I’ve just bought a second account of this terrible MMO. It’s just 1 euro right now (or 1 dollar, I suppose). Likely because an “expansion” just released, but it’s usually on sale more often than is not anyway. The reasons why I bought a SECOND account are too long to explain.

But let’s start from here. Why selling a game for 1 euro? It’s just a silly barrier of entry. Just make it free. I have played BDO for a few years very casually, I still have to spend any money on it outside of the initial purchase, that at the time was 5 euros.

BDO is a game that is outside of rational plausibility. It’s something of this world that is not explainable. That’s why I’m writing this. The whole situation of the MMO space has always been a mess, and only got worse in recent years. Making a decent MMO is extremely hard, now exceedingly rare. And make it survive the market even more so. BDO is this absurd anomaly because it has the concrete potential of DESTROYING the competition. I’m not joking, I’ve been observing this space for a too long time, I’m not exaggerating. It’s a game that realizes things we were dreaming about in the early 2000s, when the genre was starting to flourish. It does stuff that no other game even attempts, and it does it in a way that seems effortless.

Yet, it’s all a fucking disaster. A COMPLETE, UTTER disaster of the game. Flawed beyond anything you can imagine. What’s infuriating for me, it’s how easy it would be to repair. And what a marvel it would be when simply restored to its ideal shape. The shape that you can SEE, if you have eyes to see. The shape that is already there, waiting to become. DEMANDING to be delivered. A work of art that waits. If even someone out there was just willing to spend some time… and listen. Fucking LISTEN.

Because if on one side the game already realizes wild dreams no one thought even possible, on the other it completely fails on everything. Base game design, structure, every single little thing, accumulating to a trainwreck of galactic proportions. And it’s not even that, not even just game design. The game engine is at the same time a marvel and a continuous list of small problems. The UI is a disaster, and so on. Again all solvable if anyone simply cared to stop, observe and do something. Just a casual mention of one of the smallest problems: while you can move some UI elements, what you can or cannot move is arbitrary. So for example you can move your stamina bar, but you cannot move the gathering/processing bar. If you happen to move some of these widgets you will keep getting problems because they will overlap with other unmovable widgets, especially when they share a similar function. The example about stamina and gathering is meaningful because you consume stamina when running or fighting, meaning that there’s no contextual overlap between using stamina and a gathering process (you’re forced to be still). So why not use the same widget? Why have two, and why, IN PARTICULAR, you make stamina movable but gathering bar not, so that if I move the stamina to avoid some overlaps then I get the gathering bar in the way no matter what? Again, just a MINUSCULE example for something unambiguously bad, that has no rational reason to exist. You can only move 50% of the things, forcing the things that can actually be moved still be moved around and in the context of what cannot. A way to give customization only to take it away.

And I’m writing this to start from ONE thing. We’ll get to it.

Let’s say the game has an opening cinematic scene, done in-engine, already showing a bunch of problems right from the start, with plenty of graphical glitches, hair sticking out of clothes, and the usual “jank.” BDO is all jank, everywhere. A complete lack of polish. But okay, that’s not the point here.

The game starts through some quick forced dialogues and then gives you some control of the character. Already HERE it’s a mess. Because you can spend 20 minutes just figuring out a tons of crazy attacks and combos you’re given. Some of these are shown through the UI, but many you can discover by experimenting with controls. There’s enough complexity here to overwhelm even an experienced player. It’s nice to show what the combat system is capable of, but it’s really messy and confusing to present to a new player. But this is also beside the point. The trick used here is that the game gives you a full powered character, only to strip away those powers a minute later. A classic, but not quite so because even when stripped down you still have way, WAY more than you can handle as a new player.

But all of this is again beside the point.

After this initial few scenes where you got through some cryptic dialogue that sets up the “mystery” of the black spirits, you finally get ported to the actual MMO world. You get a quest and everything. Same as many MMOs, BDO even more than any other game, evolved through an accumulation of systems that got progressively patched in. So you get multiple layers of quests, and a near infinite aggression of on-screen messages and alerts not even remotely related to your character. I’m not even delving about all this. Because again, it is beside the point. Just know that any of these IMPLIED sidetracks could take multiple pages of text to analyze, to explain everything that is wrong, and how with minimal tweaks they could all be resolved by marking a clear path through all this mess…

So let’s get to the point. If you happen to hit the special key that evokes the Black Spirit, something that you’ll do a whole lot through the game, you get pushed into a quest that isn’t the starting quest. It’s something new that was added about a year ago.

A quest to help new players, on top of all other introduction quests that are supposed to help new players (a reminder of the accumulation of layers I mentioned, you can’t even imagine how many layers of “new-player-help” have been added, all overlapping, creating one of the messier new player experience in history that is infinitely worse than one of the worst games doing this so badly: Destiny 2. The race to the bottom is always crowded.).

You accept this quest to obtain an item, that lands right in your inventory.

