It’s called Black Desert Online, but the overwhelming majority of the gameworld is generic European forest. So far it's all forest, no desert.Įven the title itself is a little strange. This is everything I explored on my way to level 50. Is Russia an easier place to do business? Is North America not as lucrative as it used to be? Or does Publisher Kakao Games have other practical / logistical reasons for pushing NA and Europe off for a couple of years? I wonder if this unorthodox release order means the usual conventional wisdom is no longer true. Conversely, Russia is often a low-priority market because it has a reputation for being a difficult place to operate. It’s just an unexpected choice because NA is often thought of as a very lucrative market so developers like to target it as soon as possible. It’s not like North America is automatically entitled to get stuff first. They went for South Korea first (which is pretty understandable) in 2014, but then in 2015 they released in… Japan and Russia? They finally got around to North America and Europe in 2016 and South America and MENA in 2017. The strange thing about the release schedule is that they didn’t immediately target the North American market. Maybe it’s grindy by the standards of kids today, or maybe it breaks from the norm set by other Korean MMO titles, but it’s not a grind in the sense of killing the same monster 60 times in a row. Black Desert might be grindy, but it’s not that sort of grindy. When I hear something described as “grindy”, I think of the ancient past of 2002, when I played Dark Age of Camelot and the most expedient way to level was to stand in the same spot and farm the same cluster of mobs for an hour. I understand that Korean games are ridiculously grind-y by reputation. Note that in this context, “strange” does not mean “bad”. I can’t tell how much of the strangeness comes from the developers and how much comes from its home culture. The design is strange, the release schedule is strange, the business model is strange, the setting is strange, the interface is strange, and the dialog is strange. This is about as European as you can get.īlack Desert Online is a Korean MMO and almost everything about it is strange to me. White people in Medieval clothing on cobblestone streets with Tudor architecture and a temperate climate.
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