Black Desert Online: Launch Week
Or, as I call it, the best damned looking game ever made.
So Black Desert launched a couple of days ago for the biggest spenders. The Conqueror's pre-order pack, which cost a whopping €100, launched for head-start access on 28th February (Sunday).
Today sees my Explorer (€50) pre-order launch date, and I'm really excited to get into it.
I'm a big BIG lover of customising my characters in a game, the main reason I'm such a big lover of the Transmog system in World of Warcraft. It's also one of the main reasons I loved City of Heroes so much in the years I spent between Vanilla WoW and Wrath.
The reason I missed TBC in its entirety?
A brighter, more fun MMO, with a character creator filled with Superhero costumes.
No brainer really.
Anyhow, the character creator in BDO is a thing of beauty. The level of detail you can go into to customise your character is amazing. You can customise everything from cheekbone placement through to re-arranging the strands of hair on your character's head manually!
The graphics in the game are second to none, certainly in the MMO genre, and the level of realism in the characters you can create is astounding:
The level of detail doesn't stop with the characters. The world itself is astoundingly beautiful, and it will push my system to its limits. A vegetation, object-heavy world, with rich and highly detailed texturing and modelling, giving rise to realistic, busy cities and masses of NPCs.
The world map system is also superbly noteworthy. Not a 2D representation like we have in WoW, this is similar to Skyrim's, in that it's an accurate 3D representation of the world at large.
As for the game itself, it's a complete departure from WoW, as it's not a Theme Park MMO. There's no "endgame" to speak of, and it's more along the lines of Skyrim, or more appropriately, Elder Scrolls Online.
A world to play and exist in, with mobs to grind, quests to do, players to kill and gear to upgrade, it's entirely open world with no instancing in sight. A far cry from WoD's garrisonville.
All that, and a complete lack of fast travel - if you want to cross the world you'd better get running!
Luckily you can set a destination and afk-run or ride there, much like you can in the current flight-path model in WoW.
Of course, rather than go down the beauty route for your character, you can naturally go for the complete derp look:
So WoW may see a slightly lesser look-in over the next few days as I get myself into BDO, and inevitably spend hours poring over character creation...