Back In The Desert

Having taken the trouble to move my Black Desert Online account from Kakao to Pearl Abyss so I wouldn't have to say goodbye to my characters, it was inevitable I'd want to log in and say hello to them instead. There was only one thing stopping me: a 56GB update. I realize I've been gone for a while but that's... well, it's enough for several complete games, isn't it?

Oh well, bite the bullet. I set the patcher running and it managed to gulp down nearly three gigs before it coughed up a hairball and fell over. Some file caused an exception and the launcher froze. I closed it and re-opened it and the whole thing crashed. 

I thought about trying to figure out something to do about it but then I decided to go patch Twin Saga instead. That's the trouble with old mmorpgs - as soon as I start thinking about games I used to play I want to play them all. 

Twin Saga also needed a hefty patch. I forget how big but it was several gigs. I play Twin Saga through Steam, though, so there were no problems getting back up to speed. That's one good reason to use Steam for mmorpgs that hadn't occured to me before.

By the time the update had finished I was playing something else. EverQuest, I think. A the moment I seem to be playing, for want of a better word, rather a lot of mmorpgs: EverQuest, EverQuest II,, Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft - those four  I log into just about every day. I've played a fair bit of DCUO recently and now I seem to be adding Twin Saga and Black Desert to the mix. I even played Rift the other night and I'm more than willing to bet that won't be the end of it. 

Red Eyes snitches on Red Nose.

 

Actually, it already isn't the end - I was playing in this weekend's latest test of FHX until they had to reboot the server and I got kicked out. I'll play some more there tomorrow.

Other than the endless patching, the main problem with dotting about like this is that, as has often been observed here and on many other blogs, mmorpgs can be a bugger to get back into when you've been away a for a while. They will keep changing.

I'd have to say that really is one of the joys of Rift. It's always exactly the bloody same. It's months since I last logged in but it only took me about twenty seconds before I felt like I'd never been away.

I checked my mail (still full of free gifts I never remove because of a perennial lack of bag space) and fiddled around with the guild bank (there's a whole vault full of things that don't belong to me but no-one else has played for years so I guess they're mine now). 

Then I rode off across Silverwood, knocked off a few quests on the way and somehow ended up in Scarlet Gorge,. I put a couple of levels on whoever it was I was playing. It was fun, albeit very much a private kind of fun. It felt like I'd fired up a single-player game. I was there for a couple of hours and never saw a single other player, not even in town. I finally logged out in Scarwood Reach. Might be a while before I log in again.

Today I read a couple more posts from other people who've been reminded Black Desert exists and taken it upon themselves to give the game another go. There could be some marketing traction in this, you know, telling people something's going to happen to their accounts or their characters if they don't do something about it sharpish. I hope no-one's getting ideas.

I'll thank you to keep your suggestions to yourself, Spirit, unless you want a taste of this boomerang .

 

I was all set to uninstall and reinstall, thinking that might be the quickest way to fix whatever the problem was, but I figured I might as well just give it one more go as it stood and guess what? It worked just fine. Took a while but this time the whole fifty-six gigs flowed smoothly down the pipe and there I was, back in...

... hang on, what's the name of the world again? Oh, look! It doesn't have one! That's bold.

Mailvaltar mentioned in the comments that there were a lot of "welcome back, prodigal child" rewards I might be entitled to and he wasn't kidding. There were so many I kind of glazed over. Didn't take a single one and it seemed like there were dozens, maybe hundreds. I gave up long before I'd even looked at them all.

It's not that there's a lack of detailed explanation in game. Very much the opposite. Very, very much. Black Desert is one of those games that likes to append entire essays to mouseovers and tool-tips. It's only to be expected, I guess. If there's one thing you can say about Pearl Abyss it's that they do like to take a maximalist approach to just about everything they do. 

It's a ferociously complicated game in just about every way you'd care to mention, except perhaps for the combat, which at the levels I've attained consists almost exclusively of running into armies of mobs then jumping and yelling and spinning in circles until either they or you fall over. 

So that's what I did.

It's pretty plain my character has no more idea what she's doing than I do.

 

I only did it for about ten minutes and I levelled up twice. There seem to be some ferocious xp boosts on by default. I think the server was giving me 200%, an event threw in another 100% and some guild had buffed the town I was in for yet another hundred. I had several other consumable options I could have used but since my goal in Black Desert has always been to try to throttle back on leveling, I refrained from using any of those.

Only a week or two ago I was mithering a little about not having enough mmorpg options on my plate. I think I was misrepresenting the situation. There's absolutely no shortage of very good games I could be playing, it's just that getting beneath the skin of any of them requires more application than I seem to be prepared to give just now. 

It's not a problem. I thought briefly that it might have been but that was because I hadn't thought it through. If I don't have the drive to dive deep into any one mmorpg, I can just splash around on the surface of a whole ocean of them. 

I have no intention of re-learning how to play Black Desert properly but I am definitely up for beating on armies of imps for the sheer joy of it. I also noticed when I logged in that there seem to be about double the number of classes there were last time I played so I feel a new character or two coming on.

And now I come to think of it, it's been quite a while since went through a phase of making a load of new characters in different games. I'm probably about due. 

I wonder what else I could try...