Black Desert Online Review (2024)

I've spent the last few hours in Black Desert Online not plunking arrows into orcs or testing my skill against other players, but in attempting to tame horses. It's something I fondly remember from real-world experiences in my teens, and I thus admire that such an option even exists in this expansive sandbox-style MMORPG. But like so much else in Black Desert Online, something about how the system works seems ever so slightly off. The loop in the catch-rope I cast is laughably too small, for instance, and I can't even tell the gender of the horse for breeding it with other horses until I've caught it. But there's always a moment of quiet joy when I managed to win one over with a handful of sugar. I can think of no other contemporary massively multiplayer online RPG that grants me that same satisfaction.

I say that in part because few other MMORPGs’ worlds feel quite so real as Black Desert Online’s. Horse taming is but the tip of what it offers. There are fantasy staples like elves here, but they're subtle, with their ears usually hidden beneath luxurious hairstyles. There's an (unplayable) race of otter folk, but they blend with the low-fantasy ambience as comfortably as saguaros in Arizona. That cozy realism reveals itself in the Witcher-esque detail of the world, where carefully maintained vineyards hold vigil alongside wind-tossed grasses and weatherworn fenceways. There's a price for that detail—the highest settings challenged my GeForce GTX 980 in crowded areas—but I never tired of the way Black Desert Online uses it to create a believable world where humble Tuscan cottages stand in for the outlandish castles we usually see in this genre.

But as with the horse taming, that realism also springs from the wealth and depth of its many secondary systems. Instead of the mindless rush to the level cap that characterizes many of its competitors, Black Desert Online thrives on a vaguely sandboxy design. Using a refundable secondary XP system of sorts based on "contribution points," it emphasizes activities like establishing trade routes with hired workers, fishing on docks or skinning animals for profit, and even renting out farmland as much as simply duking it out. If I want to grow a crop like carrots for my horse, I'll have to take into consideration factors like the humidity, groundwater availability, and temperature of an area. Or you can rush to the soft cap of level 50, if you’re so inclined.

Feed for Speed

Why carrots, you might ask? Horses get tired after long journeys, and they need to stay nourished to maintain their speed. (I can buy them from an NPC at the stables, but off-the-shelf carrots won't be as effective as home-grown.) That's especially important as there's no fast travel here aside from an option to autorun along the roads to a destination. Nor are there game-wide banks: if I have something in the warehouse in Heidel, I have to gallop back to Heidel to get it. Normally this kind of thing gets annoying, but currently Black Desert Online has no real endgame to speak of aside from fighting world bosses and engaging in PvP, and thus there's no need to speed through everything anyway. For me, it creates a sense of life and meaning to the world; a reason to battle all these orcs and naga clogging the weedy pastures beside the roads.

And battle is fun. Black Desert Online is likely the MMO that comes closest to the ideal of single-player action-adventure combat, and there wasn't a single one of the eight classes I didn't enjoy on some level. Take the Sorceress, who pummels baddies with dark magic like a Shaolin monk lapsed to the Dark Side. Consider the Warrior, who benefits from a huge range of combos to deliver a less flashy but nevertheless satisfying experience. After several false starts (complicated by the one-day wait to delete a character), I eventually stuck with the Ranger, who dodges enemies with flashy backflips and and deals damage almost as competently with her dagger as with her bow.

Those gender-specific pronouns I used there aren't my own choice, and that's a bit of a problem. Each class is locked into a specific gender and race, although the Wizard has an identical Witch counterpart and the Warrior has the more defensively focused Valkyrie as an alter ego. But as for the Berserker, the Ranger, and the Sorceress? You're stuck with a ugly giant, a toned elf woman in short skirts, and a doppelgänger of Yennefer of Vengerberg, respectively. I find this amusing because Black Desert Online first gained widespread attention on the strength of its character creator, but playing it reveals its actual limits. While you can do fantastic things with the faces, the Wizard always looks like an old man, the Berserker always suffers from a severe hunchback, and the Tamer class always looks like a little girl. Worse, all of the existing gear sets for each class barely differ from one another, and I thus appeared to be walking among numerous clones in the cities until I got up close and personal.

