:fa_gamepad: Black Desert



  • So, a new MMO is coming out in the next couple days. The preorder people started a couple days ago. I bought the game yesterday, and may be in today or tomorrow.

    Anyway, I'm going to be going in mostly blind, apart from the things my friend has told me as he browses threads on /v/ about the game. I'm fairly certain he will join one of their guilds so he can get a fairly good income, but I've always been the 'start from scratch, start your own guild' type. Might have to change that, with this game.

    What I know so far:

    • The character creation is pretty amazing. No game I've ever seen lets you customize characters to such an extent, though it bugs me that only some characters can be fat. I can't be a fat wizard? Fat chance I'll be any wizard, then!
    • Trading is apparently cool. There are trade routes, and items you get from a point on one sells better the farther away on the route you sell it.
    • Guilds pay you a salary
    • You can build housing, and guilds can apparently have towns?
    • You can hire NPCs to craft things for you
    • The combat is actiony, and you can trigger most skills with combos?

    Might be the most ambitious MMO in years. Looking forward to it. So, who's with me!?



  • @Magus said:

    though it bugs me that only some characters can be fat. I can't be a fat wizard?

    There is no American wizard ? 😉



  • I vaguely looked at their website a few weeks ago.

    IIRC it's a ported Korean or Chinese game, which already puts it in the "not for me" bucket. I dunno, might be interesting though.

    EDIT: Korean. Was released in Korea Dec. 2014.

    Maybe we should ask @Ascendant if he knows anybody who plays it.

    EDIT EDIT: wait, are the classes tied to gender, or is that just really bad copy on the website? You can be a sorceress but not a sorcerer? Weird.



  • [me watches and waits for more info]



  • Yeah, so, it's an unusual Korean game in general. They're changing the business model a bit in the international release.

    As for classes, they're sort of gender locked. Witch and Wizard appear to have the same skills, but Warrior and Valkyrie vary a bit more (he's slightly more offense, while she's slightly more defense). There is only a female ranger, and only a male massive berserker guy at the moment. The ninja classes aren't in yet, but vary a bit based on gender. Basically, each character is pretty well developed and I'm willing to play as whatever, so this doesn't annoy me, but I know plenty of guys who will only play male characters, and it might annoy them.

    Right now I'm planning to play Witch or Valkyrie. Those are my preferred roles regardless of game. We'll see how it goes.



  • I usually start out with a archer type character, but I don't have any issue playing a female. It's just weird to make an open-world, open-whatever universe and then tie class to gender like a Diablo II type thing. (Even Diablo III doesn't make that error.) Who made that design decision? So weird.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Who made that design decision?

    Tera did that a lot, and I'm suspicious it was simply them being lazy on animations.

    Every new class seems gender/race locked, and the gunner is locked to females of two races that have practically identical figures.



  • Also a Korean game. Huh. Oh well.



  • I'm looking at it.

    This seems to be what an elder scrolls MMO should have been.

    Open ended MMO interaction.

    Sadly doesn't come with the ES theme and lore.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    It's just weird to make an open-world, open-whatever universe and then tie class to gender like a Diablo II type thing. (Even Diablo III doesn't make that error.) Who made that design decision? So weird.

    Basically, if you're designing specific character models, animations, equipment, and voices to the extent they are, it takes as much time and effort to make another gender for a character as to make another character entirely. Some games do that, like Path of Exile.

    Honestly, it depends on the game. It's questionable in an MMO for the same reason it would be in Skyrim: You make the character what they are. But it doesn't make sense in many games at all. Devil May Cry only has a male Dante and male Vergil. Was this an error? I don't really think so. It's perfectly fine with me if you want to develop a character with a specific gender. It's an attribute of the character, why complain? EDIT: I'll put it this way: No one is going to complain to an author, "Why didn't you let me choose to have the main character of your book be male!"

    So in this game, I'm fairly sure it's mostly the first concern.



  • I actually think the Elder Scrolls MMO we actually got is pretty much exactly what an Elder Scrolls MMO should have been. The problem is that Elder Scrolls doesn't work as a multiplayer game. They already did they best they could given that limitation.

    Elder Scrolls isn't about making trade routes.



  • I replaced it with SkyForge.

    Very grindy, but the combat is leagues ahead.

    Reminds me of a action-combat with the battle flow of FFXIII, in the sense that you build up to a burst, and try to effectively use your bursts.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Elder Scrolls isn't about making trade routes.

