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Korean Pearl Abyss show off Black Desert's character creation

Keeping a close eye on this one. To my knowledge this is the first AAA Korean MMO that will have a (mostly) simultaneous release worldwide. We got Aion, TERA and Archeage years after they were already out in Korea and had already been mix/maxed and hacked to death. I'm playing Archeage now, and it's a total blast. People are saying that a lot of the systems in Black Desert are similar which is awesome. Obviously the visuals and world are spectacular.

It's really surprising and interesting to me how much more advanced the Korean/Japanese MMO's are compared to ours. Even Archeage, which is 3 years old already, is light years ahead of Wildstar/Elder Scrolls Online in terms of graphics, game systems and world design. Black Desert is going to blow minds.
 
For some reason I've never cared what my character looked like. As long as I could feel powerful and had fun, I didn't care what that required me to look like. I played a crapload of Diablo 3 and WoW but never transmogged a single item. I never had the desire to. Obviously not everyone feels the same way I do.
 
How many games have you ever said, "Damn this game looks great! And the gameplay is awesome too!"

I can count them on one hand.
 
The problem I have with the Korean MMORPGs I've played (three, so far) is that there's no actual role-play features, or barely any that would incite "RP'ing", which makes their character-creation essentially useless. There's no tavern to hang at, no drinking animations, no sitting-on-bench triggers, no worthy emotes maybe except for usual generic dancing ones. Heck it took TERA almost three years to get its character walk toggle (they literally just had it today in the latest update, Fate of Arun).

More often then not the only "RP" you can do is 99.5% text-based while you character sits in the middle of a plaza in some hub city while everyone else runs around doing their daily business in the exact same chat channel (meaning that if you do want to RP you better find some calm spot or just have a private channel). Then there's the inevitable guy wearing some ridiculous animal costume with a food & barbecue grill weapon skin passing by breaking any immersion you might have had during your RP (that particularly applies to TERA).

The whole concept of "role-playing" for Korean devs is either ignored or forgotten. If I want to actually role-play I'll play something like Champions Online instead, heck even RIFT or Allods Online would be better for that aspect.

But, yeah, their games looks pretty, I'll give them that.
 
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While I respect your opinion, I think most people who play MMORPGs don't give even half a damn about roleplaying features. The Koreans are the only ones making beautiful, difficult, competitive MMORPGs where the economic complexity of the game is matched by the beauty of the world. Korea is pushing the genre forward, there's no doubt about it. I just wonder why the US is so far behind? Is it just that much cheaper to produce art assets over there?
 
Mandres said:
While I respect your opinion, I think most people who play MMORPGs don't give even half a damn about roleplaying features. The Koreans are the only ones making beautiful, difficult, competitive MMORPGs where the economic complexity of the game is matched by the beauty of the world. Korea is pushing the genre forward, there's no doubt about it. I just wonder why the US is so far behind? Is it just that much cheaper to produce art assets over there?
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wut lol? really, first I heard of that.

What I HAVE seen is that the games, while they may have a beautiful artistic style, are often quite shallow and depth is obtaining through Grinding.

One that comes to mind (I don't know if its still around) is Maple Story. I also remember playing Ragnarok over 10 years ago and remembering fractions of fractions of a percent of XP game and being happy that the spawn of enemy produced more XP than I typically expected.

Have things really changed? I don't care if a game is beautiful is the underplaying point is for me to kill 2 million enemies. That may have worked for me about 15 years ago, but it won't work today.

Edit: I do agree that almost no one plays MMOs for the RP features.
 
SunnyD said:
How many games have you ever said, "Damn this game looks great! And the gameplay is awesome too!"

I can count them on one hand.
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You must have ridiculous standards then. Most of the best games also tend to have the best graphics because guess what? Bigger budgets allow you to iterate more.
 
futurefields said:
You must have ridiculous standards then. Most of the best games also tend to have the best graphics because guess what? Bigger budgets allow you to iterate more.
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Or simply because they allocated more of their available budget into visuals instead of other parts of the game, leaving the game very pretty but mostly broken. At least, this is what American publishers tend to do.
 
magomago said:
wut lol? really, first I heard of that.

What I HAVE seen is that the games, while they may have a beautiful artistic style, are often quite shallow and depth is obtaining through Grinding.

