Black Desert has rich lore and story but the presentation is terrible. Here are some reasons:
- Text full of typos and grammatical errors, impeding comprehension
- Inconsistent terminology for key terms, which makes it impossible to follow and connect the dots. E.g. each god has multiple names and titles
- Cryptic storytelling, vague and unclear plotlines and events. You read walls of texts and end up with more questions than you started with. Half of the story doesn't make sense and the game doesn't pretend to care. Where other games like FFXIV provide literal infographics in-game to help you understand the story and main characters, BDO throws a bunch of contradictory and poorly translated nonsense at you.
- Multiple rewrites of the story and retconning, without updating older stuff. The story has improved drastically, but it's still unclear what's going on. All we know so far is Hadum is the BBEG but nothing else really.
- Contradictory stuff around the ancients and their lore. There is just so much potential in BDO's world, it includes aliens, robots, magic, elves, but everything is just... lost in translation. After 10 years, nobody knows who the ancients were or what they did.
- Janky animations and broken cutscenes. BDO's engine just can't handle cutscenes, even on high-end specs. It's 2025, developing a working cutscene shouldn't feel like a technological breakthrough.
Orzekea was just the last straw. Broken cutscenes, new characters introduced in the end of a storyline, half the story was hidden in unclear knowledge entries. The story created more questions than it answered and only served as a prologue to the next questline in Alyaelli (which has been renamed three times). The climax of a 4-dungeon storyline spanning three years, reduced to a mere prologue...
I love this game and what I think the story is trying to say but I'm tired of being confused. I've done all story quests but still 80% of the story is a mystery. The devs clearly don't care about the story making sense, at this point it's just about confusing the audience and sparking conversation. Devs if you care about the story please make it make sense.
the writers are just bad, why did you write that wall of text for the most obv answer why a story is bad/boring/uninteresting?
some1 who wrote it was bad at it...
Hire good writers, PA. If you can hire great voice actors, I don't know why you couldn't hire amazing authors.
The main issue of the black desert story is the amount of redtape happening. Stories keep changings so much with updates that by the time they are done with a Saga the beginning doesn't make sense anymore. Just look at how Mediah -> Ulukita went. Another example is how the NPCs act at the beginning of Orzekia which is completely different from how we left them.
I think with new writers that can connect the dots and iron out the details, and better quest chaning the story would be better.
Also they should stop trying to make us the main hero of an anime. They should've let the player be a mercenary and have us discover a beautiful world rather than making us the chosen one.