Posted in: Games, Review, Video Games | Tagged: Black Desert Online, game review, Pearl Abyss

[REVIEW IN PROGRESS] Black Desert Online on Xbox One

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Pearl Abyss's MMORPG Black Desert Online has finally released on the Xbox One, with access to several servers. Like most MMOs, the early bit of the game is devoted to setting up the story and providing a tutorial, while also levelling characters up to the cap so they can take part in end-game content. Which normally means a lot of random fetch and "go here, kill this" quests. Black Desert mostly avoids the fetch quests, but that just means you end up murdering a ton of things, all the time.

Despite releasing on PC in 2014, Black Desert has had some major graphics overhauls over the years, which makes it look far better than most other console MMOs on the market. However, that's a rather double edged sword, since the performance variability of console hardware means Black Desert is a glitchy mess on older consoles, while it's stable and gorgeous on the newer One X. Several times I've run up to NPCs to complete quests only to find them as black placeholders rather than rendered characters. The switch from live gameplay to recorded cutscenes is also not ideal, as the rendering should be a smooth transition without any black loading screens, but instead the gameplay freezes and looks like a glitch. Which is not ideal. Granted, that problem is mostly caused by my ancient Xbox One's failing hardware since I have one of the original consoles. Black Desert performs much better on the One S and One X thanks to simple things like hardware upgrades and age.

I'm still grinding my way through the game, and probably will be for a while, but things are pretty okay so far. A bit of a mixed bag, but that's MMO's for you. Most don't pick up until you really get going through the higher level dungeons. And I still have quite a bit of levelling and story to do until I'm there.

Honestly, my biggest gripe with Black Desert so far are the controls and display options. The console controls on default are, well, not great. Mostly because the game doesn't seem to recognize some of them, especially in the combat tutorial. The character movement and quest tracking systems are also more clearly designed for keyboard and mouse movement, but with a PC-first MMO, thats to be expected.

The display options, however, are frustrating. There's no way to customize display size or screen bounds, so depending on your TV, you might end up with a UI that cuts out at the corners.

That isn't to say everything is bleak. Black Desert is still an engaging MMORPG with a deep story. It's just a bit rough around the edges. That said, I have high hopes for the endgame content once I reach it.

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