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BDO, My Impressions/Thoughts
Quesa
Member UncommonPosts: 1,432
Graphics:
Probably one of the more beautiful games that will be hitting the scene in 2016 and that is saying something because it’s actually been released for a year or so now in other countries. But that isn’t all, anyone can make a nice looking game and throw it on the market. There are some additional touches to the game that I think are hugely important as the small things really do help the immersion. The game has the typical night and day cycle but it also has weather. Yes folks, the game not only has the standard sunny day but light rain, thunder and lightning storms, someone even spotted a hurricane out in the ocean, and they also did some testing with the new snow. Add to that the recent change to a darker night and the introduction of lanterns, the game just looks amazing. There were multiple times that I actually stopped what I was doing, whether it be processing, fishing or reading, and just looked at the world that they had created.
The animations of the characters are nice and flow very well with the combat yet they don’t interfere with the movement at all, unless you’re casting something but that’s different. If you get rained on or just get out of water, the skin remains wet for a time as well.
The character customization is INSANE. There are so many options that you can do when creating your character, it blows my mind. There have been loads of people creating characters that closely resemble real life people, including the most recent rendition of The Joker. The best part is, you can actually save and trade these customizations with other people out of game.
Quests:
There isn’t much difference between the requested actions of BDO quests and those of other MMO quests. They are the basic, kill this 10 times, craft that for me, catch this type of fish, and go here and talk to this guy…type of quests. There are certain quests which offer a break from the mundane nature of questing where you get to play a minigame to complete the quest, like moving a cart from one place to the other but through your actions, keep the cart balanced. Rewards from quests are a bit different, mostly due to the different types of XP that you need to level different aspects of your character, more to follow about that.
Character Progression:
While you do have a character level, there are many more aspects to your leveling than just your character level. In addition to the standard player levels, you also have levels for:
· Gathering
· Processing
· Cooking
· Alchemy
· Training
· Fishing
· Hunting
· Trading
· Breath/Strength/Health
· Contribution
· Skill Point XP
Each of these categories have their own XP pool and levels and each of these can be a possible XP reward from their own types of quests. And the best part is, you can skill up these areas of your character independently of your character level. This all means that you can, if you choose, concentrate most of your energy on being a crafter or gatherer of resources.
Breath/Strength/Health levels are some ancillary skills that slightly improve the performance of your character. Breath is simply skilled up by running around doing stuff and it improves your maximum stamina (typically used for dodging and running). Strength is leveled up by walking around with trade packs which will improve the total weight that you are able to carry (more on that in a bit). Health levels are gained by eating food, which slightly improves your HP pool. Simple things to, again, slightly improve your character.
Contribution XP adds to your total pool of contribution points, which allow you to rent out special items from NPCs, connect to resource/trade nodes or rent houses/workshops. This is a much deeper subject which I’ll get to in the next section.
Skill Point XP is yet another pool which allows you to gain skill points, which are exchanged for either new skills or higher ranks of skills. It’s a common misconception that simply leveling your character is how you get new and higher ranks of skills. It’s actually a combination of player level AND skill points that get you these new abilities as most of them have both a level minimum AND a skill point cost. I’ve seen many quests offer just Skill Point XP as a reward. You gain this XP from “killing monsters or performing quests and life activities”. I don’t know what “life activities” are, it could be a bad translation (many of those currently).
Comments
Combat and the “Level Grind”:
Combat is very fluid, once you get a handle on the combo system. Some people will obviously not like key combos in favor for the hotkey binds. I only played the Wizard during CBT1 so I spent a lot of time ‘avoiding’ being hit while setting up combos. Killing NPCs is fairly easy, farming multiple mobs isn’t all that hard either. The AI is a bit dumbed down but I suspect that has to do with how your ‘supposed’ to level your character (through killing NPCs). Combat felt quite visceral and engaging. There are a lot of effects that people have complained about (shaking and vibrant colors splashing your screen) but they can be toned down through the various settings that are available to the player.
I didn’t make it to max level, as I spent two whole days exploring the world and other systems (labor/crafting/workers). Those two hole days were very enjoyable and I never felt like I was missing out on something by concentrating on other things. After I was done exploring those things, it took me less than a day of grinding to go from 19 to 28. The ‘grind’ felt ok, I didn’t get the feeling that it was taking forever or, again, like I was missing out on something. Questing helps you add context to the areas that you are killing NPCs in, along with side quests for gathering and crafting using the resources found in the zone you are in. I believe there are a few issues with the questing sending you to areas that eventually have high level mobs, in relation to your own level, but this is probably due to (and being looked at) the slower leveling curve for NA/EU. Surprisingly, the Korean servers have it set so that you level much faster. However, it all feels like a nice pace. It very much feels slightly slower than vanilla WoW (if any of you remember that).
There are no dungeons, so if that’s what you’re looking for at launch, don’t expect it. I believe they have stated it is something they’ll be adding later on but no ETA.
Crafting/Workers:
The worker system allows you to gather on a larger scale than you would be able to using your own Energy pool (more on that later). In the lower levels, you need 10 ore to make a melted shard and, iirc, 5 melted shards to make an ingot.
There are many things you can build or process that will not require a crafting station. Things like drying out a fish or chopping logs into planks will need to be done by the player himself and can be completed without a crafting station. When you get into more complicated tasks, such as making a meal out of that dried fish, you’ll need a cooking station that will need to be placed in your residence.
