Black Desert

Just heard about this and saw the character creator video.

Really digging the graphics! Also this Occulus Rift support.

o.O shortest BETA ever? i presume there will be more.

eta: I see some of the founders packs include things like "2,500 Pearls ($25 / €25 Value) " which makes me think this might be a microtransaction hell :/

I am going to give this game a try. I picked up the conquers package because I am a sucker for a costume and weapon skin.

I like the GW2 payment model which looks like they are using.

If this game is like Archeage but with better graphics and combat but without the issues the housing and labor caused I think it has some promise.

My fear is that I would get this game and the character creation will be the best part of the game.

Let us fence riders know how it is! All the videos I have seem the game looks ok, not particularly great or bad just middle of the road... with an amazingly in depth character creation model.

Now I have to wonder how much of this game will just be creepy obsessed fans with various fantasies acting out certain scenarios with avatars that look like the object of their obsession.

My first day with CBT1 was bit uneventful. This is going to be sort of long and ramble a little I am sure but here is what I did and experienced. If you have any questions of course let me know and I can either answer them now or go see how it works in game and let you know later.

I messed with the character creator a bit but did not try to make Emma Watson or any other famous or not so famous characters.

The classes available in close beta 1 are Tamer, Sorcereress, Ranger, Wizard, Warrior, and I believe Berserker.

I created a Wizard using various preset options and created a Sorceress using the editor some more but not a lot. My teenage daughter, who has some artistic talent, is going to sit with me tonight and see what she can do with the character creator.

There appears to be one server but several channels. You create your character on the server and can move between channels as you wish. The channels look to be nothing more than an instance of the world like GW2. What is different is instead of choosing a server and getting moved into a random instance you can select the instance but at least in beta there is only 1 server.

When making your first character you have to pick a family name. This name is used on all of your characters and can’t be changed.

Each character has a unique first name.

It looks like booth family name and first name must be unique to the server.

Character creation was straightforward. You get to pick between a half dozen starting outfits in addition to how you look and sound.

You also have to pick a zodiac sign, which I can’t tell if it does anything now or maybe in the future.

The intro is very generic fantasy stuff with very generic quests. I only made level 8 so take what I know with a grain of salt but there was nothing from a PvE introduction that made me say wow this is awesome.

The game does look awesome. The animations are nice and everything is well done.

Wyser is playing with me so we decided to group up and mess with some random stuff as it is beta and our first day.

I did mess with some silly things learning for example I could crouch and crawl to move about.

Wyser reported that with my dark clothes it was hard to spot me when crawling. My nameplate vanished when crawling and when I was lying still in tall grass I was certainly hidden. That was kind of cool and I thought as an ambush tactic that would be great but to go from a crawl to combat ready is not as fast as I like and makes me wonder how useful it would be.

I did not read any of the quest dialogs and skipped cut scenes. I did this on purpose since I want to experience that when the game goes live. What I know is for some reason there is this black spirit thing that has decided you are his project, friend, or whatever and he leads you through tutorial steps early on.

The game has a couple of unique concepts, such as knowledge, but since I was not reading anything I can’t comment too much on it. I do know one way you gain knowledge by fighting things. I also know that some NPC will not tell you things if your knowledge is not high enough.

Early PvE was a bit bland. Like any launch the areas were full of people and it seemed like everything died in 1 hit. I get it is early but 1 shot to kill is a bit too easy. Your spirit friend leads you through a series of kill x# of things to gain knowledge quests. X is often 2 to 5 and with things dying in 1 hit you fly through those things.

Wyser and I messed with the friend and group mechanics a bit. Adding a friend was straightforward and it is done on the family name level.

Making a group required us to be next to each other to form the group. Which was a pain finding each other in all the people at first.

Once we had a group we just ran off in a random direction to see what we could see.

I jumped off a cliff to see how falling damage worked and I took surprising little damage for a large fall.

I jumped into the water to see how that worked and came away a bit confused. There is clearly a breath meter and you can swim both on and under the water. After being in the water for sometime though I just started losing health for no reason. I let myself die to see how that worked and was presented with the option to resurrect nearby with a small penalty or in town.

I resurrected nearby just to keep exploring.

Wyser reported that when he got out of the water his character looked wet. I looked at his character and noted he did not look wet. I jumped in the water and then back out and noted I did look wet but to Wyser I looked normal. Clearly there are some graphics that are local to you only.

There were no fish or anything in the water. While it all looked good it was very sterile in the water.

The beach also was devoid of anything.

I went back to the cliff and tried to climb up it. That worked well with my guy able to jump and pull himself up in a natural way in places that made sense as likely places to climb.

Once back up the cliff I messed a bit with destroying crates and barrels in the landscape that where in camps of creatures.

Wyser and I had free loot on and we both noted that it told us what the other person looted.

Something that is either really cool or lame is how travel works. You can of course run around like normal. You can also chart a path to a place and your guy will auto run to it. This works in 1 of 2 ways. If you have an active quest you can just hit T and your guy will auto path to the target. If you want to go to a place in the world you can go to the world map and select a place or person on your map with a right click which will chart a path. You then close the map and hit T and off you go.

I used it a couple times and it worked with no issues. Wyser reported he got stuck on a bush one time. All in all it seemed to work. No clue what happens if you get attacked when doing it. I think it is a nice compromise though between the extreems of no fast travel and fast travel all over the place.

That is all I did but a couple other things we noted.

First if you have multiple characters as long as they are over level 4 you do not need to log out or go to a character select screen to change to them. You can select any of your characters in game and you will swap to that character wherever they last were in game.

Second it looked like when I logged out it gave me an option to enter a description or log of some kind of my play session. I will have to look at this further and guess for people who like RP that will be nice.

I think that covers day 1.

I agree. Wyser and I found a waterfall near the starting area that was really nice looking.

Looks like you are further along than we are if that is your guy in CBT1.

I hear post 15 quests more or less end. Is that true?