Tag: Black Desert

I initially wanted to talk about my latest seafaring adventures in Black Desert Online today, but the updates the game got during the past few weeks (and months and years, really) were just too amazing to not duly praise them.

If you ask me the fact that the game still gets a patch each and every week like clockwork is already pretty remarkable in and of itself. I mean, BDO originally launched in December 2014, and even our younger NA/EU version just celebrated its seventh birthday. If there’s another MMORPG of that age that receives substantial balance changes, quality of life updates and bug fixes on a weekly basis I haven’t played it.

Of course not every patch contains stuff that I actually like and/or affects me, but overall there’s a whole lot to commend, especially in the quality of life department.

Believe it or not, one of the most recent changes is one I’d actually thought about and wished for just a couple weeks prior. I was trying to promote some more of my workers to their next respective tiers, a process that used to take 24 hours per attempt, and I thought Wouldn’t it be great if they reduced this to, say, 22 hours, so we wouldn’t lose half a day whenever we have to go to bed or work a bit earlier than the day before?

Well, they did even more than that. As of two weeks ago the promotion test only takes a mere eight hours, with increased success chances to boot. As if that wasn’t enough the probability to recruit Skilled- and Professional-tier workers from the get-go has also gone up. Last but not least, once your Artisan-tier workers have reached level 30 they now need less additional XP for each attempt to reroll a skill. The bottom line is, it has become much easier to set up your perfect worker empire.

Which is doubly great because…

…they also lowered the Contribution Point cost of many worker nodes in the game. If you had invested into any of these nodes prior to the February 22nd maintenance you have been refunded the according amount of CP automatically. I, for example, had 6 unspent points prior to the patch; a couple of hours later that number had ballooned to a whopping 25. Time to recruit some more workers, eh?

Now, I guess one might argue that all these were more like game design changes, not really QoL improvements…ok then, strap yourselves in, here comes the good stuff.

At some point last year a rather big questline was added, revolving around The Magnus, some interdimensional…sphere…thingy…look, I have no idea. I don’t play BDO for its story, mkay? All I know is that many of these quests have some puzzle- or riddle-like elements to them, and I quite liked that.

Anyway, finishing that questline rewards you with the ability to access any and all of your storages as well as your marketplace-warehouse from any storage NPC (the latter only if the town you’re in actually has a marketplace NPC too). Hoo boy, if you’ve played the game before you know how huge of a change this is. No more riding from Heidel all the way to Valencia City and back just to pick up some dates for cooking.

Actually you don’t need to ride much at all anymore if you’re not inclined to do so. Each region has an access point (hidden inside a well) to the Magnus, and from there you can go to any of the other wells in an instant. Moving around like this comes at the cost of some loading screens and a few million silver each time, and since I actually like to travel the game’s world I pretty much never use this, but the option is there.

As I said in the opening paragraph I’m currently pretty engaged in the game’s naval content once more, and us sea dogs got some goodies too.

If you’re planning to upgrade your ship to a Carrack, the highest tier an individual player can own at this point in time, you’ll have to, among other things, do the sailing dailies (aka “sailies”) on Oquilla’s Eye, an island sitting right at the edge of the Margorian Sea. And you’ll have to do them often. We’re talking not days or weeks, but months.

I don’t stress myself out over this, and ever since I upgraded my Galleass’ cannons fighting the bigger sea monsters is actually quite fun, so I don’t despise these dailies nearly as much as I do those in many other MMOs. Still, until recently there were some annoyances.

A few of those quests made you choose only one out of two or three different reward items. Problem was, you need all of those items, and lots of them, so whatever you chose, it always felt kinda bad to miss out on the others. Also, some quests were strung together, letting you accept the next one only after completing its predecessor, which meant taking numerous trips back to the island to complete just one full cycle of sailies.

Now we can pick up all but one of the quests right away (I hope they’ve just forgotten the last one and a fix is on its way), and every one that has multiple items on its list of rewards gives you all of them at the end. Great stuff!

Something that’s changed a couple of times over the years is how the game handles its main currency, silver coins.