The cash shop used to supplement Black Desert Online's buy-to-play model offers some attractive cosmetic alternatives for each class, but much like almost everything else in the shop, they're disproportionately expensive, often costing as much the base game itself. (This is to say nothing of the dye system, which consumes each purchasable dye after a single use, or the all-but-essential $9 pets who run around and automatically pick up loot for you.) Even then, there are only a couple extra outfits at best, so even players who slap down hard cash – as I did, for a rougher leathery look – still end up looking like a lot like other players of their class.

Attack of the Clones

In fact, for all of its detail, Black Desert Online has an obvious affection for samey things. As much as I relish galloping through the countryside, it never really deviates from the well-watered woodland aesthetic — the titular desert is currently nowhere to be found — and the actual business of leveling honors the grand Korean tradition of grinding to a fault. Rare is the MMO these days that embraces grinds so unabashedly. Individual NPCs present about as much challenge as a bowling pin presents my boot, which seemed strange until I realized I was supposed to pull about 15 at once and repeat ad nauseum. The combat is enjoyable enough that I never fully tired of shooting arrows into bandits for over 30 hours, but the business slips into such an absurd rhythm that I soon reconfigured my hotbar to place my Ranger's main area-of-effect ability and health and mana potions in the most accessible slots. I would have been in trouble with that setup against other players, but it served me fine in PvE for over a dozen levels.

To Black Desert Online's credit, you're not really supposed to level up so singlemindedly, although it makes it easier by granting huge XP bonuses to players who grind in groups. In perfect conditions with no competition and with full awareness of where you should grind, you can thus reportedly get to the level cap in mere hours. But doing so forces you to miss out on quest rewards like precious inventory expansions and the alternate currency needed for Black Desert's main secondary activities. In general, it also means you also miss out on the main story.

As if it matters. The tale starts out promisingly enough, focusing on a black spirit who follows you around and grows menacing teeth, arms, and more as you complete quests. You can summon him at any time, and he'll even improve weapons and armor for you. But the story stays in the background, so you have to go looking for it. It doesn't help that quest text often looks as though someone just threw it in Google Translate, nor does the fact that many quests just assume you've already done another quest you possibly never even saw. I usually find something to love about most RPG stories, but the best I could figure out here is that there's some evil prince, the possibility of a dragon, and that I could jokingly call my companion ghost "Casper" only in the most ironic sense.

That befuddlement extends to aspects of Black Desert Online beyond the story, although working around them isn't too difficult. Even with the inclusion of built-in tutorial videos, very little in Black Desert Online apart from combat is explained well, thus leading to frequent trips out of the game to learn about the specifics of things like horse breeding or farming on forums or wikis. Fortunately, since Black Desert Online was in beta for months and has been out in Korea for a couple of years, these resources are numerous. Folks in chat are even helpful, provided you can see their responses past the barrage of gold seller spam.

The upside is that, as I learned with horse taming and later horse breeding, mastering these systems presents a degree of non-combat satisfaction I rarely find anywhere else. Black Desert Online isn't quite the fantasy-themed EVE Online sandbox it wants to be, but it does come moderately close. I'm more concerned with its longevity as it brings nothing like dungeons or raids aside from world boss fights, and its planned-but-still-unimplemented end content largely hinges on massive battles between guilds over castles or trade nodes throughout the world. Considering that what PvP I did play seems so ridiculously gear-biased that watching one player outdo five others isn't uncommon even now, I shudder to think of how it'll turn out in practice. Even if I just stuck with crafting, I can envision a point where I've learned all there is to learn.

But for now, I've still got my horses to tend. That's an experience I've wanted again in real life for some time now, and Black Desert Online captures it well enough that I'll stick around for a while yet. Honestly, I'd rather do that or figure out how to build one of those fancy boats I see floating around than grind to the level cap, and these days, that's a massive achievement for an MMORPG.