This'll be a little bit of a long one, but I wanted to tell you guys about Black Desert Online and then see if anyone would be interested in playing and/or being part of a guild.
Black Desert Online has a lot of information (and misinformation) about the game available online. It initially launched in Korea, and went into open beta at the beginning of this year. In May 2015 the game received it's open beta on the Japan servers. Rumors of the game's NA release is supposedly going to be mid-to-late 2016, with it's closed beta tests opening up in late 2015.
So what is the game? Certainly you gathered it's an MMO - and that it is! The developers have gone on record stating they want it to be one of the most immersive and dynamic MMOs to date. Graphic quality, sound quality, and combat fluidity have all been honed to take advantage of modern hardware and data packaging - so just right out of the box in it's early state, the game is graphically impressive. The minimum requirements are nothing to scoff at, and going up into the recommended requirements things get pretty heavy. I am running the game on ultra with a special edition 6gb GTX780 and an i5 and average 45-50FPS at 1080.
Combat is some loose hybrid of character action - beat'em up combos (loose, I said) with minor influences of Dark Souls - particularly when it comes to how much weight your character has can drastically effect how well you can dodge roll.
Cool downs do exist in the game, but nearly every skill can be used and spammed as often as you want, however, the effectiveness of that skill is determined by whether it's off cool down or not.
The world itself is massive! Perhaps not the largest to date, but the shear quality that went into designing the world more than makes up for it. There is no such thing as "zones" or "instances". In an attempt to create the aforementioned "most immersive MMO to date", the world is fully open and the only case of instancing is player housing (which I will talk about in just a minute)
The world also features a dynamic weather system - it's possible to follow a storm as it moves across the map. As well as a day/night cycle (which surprisingly, some newer MMOs don't even have this). Keep in mind the game is still in beta, but [speculation] has it that there will be seasons as well as dynamic events - such as (smaller) towns being overrun by monsters, or taken back by players.
Player housing is semi-instanced. All the available houses to the players are available in the world map. By default, your own house will be part of the world, however, it is possible for another player to own that same house, and should they own it, in THEIR game their house will be the one they access. Visiting another people's house (such as one you don't own), the version of the home that will be part of the map will be the highest-rated house based on a value assigned to it on the level of decoration inside.
The game itself is a free-to-play game. This brings me right along into wanting to talk about a few of the nasty blemishes on a rather impressive game. The f2p model does suffer minor pay-to-win aspects. Certain costume sets give minor passive bonuses (like 5-10% bonus exp if wearing the full set). In my eyes, none of the cash shop options commit any unholy sins of f2p as far as p2w goes. However, the cash shop - at least for the JP version - is stupidly expensive. A full costume set (head, gloves, coat, boots, necklace, accessory) costs roughly $20.
I have my own theories as to why it is. Firstly; the game's quality is outstanding, especially for f2p, thusly, higher development and maintenance costs. Secondly: Japan's incredibly small PC-gaming group. Since PC Gaming is even more niche in Japan, and the costs of maintaining a strictly-PC MMO is high, the prices for the f2p stuff is high. This is just my own hypothesis, though. Regardless, it is upsetting at how prices are in the shop.
In addition to this, the game also doesn't have trading it. The only form of player-to-player item exchange is the...well...item exchange. I personally haven't used it, so I can't explain exactly how it works, but I do know it's NOT a globally wide auction house. I believe it's a city-wide player reselling outlet (in other words, no price bidding - players list the price they wish to sell the item at)
Lastly on the negative marks is the way questing is handled. It is handled........like any other MMO, really. For a game that has done quite a bit to stand out as player-driven MMO game that is dynamic and immersive, the fact that it does the standard "talk to NPC (ignore the dialogue), go to place, kill things, go back to NPC, profit" is far more noticeable. The saving grace to this, however, is the fast-paced, fluid combat that is at least fun to do, on top of exploring an excellently designed world. I believe I have spent more time in the game doing Skyrim-styled "personal-questing, aimless-exploration" than I have spent in doing NPC quests.
So now that my review is over (p.s. there is no fast traveling system in this game, heh heh heh), let me mention a few technicalities.
First off, the game is limited to Korea and Japan at the moment - if you didn't gather that. In Korea, the game is rated 18+ and requires verification that you are 18 years of age - which requires you to have a KSSN. So, unless you live in Korea legally, you probably don't have one. To get into it, there is a site that sells Korean accounts for $10. If you want to risk doing such a sketchy sounding thing, by all means, the Korean servers are several patches ahead of the JP servers. For JP, the game is blocked outside of Japan and requires using a VPN to get access to download and play it. Which, I figured "NBD!! I VPN my conenction all the time!"...well, apparently both PureVPN and VyprVPN don't hide your connection well enough - attempting to connect to the website using both VPNs were blocked. I asked PureVPN about this, they forwarded my email to "the proper representative"...and I haven't heard back from them a week later. GG guys.
Fortunately, SoftEther - a free VPN, does seem to be able to get into the game. The only downside is that it's a far less reliable VPN. Many times I have had it drop connection mid-game.
Regardless of which server you pick, you'll need to download the user-made English patch (unless you can read and understand the respective language you picked). The English patch, like I said, is fan made, not officially supported, and is mostly machine-translated. So the dialogue tends to be in very broken English. To me, this made the game that much more interesting. Being dropped into a world with what effectively was a mentally ill man trying to explain to me how to play, but ultimately requiring my own skill to figure it out was...very satisfying.
There are a load of tutorials on getting into the game - they're the ones I followed - and so if you are interested, I will post the links below, along with a couple gameplay videos I did using ShadowPlay
So, as you have gathered, I am playing in the JP servers. I do no speak Japanese, nor do I read it. There are a handful of English speaking players around, and it was in fact a friend I made in the game that had mentioned the small selection of English-speaking guilds in the game tend to be...well, fairly immature. I considered starting my own guild just to be a more adult-centered guild that was far more casual as well, because, by no means am I an expert on this game, and neither is my friend, and in fact a lot of the English speaking group in the game, I feel, are far from experts.
So I was just going to start a casual guild. So, here I am asking if anyone who does decide to pick up the game, might you be interested in joining, so we can all fumble through the broken text together?
I am currently playing on the Media server, which is the newest server - barely a month old.
I will post a response to this thread with the tutorial links and the gameplay videos for you! :D
