A recap of the 7 delightful years of BDO.

To sum it all up Pearl Abyss is by far the largest waste of actual talent I have ever witnessed in all those years.  The ability to create a relatively bug free MMORPG with responsive combat takes a very talented and specialized group of people.  However, what they have done with the game is nothing less than a painful shame to the community and their fellow employees.

The combat animations and combat controls are top notch in the industry.  The horse/mount system in general is one of the best ever created.  However, the plagues of BDO completely over shadow and ruin anything of value.

Mob AI:

In 7 years absolutely no improvement was ever done to basic mob AI.  For a deeper understanding you can watch Unreal 5 videos and get free access to default AI blue prints or even create your own.  This is the core coding which controls movement, animations, attack patterns, etc.  Essentially BDO has the absolute bare minimum possible just to function and never improved upon it.  Mobs move into position, do their basic attack animation and move toward the player upon agro.  In cases where mobs can actually use cc skills there is absolutely zero effort into randomization or quality control.  It's just a mash of CC's.  There is no aggro system, social mechanics, support, summoning, escaping etc.

Progression:

This is one of the worst stains on BDO's entire history.  It started out decent and degraded year after year.  Upon release you would level for months and it took a long time to unlock the skills.  Thus BDO was considered a Marathon.  A long term progression game.  Today even with poor equipment you can get to level 58+ in 3 days and have all your essential skills.  Leaving you with only 1 sad remaining goal.  To spend years acquiring silver.  A shallow and unfullfiling goal.

Now hilariously with the revamp even things like tradeskill level doesn't even matter, nor does farming level.

Critical Failure:

The formentioned silver issue has also caused repeated critical failures and will continue to do so.  ANY content that is released that does not meet a silver/hr threshold is automatically a complete failure.  Additionally, BDO has a long standing history of releasing entire major updates that where dead on arrival.  The new boss regions are likely to be a waste of time for everyone.

RNG:

Imagine the nerve of Pearl Abyss's employees implementing this across the entire game while at the same time admitting to knowing their customers can't stand it.  It's embedded into nearly everything in the worst ways possible.  It's even put into areas with no monetary gain for the company.  This was the #1 complaint about BDO for many years.

The Squandering of everything

The resources that it takes to create an MMORPG to this extent are massive.  From networking to animations, art assets, music, landscape, AI, user interface, and underlying coding it takes 10,000's of hours to create something of real value.  Let alone to market it and fix bugs across so many platforms.  To take all of that effort and squander it is truly a shame.  No one deserves what has been done with this game.  Especially not the talented people that actually put it together and made it function.  Building the game engine, artwork, animations and putting it all together.  The customer base certainly does not deserve this either.

This information isn't for Pearl Abyss.  People have already told them all of this for years.  It's for people who may be new or don't know the real history of the game or think it might have a hopeful future.

I believe the best comparison is simply that Pearl Abyss is someone that wants to be a singer, yet can not comprehend they have no vocals, they are completely out of tune and have no musical ability whatsoever.  BDO needs a major overhaul internally.

It needs a Final Fantasy remake.  To scrap a lot of the game and overhaul nearly everything.

It lacks the fundamental thing that made Diablo and WOW so powerful.  GAMERS!!!.  GAMERS that wanted to play a good product.  Something BDO NEVER had and probably NEVER will sadly.  No actual competent gamer would ever design or release content like the trade revamp.  Players know better, PA doesn't.

Game is pretty much done for, "new content" is nothing but a continuous copy pasted "new" classes and added next meta gear that is buried deep in rng and/or ridiculous amounts of silver.

But hey! As long as they jiggle, have enough langerie/fan service and there is undergarnments for Shai, they have their targeted audience secured.

The real problem hasn't been resolved and it's not clear it will be.  The MMORPG market simply doesn't have quality products available.  Thus the future of BDO is still relevant.  Several games will be releasing in the next few years, but only a few will ever have a chance to really be a competitor.  When it's further narrowed down by the type of MMO there are hardly any games in this category.  Nor have any of these new games proven they have what it takes to be successful.

The good news for gamers is that any game released on the Unreal 5 engine will have graphics on par or surpassing BDO.  BDO has lost it's edge in that department.  Even the free terrain, texture, materials, and 3d assets meet this quality standard.