    True.

    I'm probably way off base.

    @blakeyrat said:

    The problem is that Elder Scrolls doesn't work as a multiplayer game.

    I feel like the demand is for an ES with small group co-op.

    I wonder if the pattern of getting a team and joining a large world with its own instance like in Guild Wars 1 would have worked better.

    @blakeyrat said:

    They already did they best they could given that limitation.

    I'd disagree there, almost any other pattern would have worked better. Themepark doesn't fit ES at all.

    It's almost as if they ripped off last gen MMOs, and themed it with ES, instead of making ES into an MMO.



  • @Magus said:

    Basically, if you're designing specific character models, animations, equipment, and voices to the extent they are, it takes as much time and effort to make another gender for a character as to make another character entirely.

    Well whatever, I still think it's bullshit.

    I bet if they actually did the math, they'd find it was one of the pound-wise, penny-foolish decisions. They've probably spent far more on some dumb feature or dungeon nobody actually uses day-to-day.

    That said, with this game design it's not as big a deal as it would be in, say, Fry Cry or that Shadows or Mordor game, because at least females are represented as protagonists instead of just prisoners to rescue or prostitutes.

    Grump.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    or that Shadows or Mordor game, because at least females are represented as protagonists instead of just prisoners to rescue or prostitutes.

    Hey, hey, there's a whole challenge mode where you play as a female character! I mean, there's no story for it, but you have to be way better at the game for it! So she's clearly far tougher!

    But yeah, Black Desert keeps putting out Q&As which seem to show that this is one of the most-asked questions. They don't intend to completely match everything from what I can tell, but they do intend to at least provide counterpart classes like they did with the Valkyrie and Warrior for more of them.



  • @xaade said:

    I feel like the demand is for an ES with small group co-op.

    I feel people who demand that are wrong and stupid.

    There's probably a demand for a GTA-like open world fantasy game which allows small group co-op. But if they make that instead of an actual Elder Scrolls game, I'd be fucking pissed.

    Because I want an Elder Scrolls game, goddamnit.

    @xaade said:

    I wonder if the pattern of getting a team and joining a large world with its own instance like in Guild Wars 1 would have worked better.

    The design they should follow is one based on Borderlands or GTA or Saint's Row games. It's been done. Many times.

    @xaade said:

    I'd disagree there, almost any other pattern would have worked better. Themepark doesn't fit ES at all.

    Right; but you can't make an MMO that's not a themepark. That's what I meant when I said they did the best that is humanly possible.

    I still think it's dumb they didn't spend some time repackaging the single player missions they already implemented as $20 stand-alone games. One for each faction.

    And honestly, they could have packed each faction, removing the MMO elements, keeping the normal quests, and sold them as stand-alone offline games. Because the writing in the game is really, really good and their obsession with trapping it in an MMO is meaning less people get exposure to it.

    I would have enjoyed playing ESO much more if it literally hadn't even been an MMO. None of the MMO elements are necessary for enjoying the writing on the quest lines, or exploration of the world or the resolution of the main plot (which is single-player dungeons anyway.) You don't need the group dungeons or anchor events to grind, if you do normal quests the game's already balanced enough that you can keep-up the correct level. And they could upsell-- charge the price difference ($30) to port your character from the single-player version into the MMO. It'd be a cash cow.

    Yes, there's a huge QA effort involved in that, but the coding would be minimum and the content creation is already done. Zenimax should fucking hire me.



  • @Magus said:

    Hey, hey, there's a whole challenge mode where you play as a female character!

    You can also switch to the female avatar (whatsername who you meet in the second half of the game), but it's obviously a half-assed last-minute feature because it doesn't change any of the cutscenes.

    @Magus said:

    But yeah, Black Desert keeps putting out Q&As which seem to show that this is one of the most-asked questions.

    I wager in Korea the question doesn't get asked a lot, but any MMO (and ideally any game) released in the US in the last year or two should be pretty damned aware of the gender issue, and at MINIMUM have a response to it.

    As long as games like Far Cry are really fucking it up for literally no justifiable reason, they're going to come out looking ok though.



  • Come to think of it, how fucking amazing would a medieval fantasy Saint's Row be? Jesus. I want that game SO BAD.



  • What really gets me is when people complain about this stuff in Path of Exile, for instance. Each of the characters has a very specific backstory and lines. For instance, the Scion was married away to some politician by her wealthy parents, and eventually killed him, which is why she's getting exiled. She talks about it as the story progresses.