When you get to larger scale building, you’ll need to interact more with your workers. As an example, I build a rowboat (the second boat from the first tier of shipyard – aka, low level) and it took 8 ingots, which is hundreds of ore, which is hundreds of veins since you get 1-3 ore per. Additionally, this boat required 20 plywood, which again, you need 5 logs for 1 plank and 10 planks for 1 plywood. So, as you can see, the workers will be VERY important when you are trying to craft on any real scale. You’ll need to rent out lodging for your workers as well as feed them, with food you will craft. Workers also craft items that take hours to make. For the rowboat, it required 20 plywood, each of which took a worker ‘cycle’ to add to the project. Each worker will perform a cycle at his own pace, dependent upon his level and possible special skills in the field of work you are having him perform. You can have more than one worker on a project at any given time. My workers took approximately 40 minutes per cycle meaning it took 20 * 40 worker minutes just to complete the application of the plywood.
Labor:
This is quite similar to the ArcheAge system, where you have a resource pool that you draw from to perform certain actions, two of those being gathering and crafting. The main difference is the frequency of gaining an energy point and how much it costs to gather or craft. Currently, you gain 1 point every 3 minutes and you only exert one point to perform a single gather or craft a single item. You can also regenerate these points faster by performing quests. While I always want more energy but also understand that there needs to be a governor on these and other actions, it’s actually not that bad and means that need to be cognizant of your choices but even if you ‘waste’ one, it won’t ruin your entire day. It also motivates you to go out and do other things than just sit in a town and craft all day. To each their own, this will probably be a controversial topic no matter what.
In the end:
There are obviously some things I don’t like or wish they would change or slightly modify but most of them won’t make much sense unless you played the game and I’d rather send that feedback directly to the devs first.
All in all, the total package is surprisingly, damned impressive. Given the price point that is currently set, $30/US, and being B2P, I see this really having a good release but it will be interesting to see how an MMO with such micromanagement and diversity will do in the NA/EU markets. I firmly believe that players really do want a game that is more involved than just blitzing their way to max level and dungeon their way to epic lootz but just don’t know it.
If you have specific questions, I'll do my best to answer them later, for now, it's late so I'm going to bed!
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I keep hearing that people get to cap really quickly and have nothing to do (i.e. no dungeons / raids)... but is that just because they didn't smell the roses, or is there only so much to do?
Also, is the game designed to be soloed (seems like it from ease of mobs)? Or it worth doing a lot of things with a small group?
While I didn't make it too far in Closed Beta 1 and as I wasn't even looking forward to BDO in the first place, I'm still learning quite a lot.
PVP seems rather friendly and doesn't appear to reward "ganking" or behaviors that typically seem to upset PVE folks.
Small "arena" type battles 3v3-20v20 and battles for castles/lands seem to be in or coming soon for NA/EU with them already in KR. Controlling lands (nodes) gives benefits to guilds (taxes) and what not causing a reason to PVP.
But like all games, it comes down to what you are looking for. BDO is very open ended without a guide to what you should be doing, but what you could be.
Someone that wants to PVP, be the best fisher (there are leader boards), control a vast trade circuit or whatever most likely doesn't worry about PVE raiding or fighting mobs even. It certainly doesn't seem to be focused at the more themepark/WoW type fans out there that enjoy the mechanics of bosses and what not. But for those that like grinds of any sort, seems to be plenty of options otherwise.
I would also like to know more about trade packs. Are trade packs similar to Archeage?
Any guilds recruiting?
I just recently started getting into it so don't know what happened previously, but for NA from what I've experienced so far (very little), housing is "instanced" in towns. Although going in/out of a house is seamless for me.
Beyond some features not being in the NA version yet (several classes missing for example) and updates hitting KR first, they appear to be the same base game. Although I've read they've tweaked somethings and might continue to. But no major features seem to be added/removed.
At first, I was put off by this but after working with it for a few days, I came to like it. I was told that it has to do with limiting spammers and silver sellers because at low levels, your Energy cap is rather low and you could easily blow through it.
I feel this has another impact as it restricts those who insist on trolling world chats because even at level ~30, I only had a cap of like 80 Energy and you are constantly using it for multiple activities.
While there was still the standard drivel in General, I found that most people responded to the help requests in a private chat. I do hope they increase the char limit of a single message because that is rather limiting at this time.
Right now my notes on things I would like changed or bugs that I wrote down is nothing more than a list of things in OneNote. I will be gone for the next couple of days and didn't plan on formatting/expanding it out until I got back home but I screen capped it so you can look at it if you want. http://i.imgur.com/qKfpyqM.png
Also, this isn't a review, this is my first impression of playing the game during the first round of CBT.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Thanks!
I should add, I've had more fun in BDO than I've had in a long time in an mmo.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
1. GvG battles have a cheaper start cost to declare
2. GvG battles no longer have any upkeep cost
(with the above two changes and the fact that you cannot refuse a GvG, you can now keep up GvGs for next to nothing against enemy guilds for lots of penalty-free guild PvP)
3. Karma when PKing reduced significantly (and based on player feedback, will likely be reduced further)
4. Safe zones reduced to only major cities (Used to be every node, this is no longer true).
5. Can only change channels in safe zones (so you have to run halfway across the map to get away from an an enemy player with a channel change cooldown after that).
6. In addition to scroll bosses (unique to the player, summoned just for them), several harder, large group oriented versions (standard open world bosses) have been added as world bosses with more to come
7. Cooldown on potions increased and the largest HP potions have been removed from the game
8. Cooldown on deflagging for PvP has been decreased (good thing for PKers, it was a problem in KR)
I may be missing something, but off the top of my head, those are some of the positive changes we've seen so far.
http://blackdesertfoundry.com/2015/10/15/trading/
Maybe they won't make the same mistake as Trion but that labor stuff is already leaving a bad taste in my mouth.... I hate a game that tries to mandate what I do with my time on it......... If I wanna craft all day I should be able too....
I guess we will see but I can already see labor potions and such being a store bought item... Or energy whatever it's called
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo