![bdo forest in turmoil bdo forest in turmoil](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GW2fgBwx4-M/maxresdefault.jpg)
There's little about the gameplay that's working for me. I'm still working it through but at the moment I lean towards the feeling that it's *only* the world-building in BDO that's holding my interest. It's made me look at what I want from an MMO, or video games in general, and consider whether my assumptions and expectations are grounded in any real sense of enjoyment or more in habit and learned response. One thing Black Desert is really making me do is think. I spent some time chasing invisible question marks until I got that. And some NPCs aren't around during daytime, either. What I do like in BDO is that certain quests can only be done at night (maybe also weather?). If BDO were to adopt that, we'd have the perfect MMO world, methinks. I agree the scripts in GW2 were much more complex however and I really miss the nested quests and cascading events. As someone who cares a great deal about realistic scale (as in how big are the streets and how tall the buildings), BDO is the frontrunner. I have a hard time comparing GW2 and BDO both are beautiful but as you said too, GW2 is colorful smudgestick magic where BDO keeps things crisp and real-sized. There is the rare empty hall or room in Calpheon I have found, but generally sites are cluttered just right - not in a Wildstar kind of OCD-way but one that feels functional. If they had compromised on the detail front, the game would have been doomed like so many big houses that only serve as props in so many games and stand empty when entered, a great shell without substance would've killed it for me. In some ways the "game" part just gets in the way. For all I've supposedly "played" Black Desert for a month now, what I've mostly done is watch.
![bdo forest in turmoil bdo forest in turmoil](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OERcORLVZW4/maxresdefault.jpg)
It's entirely possible to stand for hours looking at this world and wondering. Were those gilded frames looted by the militia or are they the family heirlooms of some wealthy Altinovan, liquidating his assets before he flees to Heidel or Calpheon? As you watch the heated bargaining between a gesticulating Shai and cold-eyed goblin dealer in art and artifacts you have to wonder about the provenance of the goods. Black Desert's is a world of trade and commerce as well as violence and magic. The tableau of cowering refugees - or are they citizens? - surrounded and menaced by more armed and armored soldiers just a few doors up the hill make it plain this is a city in turmoil.Īnd yet, meanwhile, business must go on. Whatever it means it can't be anything good. The sight of that soldier, marking the clay while a hulking guard and a lackey look on, is chilling. Found in many places in theĪrea, it has a significance I don't understand. That action has to be handcrafted just for that scene, doesn't it? Or his colleague, painting a symbol on a wall a few doors away. Take, for example, the soldier pictured above fixing something - a mirror? a shield? a sign? - to a wall in Altinova. I can't be certain but it seems to me that the Pearl Abyss team has gone to the trouble of creating specific animations for certain tableaux just to make them more convincing. When dressing sets with NPCs, almost all MMOs re-use animations primarily intended for other purposes emotes, combat, idling. Black Desert's designers have dared to be lavish, not just in the size of the cast or the scale of the production but in the detailing. The eye and the mind and the imagination. It's those tableaux that hold the eye, though. Where GW2 is a watercolor dreamscape, Black Desert is naturalism done in oils. Screenshots taken at random look, almost literally, like paintings in the style of the great Renaissance masters. Wandering through the bustling streets of Altinova or Heidel the impression is more one of walking through a gallery. Just by watching and listening that way you feel it might be possible to come to a rich, nuanced understanding of life among the Asura. In Metrica Province, to take my favorite Tyrian example, it is entirely possible to spend a whole afternoon trailing NPCs and eavesdropping on their quotidian lives. I'm not convinced it has the edge over GW2's enormously complex, nested scripted NPC narratives, where entire storylines with thousands of lines of dialog, all voiced, unfurl across whole maps, but it has a deep charm all the same. It's a fascinating approach to world-making.