    You can't change that without completely redoing everything to do with her. Most bosses even have specific responses based on who you are.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    but any MMO (and ideally any game) released in the US in the last year or two should be pretty damned aware of the gender issue, and at MINIMUM have a response to it.

    Can I make a transgender Valkyrie?



  • @Magus said:

    For instance, the Scion was married away to some politician by her wealthy parents, and eventually killed him, which is why she's getting exiled. She talks about it as the story progresses.

    So?

    They could just make it a gay marriage. Why not?

    One of my good early examples is the game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, which allows you to be either a male or female security officer. There's a romance in the plot with another female character. If you pick a female, it just turns into a lesbian romance. Why the fuck not?

    It was fine when Raven made that game in 2000. Why isn't it fine now?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I feel people who demand that are wrong and stupid.

    There's probably a demand for a GTA-like open world fantasy game which allows small group co-op. But if they make that instead of an actual Elder Scrolls game, I'd be fucking pissed.

    Ok, maybe I didn't communicate well.

    @blakeyrat said:

    The design they should follow is one based on Borderlands or GTA or Saint's Row games. It's been done. Many times.

    This is what I meant.

    When people say they want multiplayer ES, they want multiplayer ES, not an MMO.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Right; but you can't make an MMO that's not a themepark. That's what I meant when I said they did the best that is humanly possible.

    There are MMOs that are entirely player driven.

    Finding the balance between that and IA interaction may be difficult.

    One possibility is to have employees play some of the NPCs, but that would raise the cost of the MMO quite a bit.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I would have enjoyed playing ESO much more if it literally hadn't even been an MMO. None of the MMO elements are necessary for enjoying the writing on the quest lines, or exploration of the world or the resolution of the main plot (which is single-player dungeons anyway.)

    The only impact the MMO part ever had on me, was having another player craft me some high tier weapons because he was bored, I guess. Having to rely on others to become a vampire, and getting killed by a player in the PvP zone while trying to get the badge for clearing all the PvE quests in the PvP zone.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Because the writing in the game is really, really good

    Razum-dar quickly became one of my favorite ES characters, possibly of all time.

    I saved him, and he hates me for it. But he's worth all the other bland NPCs combined.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I wager in Korea the question doesn't get asked a lot, but any MMO (and ideally any game) released in the US in the last year or two should be pretty damned aware of the gender issue, and at MINIMUM have a response to it.

    It seems the easterners response to our gender issues is pretty much, shrug.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    One of my good early examples is the game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, which allows you to be either a male or female security officer. There's a romance in the plot with another female character. If you pick a female, it just turns into a lesbian romance. Why the fuck not?

    It actually takes effort to prevent gay relationships.

    Bethesda does a good job of simply not caring what people choose to do, and keeping the lines similar.

    Zenimax took it past that point, and made it a point to have gay NPCs and gay relationships. I've run into 3 gay relationships that have had quests or impact on quests in my time playing ESO.

    "Yes mister, I'll get the flower to save your Husband."



  • @xaade said:

    There are MMOs that are entirely player driven.

    Yeah; shitty ones like EVE Online. Not fun ones.

    @xaade said:

    Razum-dar quickly became one of my favorite ES characters, possibly of all time.

    I saved him, and he hates me for it. But he's worth all the other bland NPCs combined.

    RIGHT! Razum-Dar is so amazing. SO AMAZING.

    And people who are actually Elder Scrolls fans know nothing about him, because they (by and large) don't want to play an MMO. Meanwhile, a bunch of World of Warcraft players who don't give a whit about Razum-Dar are playing ESO because they want more MMOs. It's a tragedy.

    @xaade said:

    Zenimax took it past that point, and made it a point to have gay NPCs and gay relationships. I've run into 3 gay relationships that have had quests or impact on quests in my time playing ESO.

    To be fair, Skyrim also had no compunction against gay marriage, so they could have just been following that model. (Not sure when ESO started development...)

    Zenimax does as much right as they do wrong. It's so frustrating. Like you play the game and you're like, "wow this writing is AMAZING"!

    Then something reminds you that they built the game UI for an Xbox controller, but the PC version doesn't actually let you use an Xbox controller and you rage against their stupidity. Or that despite paying them $$$ there's no way to get a Steam code to download the game via Steam without starting a new account from scratch.

