Recent reviews by Spctrvl

This is not a game. It is a work of art. It is the product of some form of twisted genius that comes along maybe once a decade. It's not the kind of art you're probably thinking of though, this isn't the Mona Lisa. It's not a Kubrick film or a van Gogh. Black Desert Online is gaming's answer to The Room. A better name might have been 'Plan 9 from Pearl Abyss'.

If it were self aware it would be an absolutely biting satire of MMOs as a genre, but somehow the total lack of self awareness just makes it that much better. It really is phenomenal what they've managed to acomplish here. This is a game that is *fractally* awful: once you think you've reached the bottom, that there's no worse mechanic or more questionable design decision they've made, you scratch a little deeper, and there it is! Another layer of self-similar garbage! Honestly, forget art, that's impressive just from a mathematical standpoint.

The devs want to deal with gold sellers? Can't sell gold if players can't trade, that'll stop 'em from cutting in to our premium shop action. Trading instead is a skill, that you level by trading commodities and stuff between different cities. Oh well that's cool, I played some elite back in the day, this'll be great! Upgrade to a bigger cart, ship more valuable goods, yeah, I can do this gameplay loop! Not so fast. In order to trade with this city, you need to connect its node to your pre-existing nodes and every node on the way between it and the city you're originating in. How do you do that? Investing energy, a lovely, time-regenerated resource ripped straight from free to play mobile games, delivered whole and unaltered into the hands of paying customers. And once you finish your investing, you're still not allowed to ship anything expensive until you've leveled your trading skill. For a few weeks. Oh so I can just do trade like an idle game? Wrong again, idiot! Should you dare to use the auto-pathing mechanic the developers so treacherously included, your trade cart will be robbed by NPC bandits. If it doesn't experience a rollover accident anyway.

Those pictures on the class listing aren't just for show either: all classes are locked behind a specific gender. Wanna be a female ninja or a male ranger? Play another game. Good idea regardless, but okay, let's say you've designed your character within their constraints, picked a class you're interested in playing, and you've started grinding your way towards the end game. But what's that? You hit level 56? Eesh. Welp, hope you like playing a new class with the same name, cause that's what you're doing now.

I could go on like this for a long time. There's so much wrong with this game it could fill a book. I would say something like, every aspiring game designer should be forced to play it for a week just to make sure that something like it never happens again, but BDO fails so hard at every level, that I'm amazed it even happened once. The interface is one of the worst I've ever seen, and I've played Hearts of Iron 3. Server performance is hot garbage. Engine performance is hot garbage. Even when the engine and server are running fine, the physics? Hot garbage. Items from certain NPC vendors are locked behind a complicated *conversation minigame*. It's a pay to win nightmare, most actually free to play games are less pay to win than BDO. And that paywall doesn't even keep up community quality like you might expect. The community is at least as bad as the game is (certainly it's the worst I've ever seen, notice the trend). I'm pretty sure they've been wondering 'if traps are gay' for well over a year now. You'd think they'd have worked it out by now, but I guess the fact that they're still playing numbers them among neither the best nor brightest. About the only straight up nice thing I can say about Black Desert is that the character designer is actually quite good, with some of the most granular options for character customization I've ever seen, I guess to compensate you for missing options like, say, your character's sex. But honestly, at this point I've become so jaded that I'm half convinced the the thing is only good as it is so that you spend so much time designing your character that you miss out on the refund.

Like I said before, fractal of awful. I'm not kidding about that, and I wasn't joking in the first part of my review either. On sale, this game *might* actually be worth $5, because you get to experience the head-on, flaming, nuclear trainwreck that is Black Desert Online for yourself. I realized the truth about this game about 5 hours in. The rest of my hours were me trying to find out how deep the rabbit hole went, and being continuously amazed, aghast, and amused at what I was finding. Do you like watching awful movies? Have you ever asked yourself questions like: How bad can a game be while still being technically playable? What if ET for the 2600 was an MMO? What if Tommy Wiseau had become a game designer instead of a director? Then for the cost of a sandwich, you could have a creation that you find yourself spending hours or even days poring over, all the while experiencing a mixture of confusion, horror, and perhaps even a twisted sort of respect for the demented minds that birthed this monstrosity.

If that doesn't sound enjoyable, I'd say take your money and run, but money has weight and I can't afford to buy strength potions from the premium store.