Worth Playing without investing money.

[Sioyth]

I wanna do mostly pve, but how bad is the grind without money and if its worth it.

[Mr Deap]

It's not investing. It's called spending.

in·vest
/inˈvest/
verb
gerund or present participle: investing
1.
expend money with the expectation of achieving a profit or material result by putting it into financial schemes, shares, or property, or by using it to develop a commercial venture.
"getting workers to invest in private pension funds"
synonyms:
put money into, provide capital for, fund, back, finance, subsidize, bankroll, underwrite; More

Is the spend worth the entertainment?

Playtime vs money, yeah it's quite cheap actually.

[DSoctober]

Worth Playing without investing money?
nope

[RotherHans]

Nein.

5 pets are mandatory to PvE grind in ANY sane fashion.
You can only get them with cash.
Sometimes a beginner event awards you a free pet, but that´s the only freebie you´ll EVER get from these people here.

[Mr Deap]

Originally posted by RotherHans:

Nein.

5 pets are mandatory to PvE grind in ANY sane fashion.
You can only get them with cash.
Sometimes a beginner event awards you a free pet, but that´s the only freebie you´ll EVER get from these people here.

For normal human on planet earth who play at most 1 hour max a day, they are worthless.

[LowfatEnvelope]

It's worth trying out! Currently the game is free for the next two weeks, so it's worth a try! You probably have to go through their website for the free version.

As far as spending goes:
If you're playing it very casually you don't need to spend money, no. They're pretty generous with handouts too if you only play for say, a month, and then take a month break, and then come back, etc. It's an extremely cheap game to get started in, but there are many items in the store most people will tell you that you should buy (namely 5 pets, at least), and these are not cheap, but again, depending on how casually you're playing, you don't need these. That being said, you will almost certainly want to buy these. They save your hands and your sanity, and if you care about looting every single mob you're killing you do actually need them to be efficient, because you can kill hundreds of mobs very quickly and if you don't have pets, you have to loot them all individually.


If you buy the Archer Ascension bundle in the store during that time ($60), you'll get a number of items + the most expensive version of the game on their website. This has a bunch of archer related items, so I wouldn't really say it's worth it unless you like everything in it.

[Linger | 零二]

Realistically. If you want to do ONLY PvE you will still be forced to spend 50$ minimum for pets. If you hate seeing yourself being WAY behind other players in every aspect of the game cuz you aren't spending money on the game, Don't buy it. This game is almost impossible to be played as F2P game. Entry price is around 130$ if you want to have the basic things to actually progress in the game and reach end game etc..

[maustercheese]

Originally posted by Linger:

Realistically. If you want to do ONLY PvE you will still be forced to spend 50$ minimum for pets. If you hate seeing yourself being WAY behind other players in every aspect of the game cuz you aren't spending money on the game, Don't buy it. This game is almost impossible to be played as F2P game. Entry price is around 130$ if you want to have the basic things to actually progress in the game and reach end game etc..

and yet i have been doing just fine as free 2 play nothing spent on the game only been not playing to much cause of the xchronahost bug that i should see if they FINALLY fixed that or not

[Tyrone Biggums]

to play this game u need id say 3 pets min or u will spend ur whole life mashing F picking up drops it really sucks

[Raz]

Been playing the non-steam version for a couple years now, and i've only paid the initial $30 (price at the time) to get in.

The pve combat is very mindlessly grindy. Spamming your keys to kills tons of enemies that look the same. Its all very flashy and nice to look at though (and the game itself is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beautiful!), so it helps break the tedium a bit.
Tons of quests and sidequests everywhere you look. (mostly the 'talk to this person' or 'kill this amount of these things')

You'll never run out stuff to do quest-wise, in fact you'll probably be flooded with more than you'll know what to do with, and you'll quickly out-level what you're currently doing so much that it feels like you're skipping ahead a bit too quickly at some points. Especially since you're awarded with xp boosts by the game almost every time you log in, cough, or fart.

The game automatically turns into open pvp once you hit a certain high enough level, but i've never had any trouble with it. Just log in to the less populated servers, and folks seem to generally leave each other alone.

I'd say $5 is one heck of a deal for this game, even if its just for the massive trading/crafting/economy thing thats underneath it all, waiting for you to dig into.
(Also be prepared to look up a lot of info in wikis and guides, the game doesn't explain much of anything at all)

[Linger | 零二]

Originally posted by maustercheese:

Originally posted by Linger:

Realistically. If you want to do ONLY PvE you will still be forced to spend 50$ minimum for pets. If you hate seeing yourself being WAY behind other players in every aspect of the game cuz you aren't spending money on the game, Don't buy it. This game is almost impossible to be played as F2P game. Entry price is around 130$ if you want to have the basic things to actually progress in the game and reach end game etc..

and yet i have been doing just fine as free 2 play nothing spent on the game only been not playing to much cause of the xchronahost bug that i should see if they FINALLY fixed that or not

What do you mean by doing fine? I'm talking here about progressing towards end game content and that your experience is incomparably worse than if you are paying. And I'm saying that after playing the game since beta till July 2018. The cash shop has gotten gradually more and more p2w and so many promises have been broken about never p2w etc.. that it's just funny at this point. So yea, you can play the game f2p if you are ok with being behind everyone by miles, most likely never gonna reach end game cuz you simply NEED to spend money on certain stuff like pets.

