Hey folks - I gave BDO a try recently as I saw it recommended; the combat looked great, and apparently there’s tons to do and it’s one big sandbox. It sounded amazing, though the learning curve was said to be very steep.
Anyhow - I was wondering if people have had a similar experience to me; I’m a veteran gamer, a high learning curve isn’t too big a deal if the game itself is fun… but the thing that turned me off after a couple hours of play is that I felt “overwhelmed” in a very different way to just sheer complexity.
From camera, to UI, to the visuals, to the story and surroundings, everything just felt alien and opaque. It’s hard to explain but when playing I’d say it felt as if the world had no substance and you’re walking in a dream. I had the graphics on high, yet everything felt ‘soft’ and hard to focus on; I never really took in my surroundings. NPCs are everywhere in abunance to the extent of cluttering the place, but quite the opposite from making towns and hubs feel alive it seems to hit an uncanny valley as if you’re walking through a world of mannequins. Enemy NPCs barely seem to react to you, and die in droves, sort of like Dynasty Warriors. As I walked from place to play following the story I didn’t really have any sense of location or how exactly this world fitted together.
The thing that really has me scratching my head is that I can see that the game is extremely deep, the graphics and animations are amazing, and there’s quite a lot of voiceover - my problem with BDO is certainly not that it’s ‘cheap’… but if you combine the above ‘softness’ of the world with the absolutely insane UI that is constantly bombarding you with information, the weird story where you get told things like ‘the captain really trusts you’ after you’ve spoken to the guy once, and the game constantly breaking the 4th wall by giving you quest rewards such as inventory expansion and player quality of life buffs… to use the dream analogy again, it’s like a crazy fever dream and the whole experience just causes my brain to shut down and not care about any of it.
It feels like there’s this amazing world where loads of people are having fun, while I’m outside, looking through some impenetrable glass 3 inches thick, wanting to find a great MMO but utterly unable to engage with this one in any meaningful way. I’m told you can do loads of things, and I kinda like the combat, but I don’t care about the world.
Maybe that is my big problem with Asian MMOs; from the very start of loading in for your first time, the devs seem to expect you to care and engage with a world you’ve just been thrown into, akin to being expected to strike up great conversation with a total stranger you’ve just been put in a room with.
Is this some issue specific to me, or do you folks share the sentiment? I’m curious as to how some Western audience actually does manage to engage with these sorts of games!