Why, of all games, BDO?

I’ve been talking about BDO for a few weeks now, and even after New World released, I’m still feeling this game more than anything else out there right now. I know it might seem a bit confusing, the game isn’t ‘new’ (it released in 2016); so why the sudden influx of posts about it? I decided to clarify with my main points – and I’ll list some cons at the end too. It’s not ALL sunshine and roses (but it’s pretty damn close).

  • The game is absolutely beautiful. It surpasses any other game I’ve played, especially if you set the graphics to remastered.
  • The combat is incredibly fluid, and yes I know classes are gender locked and no one likes that in 2021 – but there are so many choices and most choices have a counterpart, so I’ve never really felt upset by it. Hold down the left or right mouse button and ping off some combos and you feel like a master – and it LOOKS great.
  • You can highlight a quest objective (hit control to free mouse look, then click on the run icon on your quest on the right hand side) and hit T and you will auto run to your location. That’s right, you don’t have to search maps or hunt down where you’re going next just highlight it and hit T. You’ll run or ride there. Need to get to the other side of the map? No problem, you can auto ride / run your way there and go take care of something IRL.
  • Speaking of maps, the world is ENORMOUS and the maps are AMAZING. They have sun and moon cycles on them. They’re probably some of the most involved maps I’ve ever seen in a game. You can watch events happening on the maps in real time.
  • There’s player housing. There’s crafting. Incredibly involved crafting. There’s crafting you can do while AFK so when you can’t actually play but you want to play – you can! You can make progress while at work. Legit not cheating progress. You can make coin, level your horses, you can even sit at a training dummy and gain experience and skill experience that way. There’s harvesting. Farming. Fishing. Leveling your horses. Breeding horses. There’s a barter system. A sailing skill! Boat missions. Trade missions. Alchemy. Cooking. Hunting. There is SO MUCH TO DO. There’s also achievements to go after if that’s your thing in the way of titles.
  • The community is active. It is a pvp-centric game so yes you’ll always have ‘those’ people around, but it’s active and most people are more than happy to answer questions. This game has been called the MMO where you never HAVE to play with others, and that’s exactly what I’ve found. I joined a guild where the key point was ‘life skillers where you never have to say a word’ – perks of a guild, without having to deal with folks if I don’t want to. That being said, you can create your own guild too and do all that if you want. It’s completely your choice!

A few cons –

  • Yes, it’s a pvp game. It’s not optional like it is in new world, but I’ll be honest I’ve never even seen any PVP in all the time I’ve been playing. Number one if you’re below level 50 you can’t and number two, for the most part, people are in very specific areas doing PVP so it’s avoidable. You can fish and train your horses in secure locations, or just never accept the quest to ding level 50 – and you’ll never have issues.
  • There is always chat about the game being ‘pay to win’ – but if you don’t concern yourself with what everyone else is doing, this honestly isn’t a big deal. There are TONS of goodies given away on coupons and codes to redeem and daily login rewards and events that I haven’t bought a single thing from the pearl store and I have no idea how they make any money. Sure, you can pay and make things easier. Faster. Less RNG. They are items I would consider pay to win – but what exactly are you ‘winning’ – there’s only one dungeon in the entire game (they’re adding a second). Most of the ‘winning’ is whatever you personally set as a goal.
  • The UI is a confusing mash up of buttons and buffs and icons. It’s daunting to look at all that and have no idea what any of it is for! Guess what. You don’t NEED to know what any of it is for! Give the game a week, a solid effort of actually playing, and watch some of the beginner videos by EvilDoUsHarm on YouTube. Stick with it, and just honestly ignore the UI. Play the game, run to quests, do some of the AFK chores. I found it incredibly overwhelming when I started too but I plugged along and honestly, this is one of the best games I’ve played in ages.

Gear – Simplified

One of the most confusing things to me when I started playing BDO was gear. It’s still pretty confusing, so let’s look at just season+ characters and simplify things. First of all, if you’re a season character you can’t wear regular gear, so you’ll be looting gear that you can’t wear sometimes. When you’re questing, you’ll be given blue gear – Naru gear (I know technically you get white and green gear first but let’s start with Naru). You’ll see tons of people talking about ‘PEN’ – and this is a tier of enchanting. As you quest, or log in daily, or just exist, you’ll earn beginner black stone armour/weapon. You summon your black spirit dude, click enchant – and with the stones and the armour in your inventory, you use the UI to enchant the gear.

The game fools you because the first few times you do this, you’ll have 100% chance at success. Then things get hard. Now, Naru is special gear and they’ve made it even easier than regular servers, so you SHOULD be able to get all of your gear to PEN without too much difficulty. I believe that means 1-15 and then 5 levels above that to reach PEN. Needless to say it uses a ton of materials.

So once you’ve gotten your gear (ignore accessories!) to full blue naru PEN, you’ll remove it, and go talk to Fughar – type his name into search if you’re not sure where he’s at and you’ll get an auto path to him. Talking to him gives you some quests to turn in that Naru PEN gear for Tuvala gear. It’s yellow/orange, and it’s enchanted a bit to be better than the Naru you were wearing.

