I’ve been playing Black Desert Online for about 7 years now. It’s been on and off the last few years. I started way back in 2018, when the Dark Knight had just released and the literal Black Desert itself was released as content for players to explore. The game’s brutal upgrade system and open-world PvP got it the near-universal side-eye from the gaming community at large back – it basically had all the fixings for a pay-to-win title. Why would anyone play this game when games like Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars 2 offered far more content without any of the P2W bullcrap?

Because it was different and it didn’t play it safe, that’s why. In fact, part of the reason I started writing about BDO for MOP in 2019 was to hopefully re-contextualize the game into something that’s far more approachable for a western audience. I like to think my work got people to give the game a shot. Even so, I know the game was still a pretty hard sell.

Judging from how challenging it was to explain the enhance system all the way back in 2019, I’d say the game was a pretty complicated mess. Information was all over the place, and there was no real clear information from the game itself. Heck, most of what we knew from that era of Black Desert Online came from the hard work of the community pain-stakingly doing every possible quest to figure out a way to speedrun to level 60 through just questing or players staying in the same grindspot for upwards of 24 hours with a spreadsheet recording every single drop. Then there are the folks who took it upon themselves to min-max their failstacks so that a single point of those extra enhance chances weren’t wasted.

It wasn’t a dark time by any stretch of the imagination, but Black Desert Online was a pretty clunky experience. That’s especially true when it’s put side-by-side with the game in its current shape – and that’s exactly what I’m doing now. For this edition of Desert Oasis, let’s look at how things have changed since I started playing in 2019.

Upgrading your items was risky, clunky, and downright heartbreaking

I’ve already written about how the enhancing system works in Black Desert Online, and it’s largely unchanged. It was just so much more difficult back then. In brief, players can upgrade weapons. It begins with +1 and ends at PEN. PEN is roughly the +20 level. From +1 to +15, the upgrade can fail, but the level doesn’t go down. That changes after PRI (+16). If a DUO (+17) item fails to upgrade to TRI (+18), the level goes down. While a weapon will never go down below PRI, it still sucks to see your TET (+19) weapon go all the way down to PRI after a string of failed attempts.

See? Even the abbreviated version is complicated and obtuse.

The takeaway is that while players lose the upgrade items and it’ll cost even more money to get the weapon back to the original level, not all is lost. Every failure gave characters a failstack. These failstacks increase the odds of the next attempt, so in a way, nothing was technically lost. In a sense, this was a currency, and high failstacks shouldn’t be used for upgrades below TET. Instead, players had multiple characters with certain failstack levels. The character with the highest failstack’s job was to only enhance from TET to PEN. There would be other characters that would enhance from DUO to TRI etc. Imagine trying to enhance an item from TET to PEN. That would involve the player switching between multiple characters to use certain failstacks over and over again. This was mitigated somewhat with the use of items known as Advice of Valks, which would allow players to put failstacks into an item, but it was only up to 50 failstacks at the time. And no, character could not cheese, Advice of Valks could only be used if a player had 0 failstacks. There was no way to cheese it; the only way to get those failstacks was to fail fail fail.

As I mentioned earlier, upgrading your items hasn’t changed, but there’s so much more convenience to mitigate so many of the downsides now. The first thing is that each character can now hold separate failstacks! Players who need their biggest failstack can simply switch to it right from the enhance UI, no character swapping required. I think players get a second failstack slot for free, and additional ones are cashshop items (gotta make money somehow), but even just one extra slot for failstacks is a huge help.

On top of that, the game shows the best failstacks for specific upgrades. It’s based off data collected from players making similiar attempts. At the very least, upgrading your gear is so much more transparent that there’s less guesswork, and what’s even better is that all the stuff is in the game, no need to go through various wikis and sift through Reddit posts to make decisions that’s best for the player. Moreover, there’s actually a maximum amount of failures now. On the 16th attempt, the weapon will be a guaranteed upgrade.

I just love this so much more. I love how Pearl Abyss went for a compromise rather than throwing out the system all together. I’ve met the developers of the game, and at the core of their design is that failure is part of the journey. Like it or not, the enhance system is part of the spirit of BDO, and the things the devs have added to smooth out this part of the game has really made it more approachable as a system and far less esoteric.

The smaller world just meant more drama

Black Desert Online was also much, much smaller in those early years. Of course, the game world is actually pretty large; the issue was the few available grindspots for players. When I first started playing, everyone was going to Helms, Nagas, Fogans, bandits, etc. Because of the way the upgrade system worked, players would have a full set of TRI gear. Only a few grindspots would work at that gear level, so that led to many of the players gathering to a few areas. Add in the open world PvP, and the salt just flowed everywhere.

As fun as the drama was, sometimes, a chill session of grinding wasn’t in the cards, especially during peak hours when small 1v1s between players escalated into their respective guilds coming in to grief each other. I can talk about how cool this was, but at the end of the day, I know it turned away some folks.

I remember there was a call for PvE-only servers, and a lot of folks were worried that this would lead to grindspots getting overcrowded because nobody would be able to kill each other.

But the way Pearl Abyss handled it was great. For one, the team introduced instanced areas for the most contested spots. When this system first came out, players got one hour to grind in their instance daily. Today, killing monsters outside of the instanced area would recharge that hour. This has to be the biggest change. It made grinding in spots during peak hours much less problematic. On top of that, there are simply more areas to go. A player with TRI gear can go to more areas now. The improvements to upgrading weapons also made it so that players were no longer bottlenecked at certain upgrade levels so that players are more spread out.

Instances of dueling for spots will be inevitable, but in its current form BDO has so many other ways for players to avoid these situations. I’m pretty sure a big piece came from improvements to the technology and Pearl Abyss having more available resources to support these new systems. Those investments were well worth it.

Black Desert Online is a product of compromise

What really sets this game apart from other MMOs is that its design is largely based on compromise rather than the devs bending fully to either the will of players or the will of the C-suite. At the core of it, BDO hasn’t changed much. It’s still a game with open world PvP, a brutal upgrade system, and extreme grind. But it’s so much more digestible now, and I think more people can enjoy the game if they give it a chance.

The Great Valencian Black Desert is a dangerous place, but thankfully there’s always a chance for respite. Join Massively OP’s Carlo Lacsina every other week for just that in Desert Oasis, our Black Desert column! Got questions or comments? Send him a message or drop by his Twitch channel to hang out while he’s streaming the game!