The Weight of Black Desert Online

23 March, 2016. 437 words.

I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s accounts of their adventures in Black Desert Online, mainly because I feel like I haven’t done much “adventuring” in the game yet (by which I mean exploration). I’ve spent most of my time with my head down, running and riding back and forth between NPCs to finish “Life” quests. It’s a bottomless pit if you follow that route. I don’t think the quests ever end. And they are all essentially tutorial quests, teaching you how to make more and more stuff.

Don't know what this is but it doesn't matter because I need ash sap and pig's blood. — Don’t know what this is but it doesn’t matter because I need ash tree sap and pig’s blood.

My world thus far includes Velia, Heidel, and Glish. In Velia, my workers collect logs and ore and I occasionally raft out to sea for fishing (I still have two fishing quests to finish out there on the islands). In Heidel, I mainly store food for cooking quests. In Glish, I’ve recently setup an alchemy station. Though I’ve run out of alchemy quests for now, I’ve been assured that I’ll meet someone in Calpheon who will resume my training. (I don’t know where to find this mythical Calpheon I keep hearing about, though.)

I spend a lot of time riding back and forth between the above three towns, which is getting a bit frustrating. I feel like I’m wasting a lot of time on the road, instead of actually “doing” things. I also have to stop by my farm a lot to kill bugs and prune my plants, which is another detour to add into the mix. I don’t care for the farming system in BDO (at least compared to ArcheAge) but I can’t complain about free carrots for the horse. Somehow I even managed to get on the rankings board for Farming, which I assume must be a bug.

bdo_farming_rank — There’s either a major bug here or not very many people doing Farming.

The sheer magnitude of Life quests in the game is starting to wear me down, though, and I’m feeling a bit disillusioned. It’s exhausting to maintain forward momentum on more than one activity at a time. On weeknights when I get home from work, I’m increasingly tempted by the easy, straightforward gameplay of some of the other games on my desktop. (Like Far Cry Primal.)

I’m starting to think BDO is going to end up like Mortal Online for me: A game that I really like for its depth and complexity, but also a game that I just don’t have the time or energy to fit into an average day. At least not the way I want to play it.

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