One that comes to mind (I don't know if its still around) is Maple Story. I also remember playing Ragnarok over 10 years ago and remembering fractions of fractions of a percent of XP game and being happy that the spawn of enemy produced more XP than I typically expected.

Have things really changed? I don't care if a game is beautiful is the underplaying point is for me to kill 2 million enemies. That may have worked for me about 15 years ago, but it won't work today.

Edit: I do agree that almost no one plays MMOs for the RP features.
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You're about 10 years out of the loop 🙂 Have you played Aion, TERA or Archeage? They're all f2p and if you like MMO's at all you'd be doing yourself a disservice by skipping them in my opinion. Korea (and Japan, with FF14 - arguably the most advanced PvE-based MMO out there) absolutely owns the genre right now.
 
Gameplay looks stupid, TBPH. I'm not sure how all the flashy moves and such will work for much more than a hollow single player grind. I don't think they'll translate well to group gameplay, and if you're just going to play by yourself, then what's the point of the MMO?
 
Fulle said:
Gameplay looks stupid, TBPH. I'm not sure how all the flashy moves and such will work for much more than a hollow single player grind. I don't think they'll translate well to group gameplay, and if you're just going to play by yourself, then what's the point of the MMO?
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the fact it looks better then DA:I graphic wise, and yet be a MMO, and also not have used up 1/5th of the budget DA:I has...

i think its a slap to the face to most american game companies asking them WTF are they doing.

Mandres said:
The open beta started this week in Korea, and a handful of English speakers are playing and discussing the game at this sub-reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BlackDesertOnline
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my cousin got a beta invite, in which he allowed me to try on the last beta though a korean proxy server. Since korea time and US Pacific time has a 14 hour difference, i got to play when he was asleep and vice versa..

It was horribly lagging on the server side unless u were by yourself.
Infact it made me sort of not want to really play the game and just sit in character creator where i would make some pretty hot characters 😀

it has one of the best character creators ever.... but without more server capacity, and server overhead, the game will make you cry unless ur in a solo zone like the video posted above.

The game playstyle is a lot like Vindictus, for those of you guys who know the game.
Also im expecting the game to follow the Nexon model in cash shops, which is probably going to make me uber sad, as paying things for real money for a time gated item is not what i consider fun.
 
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The combat looks completely dynamic which is certainly a plus.

I don't really like how TERA turned out, but it still has the best combat I've experienced in any of the MMORPGs I've played so far. I can still play some with Tab-Tagerting, or those with a mixture of dynamic and targeting (such as Guild Wars 2), but TERA's take on dynamic combat spoiled me. The only other game's combat I appreciate to a similar level is that of DC Universe Online's. I also tried Vindictus, that one's combat is pretty good too (but it wasn't my type of game overall, the whole "one HUB only" concept turned me off real quick).

From the videos I've watched so far Black Desert's combat sure looks cool, cannot deny that. And it's not just flashy, the animations are really good as well (and I'm very picky with animations quality, especially for MMORPGs).
 
Mandres said:
You're about 10 years out of the loop 🙂 Have you played Aion, TERA or Archeage? They're all f2p and if you like MMO's at all you'd be doing yourself a disservice by skipping them in my opinion. Korea (and Japan, with FF14 - arguably the most advanced PvE-based MMO out there) absolutely owns the genre right now.
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You joking? I played Aion and TERA, both were really bad IMO. Complete grinds without the hooks that wow had.
 
What they should do is release a server in the west where role-playing is mandatory (kinda like in some MUD) and change the focus to be more pvp..... Yeah not gonna happen
 
Subyman said:
You joking? I played Aion and TERA, both were really bad IMO. Complete grinds without the hooks that wow had.
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Aion was basically WoW with a beautiful graphics engine (CryTek), world design, and some interesting new PvP systems. TERA reinvented what everyone though MMO combat had to be like, but the rest of the game was not that deep or interesting.

Archeage introduced hugely complex crafting and sandbox world building on top of all the same WoW-systems that are genre standard. It's already accomplished what EQ:Next is ostensibly working on, and it came out two years ago in Korea.

I think all 3 are in-arguably more advanced games than WoW. And nothing else from a U.S. dev house has even come close to the quality of these games in recent history.

Black Desert is the next AAA Korean game and this time we won't have to wait years to get our hands on it. I'm super psyched to play it.
 
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