Originally a free-to-play MMO in South Korea, Japan, and Russia, Black Desert Online moved to the west to fill in a gap in the buy-to-play MMO genre in a risky move that appears to have succeeded due to its unique narrative and sheer attention to detail.
Famously known for its lengthy and very liberal character customisation (sometimes referred to as a game in its own) Black Desert Online is one of few MMO games to allow the player to fully customise their character down to the smallest details; the result is certainly some impressive creations in high textures. You'll certainly need a powerful PC in order to run this game in its highest graphical settings, but it's beautiful and totally worth it.
Outside of the character customisation, however, is an entire world riddled with complexities and life. Typically, in an MMO, the player will choose a series of skills and professions that helps them along their travels and quests up to the top level count, and greeting them at that top level is a grind for better gear throughout various additional expansions. In Black Desert Online, that is not the case. The player can choose various skills to grind through and improve upon, although there is no top level count; the player forever grinds through levels.
You'll often find yourself feeling relatively overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the world and the number of things you're free to do in it: do you want to go around cutting trees, gathering wood and crafting furniture and other items? Or do you want to be a pirate and have a ship as you sail around hunting whales for their rare items? Maybe life on a farm better suits you. The possibilities genuinely feel endless, and it's riddled with so many things to do that you'll find yourself struggling to fit it all into your real world time.
Outside of the plethora of skills available, there's a detailed narrative that has you roaming across the lands alongside a rather terrifying black spirit that grows stronger and seemingly more deceptive throughout it; but once again, there's a lot of content available within the story, and you'll often find it difficult to choose whether to grind through skills or grind through the story. Fortunately, none of these really feel like a chore, and the amount of things to remember and do always keeps you busy. It's difficult to get bored of a world that mirrors the real one, but expands upon it with various fantasy elements and detail.
Black Desert Online, given it is a free-to-play game in some locations, isn't focused on making the player pay to avoid a grind. The grind is there for all, but it does feature a few customisation items and pets that must be paid for via their Pearl currency that costs real money; it can provide a slight boost when wanting to customise your house (yes, you can have a house and customise it) as you don't have to grind through the professions until you're capable of building a luxury type of bed or set of drawers. Some holiday items seem to be mostly stuck behind the paywall, however, which is disappointing if you want one of the excellent holiday events to really captivate you and give you more to do.
Given the scale of the game, I could very well be wrong there. It's difficult to look at the game and think you've seen everything it has to offer when you're always pushing forward and discovering a new area, or a new set of skills and enemies that change the way you must fight them with the movement-based combat. The sheer number of things to do in this world may very well result in a second review at a much later date.