Black Desert released in the West in 2016 on PC and has since held a fairly decent amount of player’s attention with its character creation systems and quest lines. However, how the world of Black Desert Online translates over to the console has been a topic on fans minds since the console version was announced.
Luckily, fans new and old have a lot to look forward to with Black Desert on Xbox One with brand new quest lines and additional upgrades. After spending a few days with the game, we aren’t ready to give our full review, but we’d like to give our general impressions of the early game before giving our thoughts after getting to the later parts of Black Desert to give a proper review.
The story begins in Black Desert as any great adventure should: The protagonist doesn’t remember anything, but they are seen as an exceptional soldier so the people that find them enlist their help. Although the beginning is nothing to write home about, the game quickly teaches you the basics and sees you on your way with the help of black spirit that possessed you. I enjoyed how the quests are set up and the game gives you an easy start to the adventure, but after the general introduction, the game does open up to a beautiful world that holds much to be discovered.
Attacks and spells in the game look gorgeous and are all nicely animated. Furthermore, the textures and details found within the world are equally as nice to look at. It’s clear that the developers put a fair amount of time into crafting this world along with the various settings and themes found within it. During my time with the game, which has only been a few days, I felt that the servers held up even when running at high capacity. I wasn’t thrown from a game and I didn’t experience any significant lag. However, this might all be at the price of the game’s anti-aliasing which is easy to see when objects pop in while running through towns. With that said, gameplay is still a solid and impressive good time.
The character creation system is deep enough to make the character you want. Sadly, the classes are gender locked so don’t expect to make a female dwarf, but each class varies enough to choose a class that fits your playstyle. We decided to go with the Witch because she was cute and we like magic, so it was a win for us. Inside the character creation tool, players have plenty of options when it comes to hairstyles and the character’s expression. Speaking about hairstyles, players can choose one that they like and then customize it further by adjusting the length, curl, and color of any style they choose.
What Black Desert offers players outside of quests might be seen as more interesting than the quests themselves, such as crafting or farming, which some players might enjoy more than others. You see, it’s possible to spend hours in Black Desert simply doing things outside of questing and slaying monsters. Sure, this isn’t laid out in front of the player initially, but the systems are there and they are interesting enough to hold the player’s attention when questing becomes tedious.
During my time with Black Desert, I’d like to say that the game has a lot to offer in terms of its beautiful graphics, questlines, and sandbox activities. The community in the game has been overall nice to engage with and everyone seems helpful enough to give beginner players a nice insight on what they should do to get going.
My general impressions of Black Desert are positive in what is present in the early portions of the game. I also appreciated how great the controls felt, which is always scary for players moving from tradition mouse and keyboard to a single controller. I personally can’t wait to dive deeper into the game’s features and modes to discover what this huge world has to offer.
