Black Desert Online expands for free, future content plans revealed
An explorable sea with naval battles!
The free Mediah Expansion has landed for Black Desert Online. It's a 2GB download and contains a significant amount of new content. Simultaneously the game's Korean developer, Pearl Abyss, held a press conference and detailed future plans for the game.
Let's begin with Mediah. It's the name of a huge new region added to the game and is stuffed with more than a thousand quests. It also houses a boss called Kzarka, who can take on hundreds of players at once, and the 40 vs. 40 Crimson Battlefield instance. There are new weapons and armour sets, craftable alchemy stones for equipment bonuses, and you can enchant equipment to higher levels now.
Now for the future plans from the press conference, correlated and translated by DualShocker. These include a huge new explorable ocean area with its own bespoke content, involving undersea content and naval warfare. And there will be trading ships too.
The elven land of Kamaslive will be added this summer (in Korea - it will take longer for it to head West) and with it a playable dark elf race. Later, the land of Drigan land will arrive, where be giants, dwarves and elves.
Tier 9 horses - hell horse, pegasus and unicorn - will be added, as will baby elephants as trade mounts!
Apparently there's more co-op content coming, and the team are looking at ways to speed up the new-game experience so people can catch up with veterans. The skill awakening system will be overhauled, it says, and in-game voice chat is coming.
To reiterate: the Western version of Black Desert Online is several months behind the older Korean game in terms of content. The desert of Valencia isn't in the Western game yet but is in the Korean game, for example, and Ninja and Kunoichi classes aren't in our version yet either. I expect they're all coming, though, and, I hope, soon.
I had a look at Black Desert Online recently and was pleasantly surprised. Its combat, in particular, is great. And I still have an awful lot left to see.