As a long-time veteran of this game, I still enjoy it and continue to play, but I cannot recommend it to new players.

The game has steadily shifted away from meaningful PvP. It is no longer rewarding and actively penalizes players for engaging in it. Despite being marketed as an MMO, it functions more like a solo experience, with almost no substantial group content. Even at endgame, PvE group activities amount to at most a couple of hours per week. In the past, PvP helped fill this gap, but that is no longer the case.

There are many additional issues, but the core problem is the developers’ complete disregard for player feedback. Even when an overwhelming majority of the playerbase is unified in their criticism, it is consistently ignored. Meaningful action only seems to happen when backlash becomes so severe that it directly impacts their revenue. Each year they issue apologies for their so-called mistakes, yet the same patterns continue with no real change or accountability.

For these reasons, I do not recommend purchasing this game, even if it is free, and I would advise extreme caution regarding their upcoming title, Crimson Desert.

Returning player from 2017 tried it again just for fun to see where it was at and it’s mixed feelings.

The progression is fun up till around 740’sh GS. To get any type of upgrade beyond that is the most time consuming slog ever. You either swipe the credit card to melt costumes for crons to enhance. Or you literally grind for 10 hours a day to buy vendor crons with silver to enhance. You can save your silver and buy pen Debo to exchange for NOV Khara but no new player is going to do that. It’s a big time drain and it will burn you out if you think you can handle grinding for thousands and thousands of hours. I tried it, got burnt. Realized I will be doing this forever, then gave up. Because there’s no point when PVP is dead. More than half the player base is AFK fishing in Velia. And there’s hardly any group content to do with friends. It’s a lonely MMO and some people love that and some find it very boring. The combat is fun and the animations and detail put into the classes is awesome. But beyond that the game is in crying state. And will continue to lose players to OSRS if it doesn’t fix its path.

TLDR: Heavy PTW, hardly any content, fun combat, cool outfits, crappy dev team.

Before I start, my time spent on this game is inaccurate due to the fact that before I got BDO on steam, I had a separate account on their launcher. I've been a player since 2017, but wasn't ever a hardcore one who indulged in PVP or any aspect of the competative play, so what I'm about to say is solely from the perspective of a PVE casual player who hasn't spent a dime on the game past originally paying for it here, and way back on my old account years ago.

The game is gorgeous, combat is fast and fun as hell, and if you enjoy going out and gathering herbs, cooking food, hunting, fishing, etc, you'll love it. It's a great game to just explore, the world feels vast and never ending, you could go hours getting from one end to the other if you weren't rushing and in a hurry. The plot is sorta subpar, I was into it as a kid, but that interest dwindled over time with all the changes made to the storyline overtime.

Its a game I'd recommend to at least try out once, but not something I'd get super attached to.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☑ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☑ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☑ You'll need a second life for grinding (SEE BELOW )

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☑ It's free! (SEE BELOW ON PTW ISSUES)
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

So while this is a recommendation please note that this is 100% PTW. While you can play the game for free if you want to actually do endgame content you will be required to pay real world money to do so. The entire game is a grind fest for the next loot and once you have the best loot you are forced to Enhance that loot and here is where the PTW comes in. Failing on enhancements will cause the gear to either get worse or be destroyed. Both of which you can prevent with real world cash shop items. Also note that you have to buy points to buy pearls to buy cash shop items. This of course is subject to change as laws are being passed to stop this in lots of places.

Also this is a Korean MMO so all the classes are Gender Locked but the customization options are pretty good. Also money is stupid. Again being a Korean MMO the currency in game is sort of based on their currency. The Won. It is like 1400 Won to a USD. $500 USD is >750,000 won. In game things cost thousands of silver. Basic things like heath potions and such. My "family" is running around with almost 3 billion silver. Yeah, Billion and I can't buy much. Grind spots are rated according to how many hundreds of millions of silver you can make an hour. Selling a backpack full of fish gets you around 20 million silver. Instead of taking 3 zeros off the end of all prices they embrace it lol. Thankfully a while back they made silver weightless. It used to have weight and you had to convert it to gold bars to not be overburdened.

The story starts out strong in the first quest chain but it falls off the rails after you vanquish the villain. Really. The next 30 minutes you spend hitting "R" because the story ending is horrible. Then it gets back on track with the next quest chain.

Do NOT expect to level a character doing quests if you are not on a Season server but that really doesn't matter. I say this as it is more of a precaution to make sure you make a season character and get on a season server (both of which are free for your first 5 season characters). Once that character hits 60 you can move to a regular server but I would recommend not doing so until 61. Here is the issue. You can hit 58 in a pretty solid day or two of season play. Then you hit the XP grind wall. You will spend hours upon hours grinding the same circle of mobs just to get a small bump in XP. There is no max level in the game but I think I read the highest character is level 69 right now.

Once you decide you want to take a break there are things called Life skills. Hunting and some crafting and they are pretty involved. Leveling them up takes some time and trial and error without the internet. There is also a whole thing having to do with workers and nodes and storage and workshops that after 500+ hours I have barely even scratched the surface on. There is Adventure Books that will give boots to your "Family" (which is every character made under your account. That also allows me to bring up that your Life Skills are family based and so are a few other attributes. Leveling up multiple characters can also reward you.

Open world PvP is turned on by default once you hit level 50 with no way to turn it off and no PvE servers. Just note this down. Nobody runs around killing people as the Karma hit for killing randoms if pretty big but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Overall I recommend this if you are looking for a decent game with a very very large and somewhat well written story with voice acting that isn't horrible this will work. If you have to be the best in your class or have problems with spending Real World cash on PTW items then steer clear of this one.

The game, though I hate to say it, really is quite good once you move past the rough new player experience. But, even to a new player, it's clear the current direction of the game is less than ideal. In essence, they are incentivizing AFK players too much and not incentivizing active playtime enough. Is that a good direction for a living online world? Well, you can decide.

The other main problem is the monetization. If Pearl Abyss ever needs more money, they could just make a new, really cool skin. Infinite USD potential. That's real money, too, not whatever funny money Korea uses. They even... used to do that, I think, seeing as some of the skins already in the game are quite cool. Currently, however, they favor creating new P2W items instead. The game has enough paid "convenience" items, it doesn't need more. PA, trust me: you could make more money just by making cool skins and being more generous with your playerbase.

But yeah, the game is quite good. I get the sense it used to feel even better, though, when it had less AFK fishing and less pearl shop items.

I'll leave the review positive, for now, since I don't think there's a better MMO available on the market (save for maybe GW2), but I hope PA addresses the AFK meta and focuses more on skins and less on costumes and pets.