In fact people have scanned in high resolution scenes from around the world.  Forests, mountaints, buildings, etc.  They can then be recreated in beautiful realistic movie quality landscapes.  This should be very important to Pearl Abyss ownership.  To recognize that while their graphics where ahead of the industry years ago, that is simply no longer the case.

Any game created in UR5.2+ even by indie devs should have the same quality if not better textures, landscapes, meshes animations etc.

As much as I don't like the direction of BDO and what it has become I still wish it improves and takes a better direction.  I don't believe at all that it will, but that would be best for everyone.

Why do you try to write a review when you are totally clueless about the game? 58 doesn't mean anything, that's not even the endgame level, you doesn't even have most of your essential skills at that level, and it doesn't even take 3days to reach it, it takes less than 3 hours...

And cluless about pretty much anything in general. What does UE5 have to do with anything? this is not an UE game, you can't put magically blueprints into this game, and even if you could that would hardly change anything. It's not hard to code an AI, bdo also have it... their trashy servers simply can't handle the load that's why the AI is updated so poorly.

And not to mention that the mount system in this game is probably the worst among all the mmo on the market lol...

Mob AI:

use deep mind

Progression:

use chatgpt to write bdo questing

You are right.

And all the real gamers are waiting for the real games.

However, it feels like the era of video games might be over. 

The only reason I stick around here and keep playing BDO is because its moderated, updated weekly, and they purge cheaters. 

Does OP even play the game?

Well the game have flaws like every games have, but i love to play this MMO game.

So in overall the game is good.

All in all...

1. Make a player's invested time into the game actually be worth a damn, enough with all the caps and making stuff easy as heck to the point nothing has any real value...

2. Fix the age old desync problem and find a way to cap frames, I dunno, make it 60, make it 100 (ideal), this would improve EVERY aspect of the game..."ahh, but, last time they did it, it almost broke the game" That's why they have game devs! FIX THE DAMN CODE! Putting duct tape on a code only works for so long, it'll just keep breaking more and more the more content and stuff you make it work with. FIND A WAY, don't even care if my class is crap as an awakening wizard, I won't even care for multipliers, fixing desync would make PvE and specially, PvP 100x more enjoyable and fair, more than any class balance ever would.

3. New content is great and all (whatever opinions one might have on quality of said content), but, please, fix and optimize what's already there! Stop downgrading stuff for "optimizing", actually find the root cause of the problem and fix it, PA has got a capable dev team in them for sure, cmon...

This is more a major rant then an actual review.  A well written review sums up the pros, the cons, what could be better and a final verdict. But the only thing i see is alot of negativity.  And then there is someone else who starts yapping about real games. I like to question then what real games are. There is no such thing as that. All games are real games, but you like one more then the other. It's all about personal taste. 

I play BDO myself for 7 years as well, Started with CBT2, bought the conquerors pack then and ever since i sticked around. I have taken some breaks now and then.  Yes, BDO has it's problems and some things are questionable. But BDO is different then others and does things in an other way. There are now games on the market who just copied assets of BDO and try to be a better version, which doesn't succeed so far. 

There are glitches yes, there is unbalance and some deciscions which are made isn't to everyones liking. PA can't please everyone. 

Next to that the community is, well, not really great. Though it has improved compared to a few years back. I meet now also good people. 

One of the things that keeps me in BDO is the atmosphere. You have the idea the game lives when you enter a village or town. The combat is also good. There is an extensive character creator and your char has a background. The family system is also a good thing. Instead of having some seperate chars it is now all combined like an umbrella. Having alts is a thing in BDO and you can swap easily. BDO is alt friendly. Also when you join guilds then you join with your familyname and thus all your alts are then playable within that guild then. 

Several people, several opinions. I find BDO still enjoyable. I'm not a tryhard, don't care much about being on top or such, not really into the current pvp (don't mind pvp, but it has to be functional), i play what i want and also how i want.  I do miss instances and often people ain't willing to team up, especially not on the "normal" servers. Season and olvia is where the good folks are who do team up. 

BDO needs some improvements. but it's not that bad as some are describing it.