shadow fuzzball points you along the main quest path, while at the same time encouraging you to be selfish and power-hungry. Presumably later on it will want you to do some awful things, setting up some story choices. Early on, though, it's just a matter of learning the basics of movement and combat.

Combat is action-based, meaning you need to aim your attacks and be prepared to move around to avoid incoming damage. I freely admit that I'm not very good at such things, but at least in the early going I've been able to keep up with what BDO demands. Combo attacks are reasonably simple to put together, and dodging mostly works well. My only problem so far is judging where big enemy attacks are going to land, since there's no "effect shadow" on telegraphed attacks showing where the damage is going. Several times I've dodged to what I thought was a safe spot, only to get hammered because the safe zone was a little farther away than I expected.

Even in these first few hours of learning the game, it's clear that there's a lot more to do than the usual "go kill X whatevers for NPC Y." Crafting, gathering, trading, running your own worker empire...all that comes later. More on that as I work through it.