(I mean, you could argue that the description is misleading, there are no “Edan adventures”, that the green line has the most emphasis, yet it’s just a quote, and the important message that indicates the actual FUNCTION only arrives at the bottom, in a gold color, but that is much easier to miss. It’s a small example but indicates well the attention fatigue you get, because BDO drowns you in worthless information that is extremely hard to parse, and will continue to be hard to parse even after 100 hours in…)

“Press RBM” to open a UI thing, is the only function of this object. So important that a new quest was added, as one of the first things you see as a new player. What is it in practice? A browser window, thankfully done in-game, with basically a portal to a bunch of introductory guides. It’s actually useful and I often use it even if I’ve played for quite a while: BDO is a mess of systems, you’ll constantly look up stuff on the internet.

…Especially because of a near-infinite clutter of items and descriptions to figure out. Beyond your wildest dreams or nightmares. Which is odd. Usually a large itemization pool means lots of stuff you can and want to collect. But BDO is a game of near-linear progression. You have a thing that you upgrade, but you don’t find loot and randomized equipment that drives most games to their fun and addictive progression systems. No, you only get a large number of materials and tricky sub-systems to simply upgrade a thing and tickle some gambling addiction. But again, this is all beside the point. The progression system is a large, high level concept and problem. And we’re only dealing with minutiae here.

The problem at this small scale and the first main issue to solve for all players, both new and veterans, is the limited inventory. The game will drown you under piles of items, all fighting for limited space (and one of the things you can buy, with real money, is inventory space). The real mastery is telling what is useful from what is not, but that again is a thing that plagues most “gachas”, and BDO is often more a gacha than a typical MMO.

But again, this is the issue that made me wrote all this: you get a starting quest, dumping a book in your inventory. If you click on this item, you get a browser page with some guides.

Ok. See here? Among a million of other options (by the way, yes, there’s a million of stuff, but the game cares for you, so you cannot customize the UI until level 10, but you can of course have your screen full with end-game options and pop-ups and alerts that IN NO WAY relate to your character at least for the next 50 hours). Among all those options there’s that button. And what does it? It opens the same UI widget that you access from right-clicking on the book in your inventory. It’s always been there, the book is only a shortcut to the same thing. A “shortcut” taking inventory space, for something accessible from the main menu.

(lets say you miss it, it’s still plastered all over the place. The “hotkey help”, which appears as a giant button always present on screen for new players, brings up another screen. pressing “F2” is yet ANOTHER shortcut to the same screen. But if you press F1, it’s THE SAME. It brings up the same browser, but pointed to a different tab. Still has all the other pages, you just need to click. But more! see the bottom of that screen, there’s ANOTHER button “Adventurer’s Guide” that again does the same of the F1 shortcut… There are no less than FIVE things to get to the same place: book in inventory, main menu button, F1, F2, button inside hotkey help UI)

Nothing else is explained.

If you are a new player, you will be extremely wary of throwing items out that may have some uses later on. Tons of stuff that BDO throws at you FROM DAY ONE, is important stuff that you should store safely. But it’s lost in a near-infinite ocean of pointless clutter. Something in there is stuff that is important later, and that no matter the length of its tooltip, you will have NO IDEA how to use, when to use, or even if. Everything you do in BDO has a good chance of crippling your character, by wasting some important item. And there is no sane way around. But again, all this is beside the point and a much larger problem.

The problem is that, in this specific case, this book is worthless. But because nothing in the game tells you it is worthless, there’s a high chance you will worry it may be useful, and keep it in your inventory, or dumped and forgotten inside some city storage, taking away precious inventory space…

Beside the vague point that this might be done deliberately, since the game sells inventory space, it’s still bad design. And it would be easily fixed. If anyone cared.

This has been added slightly over a year ago, for a game that existed since 2015. BDO updates once a week regularly, with massive, systemic updates delivered at an absurd pace. It’s unprecedented in the genre. And yet, it’s all clumsy. It’s all knee-jerk, back and forth, doing and undoing. All going to waste and rot. It does 500% more of what it needs, but delivers nothing. Because it has no direction.

So here’s the solution:
this is a quest that is shoved on your face, you can’t miss it. So let’s REMOVE the option from the main menu first. Place the book in the inventory as it happens already. During the first three minutes the inventory is thankfully still clean, so the book is easy to notice. You right click on it, and make it so the book IS CONSUMED. Rather than opening the UI browser, you give a pop up that points the player to a NEW option appearing in the main menu. You follow the instructions to find out the book unlocked this new menu button, and using it brings up the browser with the guides. The option is always there in your main menu, and the book delivered by the quest had only the function to trigger it and guide the player to be aware of its existence.

No waste of one (precious) inventory slot. Less clutter. No worries about whether this item can be safely deleted or not. And overall better guidance to navigate the mess that is the main menu.

This is just one thing. One minuscule example of bad design. There’s no ambiguity about it, it’s just bad, and easy to fix. In a sea of other problems, just as tiny, all the way to mountains. But all within reach, I assure you.

If simply someone cared.

Someone who does listen. Someone who can see.

But no, of course. BDO is just another MMO in decline. Something that won’t even be remembered that fondly, after all. And yet, this is potentially, concretely… not just one of the best MMO out there. It could be one of the greatest games, of all times. A masterpiece. Not after a massive overhaul, but by fixing what is easy, simple and quick. Cleaning the junk, and polish what’s underneath so it shines. If simply someone cared. If someone had eyes to see.

BDO is not a game to save or that will be saved. You just observe in dismay what it could have been. It’s nostalgia of another world.