Your next goal is to take that Tuvala gear and enchant THAT using the supplies you’ll be collecting – ideally to PEN level before season+ ends sometime in December.

This is where the grind of the game comes into play. You’ll fail. A lot. Your items will go down in durability. You can repair this durability by exchanging tuvala ore with a blacksmith for the same slot as the item you’re trying to mend, and then using the blacksmith interface to repair the durability. When you fail an enchant you’ll go down a tier in levels on it and that sucks. Honestly, just try to get your tuvala as high as you can. When you end season+ your tuvala gear will get exchanged from season+ to regular server stuff, and you’ll be able to use it on non season characters.

Everything else? I’m ignoring for now. Sure some min/max people are out there trying to pen accessories, but we get a set after season+ so I’m just not bothering.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Bring on the Spooky

It’s not the best picture, but I decided this year that I wanted some more home made Halloween decorations that I could store in those boxes that sit under the stairs and you bring out once a year. I got out my acrylic paint and some tiny little canvas I bought in the city, and sketched some little scenes. Painted, and used some pen to outline them. I have had some frames kicking around for a bit that had no use, so I put it together as best I could and ta-da! A unique little piece. I’ve got some other activities that I don’t think will be done in time since it takes me so long to do anything these days (a combination of lack of time and physical limitations) but we’ll see how it goes.

DailyCreative Goals – October 2021

Normally I have this categorized as ‘knitting’ goals each month – but I do a lot of creative stuff, and I was feeling a bit off about the label so moving forward we’re just going to call this DailyCreative goals. Again the inspiration (and motivation) comes from this amazing blog that I’ve followed for years now. It just puts me in such a happy place. Anyway, it’s a new month so let’s see how we did.

Completed:

  • I didn’t complete any projects for the month of September, but I did get a lot of progress done, and that’s always nice.

WIP:

  • I finished off the front of my cable crush hoodie and am now working the back. Once the back is done I’ll seam the shoulders and I believe the sleeves will be next, then the hood. I’m trying not to stress about the hood because I really want it to turn out but I’ve never knit one before.
  • I also started my very first stitch a long! It’s a Halloween one, and we’re 15 days in so far. This gives lots of time to finish before Halloween so I can use it as decoration. I’m not an enormous fan of the daily images, but adding some backstitch has helped.
  • Scrap blanket is still in the works, but I’m thinking of changing it to a 10 stitch blanket instead of squares that I keep having to seam together. We’ll see how that goes.
  • I did crank out some tubes for socks, but the gauge was off, so I frogged them and need to start over. On the plus side, my circular sock knitting machine is oiled and ready to go.

October goals:

  • Finish off the cross stitch SAL – I am HOPING I’m able to complete this. So far I’ve managed just fine, but I never know with my hands.
  • Complete the back to my cable crush hoodie. I was feeling a little too adventurous thinking I’d be completely done it by now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make some awesome progress on it.
  • Finish one more creative project, either a smaller knit project or maybe a smaller cross stitch kit. I have a few now that I’ve been saving up and they’d make perfect weekend projects to gift to friends.

Thoughts on New World

By some miracle, I was able to download New World and have it complete on release day (even with my 5mb/s speeds) – but because of the nature of the extra long queues, I didn’t make my character until the second day of release. Not really a big deal, but the guild / company I had signed up for filled up and had no more room for me because I couldn’t rush and get into game. I took that as a sign that perhaps it was not a good fit (the guild, that is) and joined up with some friends who are playing casually.

I haven’t seen much of the game yet, but I already have thoughts that this game simply isn’t going to work for me. First of all, combat is pretty rough on my hands. It’s a game where I need to mouse click a lot (where as with BDO combat, I can just hold down the mouse buttons and then ping my combo buttons while I’m holding them down). I think it might be easier with a controller, but for now after an hour or so my hands hurt. Crafting is neat and pretty intuitive, you go out harvesting, process those harvests, and craft items from that. As you get higher skills you can craft and harvest more items. Towns contain craft machines and they have tiers, so I assume the top tier stuff is going to be in dangerous lands that you might not initially have access to.

Everyone keeps telling me that the game is beautiful – but honestly, coming from Black Desert Online, the graphics are not really something that pull to me. There’s a lot of the main faction colours (purple, green, yellow), the name tags are distracting, and because it’s an MMO of course there are some.. unique people out there. I’ve seen more offensive names than I care to admit. I understand that this is a mostly pvp-centric game (granted the pvp is opt-in) which tends to suggest a certain type of gamer playing, but it surprised me none the less.

The game is not bad but I was already happily playing an MMO (or two, if you want to count FFXIV) when it released, so in order to pull me away from those games where I was perfectly content, it has to REALLY be something special – and sad to say, I’m just not finding that yet. I do plan to continue to play and give it a fair shot, after all two sessions is hardly enough time to really decide when it comes to a game like this, but as of right now I’m not really seeing the staying power – and it has nothing to do with the queues, that’s just a part of a new game release, and waiting to log in doesn’t actually bother me since I am lucky enough to simply be able to plan ahead.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!