How ’bout that character generator, eh?

Rawr

I remember the hubbub from back before the US release, where the character generator was a sort of standalone piece of software. It is still quite impressive, all this time later, even if most of the options end up turning your character into nightmare fuel more often than not. Still, for those that care about proper placement of their character’s dimples, I am sure that this sort of refinement is welcome.

What the character generator did not prepare me for is the rest of the game looking… washed out?

Ironically, it looks fine in screenshots.

To be clear, the game does not look bad. There is just a weird sort of dissonance between having an avatar constructed in incredibly minute detail… traversing a landscape with shrubbery that has a lesser polygon count than their eyebrows. The two simply feel out of place right away. As I was running around, all I could think about is whether or not Guild Wars 2 looked better.

Combat has been one-shot city thus far, and I think I’m technically level 17 at this point. It is certainly an interesting Action combat system, as it plays more like, well, Action RPGs. Hold Left-Click to perform a series of attacks, Right-Click starts another, LMB + RMB is something else, W + F is another attack, etc, etc etc. Technically there is also a hotbar you can utilize, but the in-game prompts warn you that it costs more resources (MP) to perform when not manually keying in the combo. Given that nothing has survived more than two hits of “hold down LMB,” I have not yet seen whether that’s relevant.

In fairness, the class I chose was Dark Knight. Which was selected based on the little video that play of the various classes and my research into what was Flavor of the Month. So maybe the class is just OP. Wizard/Witch were #1 and #2 in the FOTM ranking, but the experience of FFXIV’s abysmal Arcanist experience has soured ranged classes in new (to me) MMOs. Despite that, it was actually the Ranger that piqued my interest the most originally. Perhaps I’ll check that out later.

Say what?

One factor that is going to limit my playtime right away is the garbage localization and questing. Quests are quests, but Black Desert has discovered a way to make them even less interesting. For most NPCs, you have to click on a Quest tab in a menu to bring up their quest, then they have two poorly-translated lines per screen to convey the information, and while they are “talking” they spout off their idle dialog that has nothing to do with the words on the screen. I suppose I shouldn’t expect much more from a game with an “auto-run to quest objective” feature built-in, but it’s a bit disappointing nonetheless.

I have not spent much time with the remaining game systems, including Node management and leaving the game running overnight/during work so you can AFK gain millions of silver for reasons. From what I understand, this absurd economy is mainly based around the principle that you’ll be throwing tens of millions of silver away in the gamble that is upgrading endgame gear. As in, to upgrade a 20 million silver sword to the next level, you have smash it together with another 20 million silver sword. Success means you get an upgraded 100 million silver sword. Failure means you get a silver sword one enchantment level less; not only have you lost the 20 million silver item, but you’ll have to buy more swords to smash together just to get back to where you were originally. Accessory enchanting works the same way, except that on a failure you lose both items.

Under that sort of insane rubric, being able to make millions while AFK fishing is OK.

…wait, no it isn’t. It’s still fucking nonsense, but whatever.