    It's like they hired the best writers, artists, game developers, and the worst UI designers, business-people, website developers. It's amazing. It drives you batty.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    To be fair, Skyrim also had no compunction against gay marriage, so they could have just been following that model. (Not sure when ESO started development...)

    But I don't remember NPCs that specifically had their own gay relationship. ESO has that, so they are a little more progressive for taking the extra step.

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's like they hired the best writers, artists, game developers, and the worst UI designers, business-people, website developers. It's amazing. It drives you batty.

    True.

    If the next ES game comes close to ESO's writing...

    It's kind of sad that ESO isn't a single player game.

    But I'm not sure how ESO would handle letting the player go in any direction at any time.

    ESO has an order for you to complete. A few of it's areas are optional.

    But it's frustrating to me to look at the map, see a dark spot, and KNOW there is a static "hub" there with quests. I mean, the NPCs could at least wander around in that hub... You know, walk from ledge to ledge on that plateau, looking as if there is some life in them. At least the guards do, even if it's a set path.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So?

    They could just make it a gay marriage. Why not?

    One of my good early examples is the game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force,

    The past is not the future. An ideal world was never even the point of the game. The whole game is built around a world of corruption. I'm pretty sure the Templar was exiled for being gay.



  • @Magus said:

    I'm pretty sure the Templar was exiled for being gay.

    That makes it a little more realistic anyway.

    I don't understand why people want to remove offensive material from fantasy. That's what makes the world more real to me.

    I want there to be the secular guy that mocks religious people. The world feels empty without him.

    Sometimes it's good to dive into a world with problems, where the main characters don't try to solve them all.



  • @xaade said:

    But I don't remember NPCs that specifically had their own gay relationship.

    I'm racking my brain but I can't think of one in Skyrim. So yeah. (I vaguely recall one in Morrowind, but too vaguely to talk intelligently about...)

    I also liked the new types of relationships in ESO. Like the Bosmer's duo, where one's the fighter and one's the lover, and in the ESO timeline the figher's a woman and the lover's a man.

    Or the whole aspects of Jode, Jone and The Mane in the Khajiit government/mythology.

    @xaade said:

    If the next ES game comes close to ESO's writing...

    It's kind of sad that ESO isn't a single player game.

    Two months on effort on Zenimax's part, and it could easily be. Three single-player games, each of which easily contains at least $20-$30 of content. So frustrating.

    @xaade said:

    But I'm not sure how ESO would handle letting the player go in any direction at any time.

    ESO has an order for you to complete. A few of it's areas are optional.

    It doesn't have to be exactly like the main Elder Scrolls series. I'm talking MINIMUM changes from the MMO-- removing the group dungeons, removing the anchor events, removing the auction house and guild traders. All removing, no adding. Like I said, I don't even think the game balance would be hugely affected, since you can solo all of ESO now without using any of those MMO features.

    Don't even need to change the maps. Just leave the anchor stones where they are. Block-off multiplayer dungeons with a "you can't enter here" dialog box. Whatever. Bare minimum changes.



  • @Magus said:

    The past is not the future. An ideal world was never even the point of the game. The whole game is built around a world of corruption. I'm pretty sure the Templar was exiled for being gay.

    My point is simply that if they had cared, it would have been easy to write backstory for both genders, and even if they didn't bother and just let the player select gender regardless, that'd still be better than what they shipped now.



  • And my point is that you're insane. You would never ask an author to rewrite her book with all the genders swapped, or configurable genders for everyone. Sometimes, the identity of the characters actually matters.



  • This goes back to removing all offensive content.

    What would be the point of the Civil war if Tullius and Ulfric agreed on everything.

    I think it's a great moral to the story. If you allow someone to convince you that an insurrection is a great idea, you need to be sure that you aren't picking a jackass for a leader.



  • What's offensive about writing a character? Why is this a problem?



  • @Magus said:

    And my point is that you're insane.

    Yeah.

    @Magus said:

    You would never ask an author to rewrite her book with all the genders swapped, or configurable genders for everyone.

    I would. Sure, why not?

    @Magus said:

    Sometimes, the identity of the characters actually matters.

    But in this case, the important thing is a person was closely associated to another person against their will, then murdered that person and was exiled as a result. The basic plot doesn't involve gender.



  • You're basically asking someone to write an entire game with seven main characters and a bunch of interactions between them and NPCs twice, hire seven more voice actors, and record all the NPC responses again, as well as have every artist take months more time making sure all the armor, weapons, animations, and models still work.

