You’ll want as much of both as you can get, and you get more just by exploring. Contribution points are spent on buildings like factories and lodging for workers. It’s an addicting cycle built on palpable progression, which is reinforced by two of Black Desert’s central mechanics: energy and contribution.Įnergy recharges over time and is spent whenever you gather materials by hand, restructure towns remotely, hire new workers or talk to some NPCs. Whatever you decide to craft or level, you’ll improve as you go, earning titles and increasing your yields and profits. You might also support your plans by skinning animals, planting crops, quarrying stone or just auto-fishing the days away. You’ll connect cities and create trade routes, hire and feed an army of NPC workers, build and staff factories and forges and plenty more. Forests, mountains, plains, seas and deserts peppered with towns and cities, stuffed with resources begging to be harvested and put to use in cooking, alchemy and production. If you want to build a production empire, which I highly recommend doing, you’ll spend a lot of time exploring and overseeing the map. To many others, it’s a captivating role-playing tool powered by a rich character creator and a thickly detailed world. To you, it might purely be an action-RPG with combat more fluid and frenetic than any other MMO. This is a game about building an empire, more akin to Civilization than World of Warcraft. And that's where the sandbox really shines.īlack Desert lacks much of what you might expect from a modern MMO, but what it has in spades is agency. You can buy Black Desert for $10 (or even cheaper in its first week on Steam) and there’s no subscription fee, so as far as I’m concerned it's a single-player game that happens to have thousands of unusually dressed NPCs. The thing is, I’m not interested in endless end-game or guild activities or, really, anything involving other people. A couple of oversized world bosses is all Black Desert has in the way of end-game PvE, which is kind of a good thing since upgrading your gear grows tedious at higher levels. Black Desert lacks much of what you might expect from a modern MMO, but what it has in spades is agency.Īnd if you’re explicitly after dungeons and raids (things that MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV do so well), pack it in now.