Wed. Oct 16th, 2024

Over the course of my first day in Black Desert, I did a lot of the things you’d expect from the first day in a new MMO: I killed some imps, couriered some items for spectacularly lazy NPCs, and learned a few skills. But I also spent a much larger amount of time doing things that might seem a bit more novel: I built a raft and sailed the sea; I made a hefty profit buying trade goods in one settlement and selling them off in another; I bought out all the real-estate I could, set up a residence for myself, and used the vacant lodgings to house the workers who built my raft; and I, honest-to-god, spent a solid half an hour extracting blood from dead weasels.

Black Desert is a curious and sometimes arcane creature; for the majority of my first play session, I felt more than a bit lost. And I loved it. It’s been a long time since a game has managed to make me feel lost in such a way that I actually enjoyed the experience. Sure, there have been plenty that have made me feel lost through various means, including convoluted UIs full of flashing buttons, poorly translated quest text, and indecipherable tooltips that provide no useful information.

But the “lost” sensation I experienced while playing Black Desert was something different. The information was all there — the game does an excellent job of making information readily available, though some of it is admittedly not as clearly phrased as I would prefer — and although the UI isn’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen, it’s clean, efficient, and gets the job done without putting players at risk of seizures with blinking, flashing widgets.

 

http://massivelyop.com/2016/01/01/black-desert-cbt1-impressions-part-1/ Click here to read more.