Housing
Much like how Everquest 2’s housing worked, you can purchase a house in the main cities of the game and then simply enter either your own, friends’, guild’s, or the top 15. It will load their arranged furniture as you enter without any loading, so you’re always still connected to the world even though it has minor instancing. While I didn’t get to amass enough wealth in my short time with the closed beta, I have seen what others have done with their housing and am quite excited to see what craftable items I’ll be able to create to decorate with. You can own multiple houses (you’ll actually need to eventually if you want to partake in many other mechanics), each of which have different uses.
Exploration
Sure, this category could easily fit with any MMO, but there’s a lot of reason to do so in Black Desert. Not only is doing so worth it considering how gorgeous the game looks (refer to point #2) but you’ll find secret areas, chests, and rare resources among other things. Not only do you want to explore the landscape, but with NPC’s as well, as this will play into the embedded intimacy minigame that allows you to open special dialogue options, get special quests, or even access to buy special items by doing so.
Nodes, Workers and Crafting
Sure I may be cheating a bit by combining 3 categories into one for this, but they all play essential to one another. Nodes are essentially specific locations on the map and are either adventure or production based. These nodes can be connected with Contribution Points (gained from questing) and will give you bonuses such as better loot in an area and also allow your workers to bring back resources for you.
You’ll want to begin your node network from a city and work outwards; the reason for doing so is that you can hire workers to collect resources for you, meaning you don’t need to spend your energy (and time) doing so, but can only do so with nodes that are connected (by spending your Contribution Points). You can send them to get ore, wood, or other items but only after you hire them and give them room and board (this is where you refer back to #4’s housing) which also requires Contribution Points to purchase. When your worker finishes the job they will deposit the resources in your warehouse, even if you’re offline. They are people though and require to be fed to replenish their energy just as you would.
This is where crafting comes into play. Sure you could simply buy them, but that’s more expensive and nowhere near as rewarding. There’s many items that can be crafted but what makes it unique is that it’s not based on your direct skill level, but more so gathering the items (via your own doing or with workers) and giving them to the correct NPC to create the item for you. You’ll basically need the materials, silver (in-game currency), Contribution Points (for the specific housing types), and time, a lot of time. The hardest part of crafting is simply the preparation of getting the specific items you need to craft the items you want, but this is also why it’s so rewarding. Crafting will be a huge importance to guilds as you can create siege weapons for PvP, but also the more money and effort you put into it, the more and faster you gain in return as well.
AFK
What? Why is AFKing on this list? Because Black Desert actually encourages you to log in and play (or AFK) for as long as possible where most games will automatically log you off after a short amount of inactivity. There are even a few mechanics built into the game to encourage doing so.
Firstly, fishing is a great way to pass some time and gain some money in game, but you can also fish while AFK without the need for grey-area bots or macros. There’s a minigame involved with fishing, allowing for better catches based on a quick game of reactionary skill, but there’s also a built in mechanic that will auto-fish for you every 3 minutes. so should you need to go eat dinner, sleep, go to work, whatever the case is, you can leave your character logged in and fishing the whole time (albeit much slower than if you were controlling your character).
Lastly, there’s also some interesting idle animations as well if you don’t plan on AFK fishing for hours on end. The camera eventually switches to a stylistic mode, applying different filters on the screen while your character looks at, waves, and laughs at the camera. Sure it’s a small little detail, but it’s better than other games that have your characters simply staring off into space for hours.
So there you have it, 7 reasons why you’ll want to get excited for Black Desert Online. It’s still in a closed beta state and there’s much in the game that hasn’t been released, tested, or balance yet, but even in such an early state, I think I found my next online home. Check back after the next closed beta finishes up (no set date as of yet) for another list of improvements and additions.