In the olden days each of your characters and each city storage had their own coin purse, so to speak, meaning you had to actively manage having enough cheese at your disposal where and when you needed it. Because nothing beats getting the rare opportunity to recruit an Artisan-tier worker just to realize you actually don’t have enough silver to pay the recruitment fee, despite having millions or even billions lying around someplace else.

Additionally the stuff had weight, so when you went out to grind it wasn’t just the loot drops that filled up your inventory slots and carrying capacity, even the raw silver started to weigh you down sooner rather than later. Good thing they sell all kinds of stuff to increase your capacities for real money, right?

Well, to give credit where it’s due, they did away with silver weight quite a while ago (I wanna say two or three years, but I don’t remember exactly). Towards the end of last year they took the next step and consolidated all those different purses down to just two: your marketplace wallet, where your sales revenues go and from where you pay your purchases, and a thing just called “My Silver”, which is everything else. You can pay any kind of stuff in the open world with that, no matter where you are and which character you’re on.

There is even more good stuff I could talk about, like the ability to repair depleted cooking and alchemy tools on the spot instead of having to replace them all the time, or the fact that when you cancel a worker’s task you can immediately give that worker something else to do instead of having to wait for the current cycle to end.

Suffice it to say, the game keeps getting better and better, especially in the QoL-department, and if any of this was what kept you from enjoying the game in the past it might well be worth another look by now.

Last time around I said that Black Desert Online is a complex game. Oh boy, what a hell of an understatement.

Many MMORPGs I’ve played are designed like a pyramid in that once you’ve left the tutorial stage there’s a broad base with lots of different stuff to do at first, sometimes to the point of feeling overwhelmed by it all, but the closer you get to the top your gameplay options seem to shrink down more and more.

BDO is, to me, the exact opposite of that. When I tried the game out for the first time my initial impression was that running from one place to the next and killing anything that moves on the way is pretty much all there is to it. Unfortunately my chosen class’s combat mechanics didn’t feel too great to me either, so I concluded that the game wasn’t for me and dropped out.

When I gave it another shot a year or so later I’d done enough research to know that a bit of perserverance was called for. It just takes a while until more options start to present themselves – at the time your character had to be at a certain level to even see all quests, for example. I think they’ve scrapped that level requirement, but you still need to proactively tell the game that you want to be shown all types of quests, not only those focused around combat.

Anyhow, once all questgivers deem you worthy to talk to a gigantic rabbit hole opens up and you need to take but one step in any direction to lose yourself completely, as Aywren, Bhagpuss and Naithin all can attest to.

And don’t even think for a second that a somewhat seasoned veteran of the game like myself becomes immune to this. Not a chance.

I mean, sure, I did what I set out to do a couple of weeks ago and started a career in bartering with the (distant) goal of upgrading my frigate to a formidable carrack. Still, I actually ended up spending more time on various other stuff. Much more time. Here are some examples.

Not all of the necessary materials to upgrade my ship are acquired via bartering, I’ll also need a variety of normal land goods. Hence my choice is to either gather those myself or let my workers do it for me. I like the game’s gathering, but since I have enough other stuff to do right now I’m not terribly keen on sucking gallons of sap out of trees manually for the next few weeks. Workers it is, then.

However, as most of my contribution points are always in use I needed to redistribute a bunch of them first, so I had to decide which nodes to give up. In doing that I realised that I’d actually been collecting quite I lot of resources I’d never had any use for as of yet.

In the end I freed up and reinvested considerably more CP than I’d originally planned, the result being that my workers now gather lots of materials I didn’t have before, some of which are actually worth quite a lot on the marketplace. The whole process did take some time, but should pay off nicely.

Yeah, I’ve also picked up fishing again. Not quite voluntarily, mind you. The thing is, there’s a questline on Crow’s Nest, an island hidden out at Ross Sea, that awards a very generous amount of ship upgrade materials for only little work. Or so I’ve heard.

Well, technically it is true, only that the NPC in question now wants me to catch a tuna and bring it to her. Tuna’s a rare fish though, and what’s worse, my fishing skill isn’t high enough to see tuna hotspots yet – at a hotspot you only catch the corresponding type of fish – so whenever I’m not doing something else right now I’m trying to bring my fishing skill up to snuff.

