Tuesday, 18 February 2020

Black! Like the procession of night that leads us into the valley of despair!

My gaming world has been pretty MMOGless for a while now, depending how exactly you define a MMOG; I had a good run with the Sunday morning gang in Guild Wars 2 and Neverwinter, and a bit of a canter in The Elder Scrolls Online though it didn’t quite grab me in the same way. Star Trek Online provided a brief diversion with some entertaining character design and ship naming possibilities, and the others had a fair go at Rift but I don’t think I even got to level 10. After a bit of a break, though, and with Black Desert Online on sale for a few pounds it seemed like a good time to give it a crack.

I thought the development or initial release of BDO might just have made it into a blogpost here, back in the days of vague topicality and frequent posting; I recall previews of the character creator causing a bit of a stir with the sheer number of sliders to control cheekbone angularity and earlobe density. Either my brain or the search facility are faulty, though, and I know which my money is on. Character creation is certainly impressive, but as with so many games rendered somewhat pointless when you’re mostly staring at the back of your head from a distance when actually playing. Once into the world it’s a mixture of familiar old MMO tropes (accept quest, kill mobs, get loot) and the bewildering array of lore and skills and currencies and points of a several year old game. I’m not sure if it’s localisation or translation, several quests involve “learning about” types of creature so I was preparing a short questionnaire to work in conjunction with observation and assessment, except it turned out the questgiver was using “learn” in the sense of “kill to death” in the grand MMO tradition, it’s going to get very confusing if they start mixing their euphemisms (“look, when you said ‘learn about’ I thought you meant ‘get to know’, you know, ‘know’… in the biblical sense?”).

Combat is joyously messy, a fast paced action system of clicking or keys plus directions, like a fighting game in some ways with combos and the like. I would imagine some sort of cautious technique is advisable later on, but at least in the early game jumping into a pile of mobs and mashing random buttons produces satisfying flurries of sword slashes, kicks, punches and such, even more fun when there’s a few of you piling into a fight. There’s something deeply satisfying about mowing through large numbers of easy to kill mobs; course there still needs to be a bit of threat, but I prefer it to slogging through smaller numbers of tougher opponents. The Division 2 is a case in point; it too was on sale, and at 80% off I thought it’d be rude not to. It’s been fun enough, the world continues to be well realised and interesting to explore, but at the end of the day the hide-behind-low-walls combat where even standard minions soak up plenty of gunfire doesn’t grab me like the faster paced first person shooting of Destiny 2, so the latter is still where I’ll usually drop in if I’ve got half an hour, and The Division 2 will probably sit alongside Far Cry 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and heaven knows what else in the ever growing “should probably get around to having another go at” pile that waits only for someone to add another two or three days of free time to every week.

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