I promise I’m not going to write boring blog posts about Black Desert Online every day, but I did want to share some stuff I learned in case any other newbies stumble onto my blog.

1) Thanks to a friend of Stargrace I learned how to disable those annoying ‘banner’ announcements. In settings -> game if you scroll down there’s a big swath of checkboxes for Notifications. These are all “opt-out”; in other words you check the ones you DON’T want to see. I turned off most of them and now instead of seeing constant adverts for in-game stuff I don’t care about, I can see Black Desert Online’s beautiful world.

2) I finally noticed the “Edit UI” option in the main menu. In my defense it doesn’t seem to be there when you’re very low level, but I’m sure I’ve overlooked it a few times. That let me hide that odd palette of suggested key strokes that floats around the middle of the screen.

3) I took the time to write down controller button bindings because they are non-traditional (and yet work well). So for example one of the face buttons is bound to Left Mouse Button, but the left trigger is bound to Right Mouse Button. The right trigger is bound to Shift. Pushing in the left analog stick is the same as hitting the frequently used R key, while pushing in the right stick is Q. And so on. So my Heavy Attack that is performed by pushing both mouse buttons is X+L2 (on an Xbox controller) while I have some kind of shield charge that is Shift-Q which winds up being R2+Right Thumb Depress. It sounds odd but it all works pretty well since the timing isn’t super-precise.

Once I had these bindings written down so I could glance at them to refresh my memory, combat with a controller got really fun. For me, who is primarily a console gamer, fighting in BDO with mouse and keyboard felt like a random button-pressing activity and I didn’t care for it. But fighting with a controller, dancing around enemies and unleashing devastating (well, for level 10) attacks, is super fun.

Next I need to write down my skills and the combos needed to activate them. I still think they throw too many skills at you too quickly and I know I have some I just never use.

At one point last night (and I only actually played for about an hour) I was down to a single quest given to me by the evil black cloud (who has grown an alarming set of teeth) that had me fighting a level 15 mob with a group. I was level 11 and me+groups=avoid at all costs so instead of following the bread crumbs to my inevitable death, I set that quest aside and just wandered around practicing combat. Eventually I wandered into a village and all kinds of things opened up. I now have quests that will teach me about gathering and crafting, I got some storage space, and a bunch of other things I need to play around with next time I’m in game. I also spent my first Contribution Point unlocking (is that what you call it?) a farm that I recognized the name of from reading my friends’ posts. I guess I can grow some taters there.

(I have real problems with place-names in this game for some reason. The first two villages are, I think, Olvia and Velia and for some reason my brain constantly confuses them. So I can’t recall which one I was in, but there was a dock there and I assume lots of AFK fisherfolk.)

So things are coming along. I’m really happy that I tried combat with the controller. It changed the combat system from “Meh” to “OMG SO FUN!” for me. Now I feel like I just want to go hit things with my sword instead of doing all the crafting and farming that I initially signed up for!