Black Desert Online isn't for people like my husband, although I guess it could be, depending on how you look at it. He wants games with goals, where you head straight for the finish line and get rewarded for it. He even plays MMORPGs like that: in WoW he wants to be a decent raider, and see all the end-game content. He's also tried PvPing with me in the past. The thing is, I want to get lost. Don't shove me through the world with blinders on. Let me take in the scenery. There's enough bullshit rushing in our day-to-day experiences. Let's take it easy in the game, and actually enjoy the journey. If you agree with my opinion, you may genuinely enjoy Black Desert as I have. Granted I'm still not max level, or even close, but I feel like I get a ton of enjoyment out of the game, and that it's worth the investments made.
My only real complaint in the game so far is the level of evil RNG we have to try to overcome. For example, I recently got a tier 3 hawk. This took me way longer than it did most people. I had one brown hawk I got as a reward from my pre-order, one brown hawk as a reward from the Maehwa event, and one sky hawk that I purchased separately. I followed a plan, believing that leveling your pets gets you a higher chance at a higher tier result of exchange. (It's exchanging, it's not actually breeding. You take two pets, combine them, and they turn into one new pet.) I took the two tier 1 level 10 brown hawks and exchanged them, and I even had my fingers crossed, but what did I get? A tier 2 brown hawk. Tier 2s are the most useless things ever. They start back at level 1, and they start off with one buff, but unlike the tier 1s, they don't gain a new one at level 10. They only have one buff. So I traded two looting and buffing pets, for one, and I didn't even get a new appearance as a result. I was pretty pissed, and of course I was directed to the "suggestion" forum to express my grievances. I took some time, regrouped, and leveled that tier 2 and my tier 1 sky hawk. Once they reached level 10, I took a deep breath and exchanged them. The result was a little bit underwhelming at first, but overall I like it.
This shows the buffs I ended up with, 3% karma regeneration and 3% hunting exp, neither of which I will use, at least for now. Thankfully Tuulikki kept the ability to find rare monsters, which is one of the things I really like about bird pets. Her name is the name of a Finnish goddess, and means "little wind".
Here are some pictures of her in-game.
As you can see, she's white and teal. She's not what I had hoped for (a burgundy color that I've seen around), but she's fine the way she is.
The thing is though, that all over the web I've found all these people saying they mated two level one t1s and got a t3 right away, whereas I leveled all of mine to 10 each time and ended up only going up one tier. There doesn't seem to be any sense to it. At least when it comes to in-game horse breeding there are ways to calculate likelihood of results. This seems to be completely random.
I've gone a bit off-track, but it's little things like this that I find very frustrating. There is definitely a lot of RNG in this game, almost to the point of absurdity. I don't know much at all about the end-game, but - and this might drive off some people, too - it seems to be a lot of grinding, which may or may not be the fun part. Getting a group and endlessly slaying doesn't sound terrible. There's also competitive or non-consensual PvP, depending on your goals. Some people are dead-set against PvP, and won't even fight back, and I think it's a little sad that that's okay. The really hardcore PvP crowd are so overgeared that there really isn't anything you can do to stop them from killing you... or your horse, which is way worse. Horses with death counts produce lower quality foals.
I 'made' my hubby buy Overwatch last weekend, so I may start playing that soon.
Our battle tag is Stormborn#11275 if you're interested in joining a noob on her first few matches.
I just have to peel myself away from BDO, first...
