David Vincent

Second Review 5 Months Later My opinion of this game from 5 months ago has not gotten better; only worse. The quests in this game are often boring tasks like go shoot a beehive, and you must be able to generate massive amounts of money daily to afford the very expensive upgrades. I enjoyed Guild Wars much more than this game. Initial Review I have played many games over the years such as World of Warcraft (WoW), Guild Wars I & 2, Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR), StarCraft 2, Diablo III, Dawn of War, EVE, Final Fantasy, and NeverWinter to mention a few. My profession is a Lead System Architect for a well-known business application company. I must build applications that people are willing to purchase, and that requires designing solutions from a customer's perspective to give them a great user experience. I purchased the $100 Black Desert Online starter package, and later invested another $100 Summarized below are some of my main pros and cons of the Black Desert Online (BDO) game as it relates to other games, and I have included a score on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best value. Pros: - Top 5 gaming system graphics. The landscape, armor, and visual effects are really nice. (Score 8) - Many new characters to choose from (Score 7) - Top 5 gaming system new character design features (Score 9) - You can acquire a lot of money fast (Score 8) - Helpful auto travel feature from one point to another feature (Score 7) - You can level your character up to 56 in 5 to 8 days (Score 8) Cons: - The quests and stories are really weak (Score 1) - The User Interface is the worst I've seen. There are many available skills to learn that required two, three, or even four-button combinations to activate. That's a terrible design concept, and some of the activation combinations indicated on the spells do not work (Score 0) - No Tutorial to help you learn how to use or optimize the game's full potential. I constantly had to search for information online about how to do something in the game. (Score 0) - The high-level items in the Cash shop are really expensive (e.g., $100M to $2B) (Score 2) - All player classes are gender-locked (Score 3) - It could take you months to build your PvP character to a highly competitive level. People are lured in by the great graphics, and ability to customize your character's looks, but the weak stories associated with quests, and the terrible User Interface reveals a significant design issue. Based on my gaming experience, BDO is not worth investing the money and effort required to learn how to optimize this game when compared to other games available.