[IconoclastEntityActual]

You can play the game without spending money on it.

However just be prepared to be inconvenienced at every bit of content of the game. Which you can make much more enjoyable by spending a basic of $200 - $400 USD for your account and about $150 - $300 per character.

The game is basically a Pay to Fast to Win Korean Grinder.

[Bear]

The game may cost £5 but in theory it costs like a AAA title - £50. Thats for pets for looting. Pets and possibly weight is the only thing you need to get using cash.

[andragonfirefly]

You can apparently get most of the things you need in game from grinding. How much grinding does it take? Way above unrealistic levels of grinding to amount to materials you need. For instance... You need a saddle for various reasons once you get your horse. You will need to kill about 200 wild boars to process twice, which cuts it down to you only having about 12 of the fine hides required to make a saddle. Of course that is only 1 of the ingredients it takes. You can play without spending any more money than you already spent on the game, but you better not leave the rookie areas without the right weapons, armor, and other equipment. Very rarely do they "give" you anything cool for free. Even the freebies usually require some kind of grinding and there is only so much grinding you can do in a day. Not to mention the tools required to harvest these materials are not cheap to constantly be replacing or repairing if they even can be repaired. I spent millions on a garden hoe just so I can have one that can be repaired, but the cost of the repairs turned out to be 10 times the cost of buying a brand new "improved hoe". You need to make one single item but you have to juggle contribution points around and lose invested energy and get hardly any return. Turns out you can get more by just going to get it yourself, but a specific mineral node hardly ever produces the mineral it is supposed to be producing. For instance...You chop down 10 birch trees, huge ones at that, and you don't get a single birch timber, just plain logs or some kind of event item or all kinds of possibilities but not the freaking type of wood you need which is why you were chopping down a specific tree in the first place. Then 3 50,000 silver worth improved axes later, you might have the few birch timbers you needed. But now you have no inventory to put it so you still never get the materials you need after hours of grinding. And don't forget, if you need planks, count on 10 times as many timbers. And if you need plywood, count on 100 times the amount of timbers you will need to harvest. So yeah, the grinding is never ending from these tight-wad rich kids from Kakao. But that being said, it's the best MMO combat animations I have personally seen, and pretty cool graphics to the scenery too. I hope you have better luck than me. Real luck, not in-game luck buffs. They don't seem to do much at all at all of these RANDOM RESULTS games you have to play to survive. It's like a box of chocolates. Sometimes you can kill 100 specific monsters needed to complete a quest that requires you to kill 10, but the game mechanics is set to random whether or not each monster counts. The randomness in the game is too much. Sure, life is full of surprises but if I stick a sandwich in the microwave, I expect to get a hot sandwich out of it when it is done if I didn't screw it up. They got me hooked on this game but they also convinced me to never buy another game from them too. It's a casino in disguise.

[RetroGamingGalaxy]

Considering there is zero montly fee to play, and the entry fee is so low... putting $10 - $20 a month in cash shop stuff to slowly upgrade your quailty of life isn't a bad thing... The servers don't run for free... and people are not working free when they brought the game to market, not even including the work done to deliever patches....

It's beyond me why people complain about spending more... the amount of hours you can get in value from BDO is massive... and to get the same amount of hours in "AAA" games, you'll be spending well over a few thousand dollars with all content, season passes, dlc, stuff...

[Linger | 零二]

Originally posted by BornToBeRetro:

Considering there is zero montly fee to play, and the entry fee is so low... putting $10 - $20 a month in cash shop stuff to slowly upgrade your quailty of life isn't a bad thing... The servers don't run for free... and people are not working free when they brought the game to market, not even including the work done to deliever patches....

It's beyond me why people complain about spending more... the amount of hours you can get in value from BDO is massive... and to get the same amount of hours in "AAA" games, you'll be spending well over a few thousand dollars with all content, season passes, dlc, stuff...

Are you seriously gonna pull the "They gotta pay servers somehow" to justify the p2w they've brought to the game despite them promising they won't add it? Also Although i understand your point you are trying to make, Pearl Abyss (BDO devs) abused the trust of their community and included predatory microtransactions and even degraded the gameplay to pressure you into buying them. And i'm not evne talking about the game not being f2p but b2p. And yes, it cost 30$ at launch minimum, so they must've made a lot of money from that. Also I don't see how it's a good thing that you have to put 10-20$ monthly into a game to upgrade your quality of life. The game shouldn't make you feel that your quality of life sucks and you need to improve it through cash shop.