Have you noticed this little checkbox above your horse’s health and stamina bars? It’s not really hard to see, but it still took me a while to realize it’s there, probably because it hadn’t been there yet when I’d last played the game, and I usually don’t pay much attention to those bars anymore.

Holy crap, what a game changer that is! You see, of all skills horses can learn Sprint is the most important one because it provides such a big speed boost. Still, even with that skill at my disposal I sometimes want to use the auto-ride function and do something else while traveling, which, without Sprint, can take ages given the huge distances. Hence this change is a pretty big deal.

Only when I played my main I couldn’t check the box however hard I clicked. Then I finally took the time to read the tooltip:

Well, that explained it. Of course my life skill alt already had the Training skill above Artisan 1, but my main, who only ever uses max level horses and thus doesn’t get to level up his own skill, did not. However, he travels much more and much farther than the other character, so I felt he really needed this too. Consequently I went back to taming and training horses.

Fortunately last week’s patch enabled 50% boosts to both horse XP and Training XP, just at the perfect time for me. Those buffs will stay active until February 9th, by the way.

The Striker hit Artisan 1 on Monday, so now he can ride like the wind too while I play Genshin Impact or something.

As a side effect I also have almost a dozen new tier 5 horses in my stables, which is the highest tier that can be caught in the wild. I’d thought I was finished with breeding for good once I had two good tier 8s, but why let this opportunity go to waste? So now I’m leveling all those horses up – four at a time, in front of a merchant wagon – to breed them, then the foals will be leveled up too, and so on, until I have some more tier 8s. Maybe I’ll even go for a ‘Dream Horse’, who knows?

As if all of this still wasn’t enough I also stumbled upon the fact that a couple of legendary items have been added to the game – and for once these really deserve that lofty adjective.

How about HP- and Mana-potions, a compass and a teleport-item that aren’t consumed upon use and never expire?

Believe me, in BDO these amenities really are legendary. Depending on the class you play you’ll consume potions by the hundreds if not thousands rather quickly. A compass lets you use the map on the high sea and in the desert – a big quality of life boost if you traverse these regions regularly. An item that teleports you to the nearest town can also be a huge boon in a game that has you run everywhere on your own otherwise.

Of course getting even one of these is a monumental undertaking. I decided to go for the HP-potion first. When I checked out one of the grindspots I’ll have to kill mobs at for a rare drop I noticed that there weren’t any daily kill quests available nearby, which is highly unusual.

It turned out that I hadn’t advanced the region’s main story questline far enough to see them. As a matter of fact I hadn’t even finished that of the previous region either. So I postponed the grind and started questing. I also did a few side quests on the way, but only those that didn’t force me to make any detours. “Only” ~150 quests later I arrived at the grindspot and, lo and behold, now there are daily quests on offer.

Needless to say, I haven’t gotten that rare drop yet, nor any other component for the potion.

And there you have it. As you can see playing this game can really be like opening Pandora’s Box, only that in this case it isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually quite a lot of fun.

I hadn’t engaged in Black Desert Online’s sea content – or the game period, really – in quite some time until about a month ago, which means that I completely missed, among other things, a pretty big overhaul of said content.  The Great Ocean update, released in October 2019, added new islands, quests and ships, a crew system for the bigger vessels, and a completely new way for mariners to make money: a sea-based bartering system.

BDO is a complex game though, and it took me a while to reacquaint myself with all the different systems and layers. However, once I felt comfortable with the day by day gameplay again I couldn’t wait to board my trusty Epheria frigate and try the new stuff out.

As it turns out there’s a lot of additional stuff to do. My ship, the cream of the crop back when I finished building it, basically ranks just one step above ‘cockleshell’ nowadays, for example. Especially for bartering it’s barely adequate as its cargo hold can’t carry all that much weight. It’s a start though, and as most of the materials needed to upgrade the ship further are earned via bartering and defeating sea creatures anyway this seems to be working as intended. I’ve got to work my way up, as it were.

And that really doesn’t bother me at all, because frankly, once I’d finished building the frigate and crafted the corresponding gear almost two years ago I lost interest in the whole sailing thing rather quickly. My big goal was achieved, and at the time there actually wasn’t all that much to do out at sea beyond that, at least not for solo players.

Now I have another long term goal to pursue, and I also know that there’s an actual use for it once I’ve reached it.

