★★★☆☆
Some parts of this game are 10/10 amazing, other parts are 0/10 literally unplayable, and all parts are plagued by godawful levels of quality. It also somehow manages to be a singleplayer MMO.

Likes:
+ Music
+ 3D Map
+ Combat
+ Housing
+ Auto Pathing
+ Mount Systems
+ World/Graphic Style
+ Hey, check out these teeth!
+ Weather with dynamic puddles
+ Varied and interesting locations
+ Multiple Levels (Character, Skills, Contribution, Energy, Stats, Mounts, Pets, ???)

Dislikes:
- Buggy
- No Fast Travel
- System resource hog
- Class/race/gender locks
- Buy2Play+Pay2Fun+Pay2Win
- No multiplayer and a terrible community
- Combat is unresponsive with clunky controls
- Graphics: Low draw distance and capped performance
- The translation and/or original writing is barely understandable
- Lacking tutorials and map info (Like where enemies of my level are)
- Unintuitive Mode Switching: Neutral/Movement, Combat, Mouse, etc
- Weird cooldown system. Use abilities on cooldown, but with reduced effect
- It takes 4 clicks to simply vendor an item; the type of clunk that plagues this game.
- Broken PvP, that only requires one side to opt in, only punishes you for using it, and has such simple stats that its either a 1shot insta-faceroll or a pointless stalemate
- Market prices are locked, making the AH more like a poorly designed NPC vendor than a player driven economy
- The tamer pet has 100% uptime, but has to be manually resummoned every X minutes. Pointlessly annoying. His AI modes are also rather janky.
- You can do story quests out of order, to a ridiculous degree. Defeat the final boss without any of the quests leading up to it, then go back and do other quests where he's still alive.

Black Desert Online, as a whole, suffers from what is clearly demonstrated in its graphical presentation. The graphics look amazing, especially for an MMO, which makes them even more impressive. However, draw distance/LoDing is terrible, with things constantly popping into and out of existence within slapping distance, ruining an otherwise eye-citing experience. With a severe lack of graphic options, and what seems like perma-vsync, limiting the game to 30 FPS, even on the lowest preset.

+ The open world feels like MGSV, except instead of a barren waste between outposts that can only be accessed via roads, there are fully accessible areas, packed with content between each. Every player can own nearly every building in the world, with a variety of meaningful functions. You level your character, skill points, contribution points, energy, inventory size, and possibly other things, at the same time, but as seperate currencies, this is interesting, and works well. The mount system has super depth, you can level them, equip them, they learn skills, have mounted combat, can customize them visually, they pull carts, taming, etc. And, your (pay2win) pet will even ride on the horse with you.

+- Combat is fantastic, impactful and fast paced, as you wreck through enemies, but its unresponsive, and has over 9,000 overlapping control combos to master if you want to make full use of your arsenal. The lite parkour is a nice idea, but is clunky to the point of being nonfunctional, and serves no purpose. The auto-pathing often has you stuck running into walls. The quests/storyline are somewhat interesting, but are chopped into tiny pieces, a single quest of killing goblins, for example, is split into 6 separate quests, with annoying breaks in the action, for textboxes to re-inform you that you need to kill yet more of the same goblins. This game has one of the most detailed character creators you'll ever get to play with, but the class/race/gender lock does it a huge disservice.

- Majority of the features go unexplained. Nodes? Workers? Fishing? Crafting? Storage? The Market? Trade Managers? Housing!? THIS IS MADNESS. The map can't be navigated with WASD, and is missing some important info, like where are enemies of my level? The NPC finder would make more sense as a feature on the map, instead of an extra button by the minimap. Selling items takes like 3x more clicks than it should. Mining feels detached, a bar slowly fills up as you whack a rock, instead of each whack having impact. Played for over 24 hours, haven't interacted with another player. You can see them running around, and chatting like annoying trolls, but there are no dungeons, or world events, or dynamic parties, or PVP teams, or anything actually involving multiplayer at all, as far as I've seen. It sounds like there may be some at endgame. Without quest progression, I feel there is a severe lack of things to do in this supposed "sandbox", as the world is level restricted. Also, at this point, the Samurai/Blader class that I wanted to play has yet to be released in the NA version (it has now been released, and I do prefer it over the knight that I was playing).

-- The biggest problem with the game, however, is the hard switch between modes, it's game breakingly unintuitive. Once you're in combat mode, the game works well enough. But if you want to click on something? Switch to mouse mode (which is incredibly awkward and unintuitive on its own). Between combat, you have to switch back to neutral run around mode. You can only equip 1 harvesting tool at a time, which means if you walk from a bush to a rock, you have to hop into your inventory and change gear. Want to fish? Equip a fishing pole (as your main weapon, separate from the mining tools), which is even more game breaking than it sounds, this is an entire mode on its own, you can no longer run, or jump, or ride a horse, or open the map?! There is no reason all of these modes couldn't be automatically dynamically intuitively activated when needed.

- Your mount can die, but this doesn't seem to serve any purpose, besides being tediously annoying. He doesn't join you in combat, he doesn't run from enemies, he doesn't fight back against those enemies. It just forces you to park far away and/or go all the way back to the stable if he ends up dying. Also, without the pay2win horse whistle, you can only call your horse from like 10 feet away.

- Every aspect of the game is also plagued with bugs, which is surprising, considering this is an English translation of a several year old game. I would expect most of those issues to have been ironed out by now, and not effected by a simple language change.

-- The game is also a complete and utter scam pricing wise. The NA version requires you to buy a copy of the game to play, but huge portions of the game are still feature-locked; unless you pay even more money at the ingame cash shop. Expect to pay multiple times the advertised price tag; if you want to fully enjoy your experience with this game.

* With some quality polish, and less scam pricing, BDO could make the best games of all time list. Shoots itself in the foot, every time it takes a step forward.


* After extended play with the combat system, it seems to lack any real depth, like Blade & Soul's. It's not truly a skill based realtime responsive reactive action combat system. Its just a standard MMO combat system, but with overly clunkified controls, where you have to hold down LMB and A for basic auto attacking. This issue is further compounded by every class playing nearly exactly the same, with the only change being the color of particles that fly out of their butts when you hold Left+LMB, and the best class being determined solely by which has the highest damage% and/or AoE range. GW2's combat system is more skill based and involved than either of these games, and it uses a modernized version of standard MMO mechanics.