Recent reviews by babasheep

BLACK DESERT REVIEW.

In order of + Pros, / Neutrals, - Cons.

+ Excellent combat for an MMORPG, one of the best if you like action.
+ Lifeskilling, workers and trading are fun and allow you to do much more than combat, giving plenty of reasons to return to areas you've already been to.
+ Beautiful graphics and animations.
+ One of the best character customizations in an MMORPG.
+ Solid soundtrack.
+ Good movement, controls and parkour system when there isn't any lag.
+ Entire world is open and nothing is instanced, including the ocean.
+ It doesn't take long to reach lvl 56, it's not as grindy as some other MMORPG's and catching up as a new player isn't too bad unless you want to play top level PvP.
+ Many hours of fun for a game that only costs $10 to play.
+ Event and attendance awards are generous and give you items you'd otherwise have to buy from the cash shop. You can even buy many cash shop items from the marketplace with in-game money.

/ Cash shop items on the marketplace can't be pre-ordered, meaning bots or other players will get them first.
/ World design isn't that original or interesting, but not bad either. Standard medieval fantasy stuff. Not many memorable looking creatures or locations.
/ All classes are gender-locked. There are similar classes of the opposite gender but they still play differently. Not a big deal to me personally but it seems to bother some people.
/ Voice acting and the story are nothing interesting, often repetitive, and a lot seems to be lost in translation. It's probably better in the original language.
/ While the housing and furnishing system is nice there's no reason to put much effort into it other than roleplay. Players who spend hundreds of real money on furniture will always outrank your house anyway.
/ There are tons of quests in this game, but you will soon realize none of them are well-written and the tasks are all the same. It feels like a chore, but thankfully it's mostly optional. The amity system is also boring and makes you miss quests, so I wonder why the developers bothered adding it.
/ You have to stay logged in 24/7 to earn the most money by doing things like auto-fishing, and because farms and workers don't continue while you're offline. It's also optimal to fill your character slots and use all of your alts for money purposes. Many people including myself don't care to do this or have the time for it.
/ There is no reason to group or communicate with other players until Level 50+. Even then you can play with your chat turned off most of the time. It's like a single-player MMORPG until you reach Node Wars.

- Class balance is so bad that you'd think it was done by Blizzard. Some classes are blatantly worse others, even 2 years after release.
- Optimization problems. One example is my FPS tanking when I open the marketplace.
- Servers can be very laggy especially in large-scale PVP battles. NPC's are buggy sometimes too.
- World PVP is dead and Node Wars are filled with drama, and there's no serious endgame PVE. Node Wars PVP is the endgame. This might change eventually.
- Abysmal gear enhancement system that revolves around RNG. It will waste you hundreds of hours and billions of silver but you have to do it. This has made the most players quit the game but the devs don't care because it makes them money, since there are cash shop items that help with it which makes the game lean towards Pay-To-Win.
- If you make a new main character you must repurchase things like inventory expansions and weight limits from the cash shop or else you will be at a disadavantage. This is not an alt-friendly game.
- Your character's gear will look ugly, or at least worse than everyone else's, if you don't buy an outfit from the cash shop. Not much care was put into the appearance of normal gear in this game, and this seems deliberate in order to make more money. The outfits give major bonuses to encourage buying them even more.
- Terrible cash shop practices. A value pack costs $15 a month but you have to purchase $20 in coins since there's no $5 option. Most outfits also cost over $30. Hell no!

Summary: This could have been one of the best MMORPG's to come out recently without a few major issues holding it back, which is really unfortunate. This seems like a great game at first, but a couple hundred hours later you will start to see the major flaws that outweigh the good and then you can never go back. From what I've seen the developers are in no hurry to fix these problems either, if they even want to.