I curse you, Black Desert Online!

ALL my friends (OK, a few of my friends) are playing Black Desert Online, the new MMO from some company or other. I haven’t followed it much, wasn’t the least bit interested. Then they started talking about it.

And I’m intrigued. I hear about how complex it is, which interests me. That it’s Alt-Friendly and I love me some alts. That there are rewarding systems that go far beyond just combat. From the outside looking in, it seems to be the best ‘virtual world’ game available now if you want modern graphics. (And yeah, I like me some nice graphics.)

I held strong for a while because my friends tend to be very attracted to the new shiny. Blade & Soul was hot for maybe 10 days. Figured the same would be true with Black Desert Online. Plus there seems to be altogether too much excitement about AFK activities. The game literally plays itself I guess. That seems like an odd thing to be excited about but then, I haven’t experienced it.

But there seems to be so much to like about the game, and as a bonus it’s really pretty, at least in theory. I’m not sure how pretty it would be on my old machine, but it’s sure pretty on other peoples’ gaming rigs.

I came so close to caving and buying the $30 starter package (there’s no free lunch here, you have to buy something to get started).

But then I thought about spending hours sitting in front of my PC playing a game and I realized this was not the right move for me. I work from home. I sit in front of my ‘gaming PC’ for 40-50 hours a week working. Sitting here for another 20 just no longer sounds like fun. Most days once I ‘quit’ work for the day I walk out of the office and don’t return until the next morning.

Sadly I can’t even imagine a game as complex as Black Desert Online ever coming to consoles. So for now I guess Black Desert Online gets filed away with EVE Online; the kind of game I love to read about, but that I don’t really want to play. At least not until I get a kick-ass gaming laptop or some other way to play it in front of the big screen in the living room. Maybe it’ll come to Steam some day and I can play it via Steam In-Home Streaming….

7 thoughts on “I curse you, Black Desert Online!

  1. For what it’s worth, BDO does support a game pad. But, until you hook you up a PC to some big TV/monitor, it won’t relieve you from not wanting to sit in your office. So you are safe. 😉

  2. I hate it, Glo and I both have not been able to get into it. Largely due to the move mechanics, but also the “kill 10 of these” then “kill 10 of these that are all clumped up five paces over” idea of quests. Boring! Mind you, this is just from a few hours of play; we have a thousand other things to do with our time. In my opinion you’re not missing out. 🙂

  3. BDO runs fine on my very, very low spec machine. I needed to tweak a lot of settings but I got there in the end. It’s a very strange game in many ways. Most ways in fact.

    Re the comment above, PvE combat is a relatively small part of the game and certainly an unsophisticated one compared to other MMOs. Monsters are there to be killed quickly in large numbers with ferocious attacks. Someone described it as you playing the raid boss as far as the monsters are concerned and that’s certainly been my experience so far (Level 16).

    Almost nothing in BDO works like a “normal” MMO though. Quests aren’t for leveling up, for one thing. You can do quests by the hundred (and there seem to be thousands) and barely level up at all. They are more like faction or reputation quests, when they aren’t disguised tutorials.

    I spent the last hour just running through the countryside opening up new areas. The world is HUGE. And immensely detailed, in a quasi-realistic way, which means there’s a lot of wild countryside between the settled areas. It’s a true explorer’s dream though. I remain to be convinced there’s a game in there but with a world so extravagantly brought to life I’m not sure there needs to be.

  4. @Maeve — Well that means if/when it comes to Steam I should be able to play it easily from the sofa!

    @Gwyn — Have you checked out what seems to be almost an economic strategy game layer? I keep reading about people setting up trade routes and stuff. That’s what intrigues me; that and just exploring.

    Which leads to @bhagpuss: Like you, I can lose myself just exploring a world. So I have this vision of setting up my NPCs to do work while I travel the countryside seeing the sights and opening new trade routes!

    Maybe some day…

  5. No, I really barely scratched the surface and just can’t get into it enough to get to the meat, I guess. Maybe if I were a native mouse-look type person, I’d be less annoyed with the mechanics. Maybe Witcher 3 being my most recent game has spoiled me for games without a good story. Maybe I’m just outgrowing gaming? Gasp, the horror! But might be true — I’ve spent more (happy) hours the past couple days planning my next road trip than I have in a game.

  6. I have a friend with the same outlook as you, he simply cannot play games on his PC anymore, since he considers it his ‘work machine’. Now he plays solely games on consoles, when he needs a break from his computer. Which I find completely perplexing, since both the PC and the console are in the same room, only a couple of meters away from each other, and in both cases you end up staring at a screen for hours.

    I really don’t get console gaming, except maybe being forced into it by exclusive titles…

  7. @Tithian — Well I can’t speak for your friend of course, but in my case the consoles are downstairs in the living room and the work/gaming PC is upstairs in my office. When you work from home, you sit in your chair for 8+ hours/day. You don’t get up and go over to a colleague’s desk to talk over a problem, you don’t get up and go to a meeting. Everything you do, you do sitting in that one spot. No one should spend more than 40-50 hours/week with their ass in a single chair!! LOL

    But even aside from that, you start to mentally associate being at that PC with being at work. So when I sit down to that computer without even thinking I check in on work email, check in with slack, check in with our project tracking software. And if there’s a problem I’ll either start working on it, or tell myself “The heck with it, I’m off the clock!” and try to ignore it but it’ll be sitting in the back of my brain tormenting me until I go and fix it.

    If I had the space to set up a desk with a ‘work machine’ and another desk with a ‘gaming machine’ I don’t think it’d be an issue. My gaming machine wouldn’t have the tools I need to do work. I wouldn’t have the work email account logged in on it. Stuff like that. If I had the space for that I think I could still enjoy PC gaming.

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