As for the bartering system itself, I think it’s pretty neat. In a nutshell, you trade certain ‘normal’ goods like raw or processed materials for Level 1 trade goods at one place, then take those someplace else to trade them for Level 2 goods, and on it goes up to Level 5. With some exceptions low level goods serve no other purpose than to exchange them for higher tiers, while tiers 4 and 5 can be sold to NPC merchants for hefty sums of silver or a special currency used to buy various goodies.

Trade goods are very heavy and need to be in the ship’s cargo hold in order to barter with them anyway, so getting a bigger boat soonish is definitely advisable.

What the system doesn’t entail, despite this post’s header, is any kind of haggling. What can I say, I just can’t resist an opportunity to use a Python quote. Anyway, I’m actually pretty glad that there’s no negotiating involved, as the game’s onshore trading already has something like that, and I really don’t like it.

Which doesn’t mean that there’s no RNG involved however, because of course there is. This is BDO after all. You can reroll the trade routes a couple of times per day, and from what I can tell everything about it is completely random: which land goods are required, which Level 1’s you get for them and what you can trade those for in turn, where everything is etc. Not rerolling at all isn’t an option either as every trade route runs dry after a certain amount of barters.

Consequently, to make efficient use of your time and resources you need to carefully plan which routes to take, how to optimize your available cargo hold, when to reroll and even what to trade and what to keep – that Level 2 piece you’re about to give away might well be needed at a later point to exchange for ship upgrade parts, for example.

I will say that it all seemed a bit tedious at the beginning, but the more barters you’ve completed the more routes open up, which reduces the need to regularly make overly long trips for just a single exchange by a lot. It’s actually starting to be quite fun now.

I also really like that I finally have a meaningful use for all those land goods. Ever since I play the game I’ve had workers accumulating all kinds of resources for me, and while I’ve obviously used up some here and there the majority has just been collecting dust in my warehouses. Of course I could’ve sold any surplus to other players at any time, but I didn’t want to – I might still need that stuff at some point, you see. Yeah, I’m a hoarder when I play RPGs, sue me. And, what do you know, at some point is actually now. Ha!

The new questline also introduces players to sea monster hunting. I’ve done quite a lot of that back in the day to collect materials for my frigate’s cannons, sails etc., but I’m still glad about the refresher because the damage- and hitpoint-numbers have apparently been tweaked since then, and it’s actually feasible to shoot them with my cannons now instead of trying to ram them to death (!).

This is definitely much more fun, and it also makes me look forward to getting the upgrades for my frigate even more – not only will those have more cannons to shoot with, I’ll even be able to fire broadsides right from the steering wheel instead of climbing down, manning a cannon and firing it manually, then climbing back up to change the ship’s potition, and so on. Can’t wait!

So, yeah, if seafaring is your thing and you’d like it to be just one aspect of a proper MMORPG – instead of playing something like, say, Sea of Thieves – I can wholeheartedly recommend giving Black Desert a shot. Just be aware that pretty much everything in this game is a marathon rather than a sprint. Don’t expect to be cruising around in your carrack within a week or two.

Personally, I like it that way. Finishing the frigate felt like a real achievement at the time, and I feel those are rather hard to come by in most modern MMORPGs.

Sidenote: if you’ve played BDO in the past but don’t right now you might have missed the memo about Kakao Games handing over publishing duties for the game’s western version back to Pearl Abyss pretty soon. You need to transfer your data over to a Pearl Abyss account before the end of May, else you’ll lose everything. Naithin and Bhagpuss have all the details, should you need them.

I’ve shared my thoughts about randomness in MMORPGs before, my verdict being that it can be good or bad depending on how it’s utilized.

The RNG elements in Black Desert Online, of which there are many, are mostly bad in my opinion. Losing a bunch of progress you’d already made with a single click, for example when an item downgrades again due to a failed upgrade attempt, is just the antithesis of fun.

So color me surprised when the game’s third anniversary came along and with it an event that had a kind of RNG I actually liked quite a lot.

This event gave us the opportunity to earn four pre-enhanced pieces of gear. Spread across four weeks you could get one temporary accessory piece and some event-only upgrade materials per week by doing a quest and being logged in for a certain amount of time every day.