    From a programmer's perspective, it's trivial. That's ignoring reality: it's anything but.



  • You asked if I would ask them to do it. I said yes.

    Whether or not they actually do it, or even SHOULD do it, is an entirely different question.



  • Anyway, during the months before the release, they allowed people to download and use the character creator.

    I created like five of them: An archer who was so tall she didn't fit on the character screen, a basic angry looking valkyrie, an awesome witch, a massively ugly berserker, and a really emo tamer.

    You can move, rotate, and scale like 30 parts of the face, mirrored or not, and about as much with the body as well, including designing poses they prefer. It was quite cool.



  • So, apparently this game lets you choose a family name, which is shared between your alts, which also share guild membership, stash, and max energy.

    So, should I indeed name my family Seer/Syr? I haven't thought of a better one so far. Just don't know that I'd play T'dem very much, since he'll almost certainly be a berserker.



  • What's offensive about bikini mail? Some [women] complain.

    And yet, there are women in history that purposefully wore clothes like that into battle. (I know of one in Chinese history, and Japanese had a specific word for a female ninja that relied on this as a tactic).



  • Wait, is it released? Their website still says "Order Now".



  • @Magus said:

    Basically, if you're designing specific character models, animations, equipment, and voices to the extent they are, it takes as much time and effort to make another gender for a character as to make another character entirely. Some games do that, like Path of Exile.

    As someone who's working on a project similar to this, can confirm. Every new character type, be it male/female/elf/tauren/charr/etc. multiplies all the work you have to do. Even animations can't quite be shared because relative bone lengths between skeletons can be different. I want to eventually have six different "types" but settled on just plain male and female for now because that's one third as much work.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    There's probably a demand for a GTA-like open world fantasy game which allows small group co-op. But if they make that instead of an actual Elder Scrolls game, I'd be fucking pissed.

    That kind of exists. I quit it after a couple days because the structures are very easily camped, characters autoheal by hiding behind walls, getting shot stuns your character and makes the screen red.... basically, everything I hate about modern FPS.



  • TIL APB is a fantasy game.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    TIL APB is a fantasy game.

    Of course it is*! How else would you explain a full recovery from a nearby rocket blast simply by hiding behind a pillar for 30 seconds?

    *Okay, okay, I missed the "fantasy" part.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Magus said:

    Path of Exile

    How can game that has had so much effort applied to it be so consistently not fun? They get so many things right, but I just don't enjoy playing (for reasons I don't entirely know).



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Wait, is it released? Their website still says "Order Now".

    I get access today, then everyone else does tomorrow. I bought the cheapest preorder.

    @dkf said:

    How can game that has had so much effort applied to it be so consistently not fun? They get so many things right, but I just don't enjoy playing (for reasons I don't entirely know).

    I actually like it quite a lot. But there are some things that are decidedly not fun early on, like, say, using a 1h weapon and shield. Honestly, they managed to make summoning fun fairly early now, but if you use 1h weapons as a melee character, or bows, the beginning of the game will be downright horrible.

    Later on, it can be quite fun. My favorite build is a rapier and shield build with the ranger, which got massively nerfed defensively a few patches back, but the new expansion may provide a solution. Ice magic is always fun, especially because of how ice spear works. As someone who easily becomes obsessed with the mechanical nature of games, it's very much my thing, unlike Diablo 3, which bores me to tears to try to go back to.

    Anyway, back to Black Desert. The people who did the expensive preorder made it in on the 28th, then the middle ones got in yesterday, and I get in today (technically last night at 8 UTC, but...). There's some maintenance tonight, and then the actual release. Apparently the reason for the weird name of the game is that the endgame consists of a stupidly dangerous desert that drains your life but has good loot or something. Not really sure.



  • @Magus said:

    I get access today, then everyone else does tomorrow. I bought the cheapest preorder.

    Why does the cheapest package give you early access? Weird.



  • Yeah, it's definitely weird. But honestly, no complaints here!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Magus said:

    Diablo 3, which bores me to tears to try to go back to.

    OK, that's another yawnfest. Torchlight 2 is a bit better, but not quite as much as Grim Dawn. (That's mostly OK, except that you end up knowing the maps a bit too well…)



  • So as it turns out, while they named the packages you can buy the same things as the preorders were called, they aren't going to actually let me in until tomorrow. Whatever.



  • Sounds like you got 🕶 Black Deserted.


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