If you were lucky and got that piece to enhancement level TRI you could then exchange it for a regular accessory piece, also at TRI level. A huge prize! The real kicker, at least for me, was that even if you weren’t that lucky you’d at least get a DUO version of that same piece at the end of the week, provided you’d completed the quest (which required to kill a thousand mobs of a specific type) each and every day. At that time a DUO accessory was still a big deal for Lakisa and myself, so I knew that doing the event would be a win no matter our amount of luck.

It went really well, much better than anticipated. After week three we both had already scored two TRI hits, so we had to settle for the ‘consolation DUO ‘ only once each. In week four the best of the items was up, the Ogre Ring (which is actually worn as a necklace, apparently Ogres have pretty thick fingers). Unfortunately Lakisa only got the DUO this time, I on the other hand…

I was very excited to get it – I made Lakisa jump in her seat by cheering rather loudly – and also pretty happy with the event as a whole. Getting those TRI items was obviously huge, but, again, the fact that we at least got a DUO whenever the RNG wasn’t in our favour was what made the event feel really rewarding and fun to me. I would’ve also been happy, if a bit disappointed of course, if I’d scored only one TRI, or even none at all. I guess I can enjoy randomness much more if it’s not either win it all or lose it all. Not winning the main prize stings much less if I at least get an adequate reward for my efforts so that I don’t feel like all I did was for nothing.

Anyway, that particular day the RNG gods weren’t quite done being nice. After finishing the event quest we did some boss scrolls, and I finally got a pair of Bheg’s Gloves while Lakisa was even luckier and received Dim Tree Spirit’s Armor. What are the chances of that happening on the same day?

As if that still wasn’t enough I pulled a DUO Eye of the Ruins Ring from a Dark Rift reward box later that same evening. Say what?

Whoa. Not only did all that additional attack power boost my damage output quite noticably, having made such a substantial leap on the gear ladder actually motivated me to try and push even further. Since I now had Bheg’s Gloves lying around, as well as a Kzarka weapon box I got during another event a while back, I decided to buy the remaining boss armor pieces I wanted, namely Dim Tree, Griffon’s Helmet and Urugon’s Shoes, from the market and have a go at enhancing them all at once, which is the most efficient way anyhow.

I knew that 300 Armor Black Stones wouldn’t be enough to build all those failstacks I’d need, but I kinda hoped that the rest of the items you see up there, especially the Memory Fragments, would suffice. Haha, not a chance. Over the span of three hours I used up about 700 Mem Frags, well over 1k Black Stones, more than 100 Concentrated Black Stones, 50 Valk’s Cry, almost all Advice of Valk’s I had and like 100 million silver. But I got there.

At the time of this writing those five items have a combined worth of about 4,5 billion silver on the marketplace, so I actually made a profit, hard to believe as it may be. Still, I’m glad I got it over with. From here on out I’ll only try to enhance anything when I have accumulated enough Cron Stones so a failure won’t bounce the item back to DUO.

The only thing left to do then was to bring the remaining accessory slots up to par. I had long since decided that I’d never try to enhance those myself – because they don’t just fall back a level when an enhancement attempt fails, they are destroyed instead – so I’d held on to any I’d found in order to sell them later and use the silver to buy already enhanced pieces from the market.

I activated a 7-day Value Pack and put all kinds of stuff I had accumulated over the months up for sale. Just 12 hours later I’d made almost 2,5 billion silver. I used that to buy a second TRI Narc Ear Accessory and a TRI Eye of the Ruins Ring. Not satisfied with wearing one last DUO piece I then sold that DUO Eye Ring and also the DUO Ogre Ring I had lying around since after the anniversary event to buy another TRI Eye Ring.

It’s ironic, and also a bit schizophrenic I feel, that I still don’t like this gear upgrade system at all, yet looking at what I’ve achieved with it makes me feel really satisfied and happy.

But, again, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all if not for the anniversary event and its rather generous and rewarding form of RNG.

Anyway, at the end of that arduous play session it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea what those shiny new items actually look like on my character since he’s always wearing the costume you’ve already seen in numerous screenshots. So I toggled the hide costume switch.

Ehhhh…I think I’ll stick with my costume, thank you very much.