chamofleur

locally-sourced gridanian potato.

  • she/her

ffxiv / misc. games / whatever i feel like talking about. all opinions are my own!!!


icon credit: yokotate_ju @ twitter

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i finished the newest bit of black desert's msq, which was this big new island area across the sea called "the land of the morning light". for a very long time, the island existed on the world map as a place called "port ratt," and you could visit it, but you could only access a tiny area. (2nd picture. mugi went there once by boat!) as of a few months ago, the port of old has been destroyed, and the majority of the island is now explorable, with its own unique storyline.

the storyline here is pretty separate from the actual bdo MSQ. usually the MSQ's core goal is your character chasing after a witch who manipulated them into losing their memories and unintentionally acquiring a black spirit, but this time the devs were like "actually we just want to do a big korean-style area with a big side-story," and so they did.

the land of the morning light is incredibly fun to explore, and you can tell the devs put a lot of love into it. the area is inspired by joseon dynasty-era korea, and the story itself is presented through 11 or 12 short story segments, most of which revolve around you dealing with supernatural figures from korean myth, like the gumiho (9-tailed fox) or the golden pig king. these culminate into boss fights, which you can then challenge weekly at different levels.

i decided to do this questline on mugi's older sister character since it was considered a "side story," and while i really appreciated the ambitious approach to the overarching storyline, i did feel that it fell into the same sort of pitfall that the BDO MSQ did in o'dylitta, which is, "we're going to namedrop a bunch of things without much context and hope you remember them and reference your in-game knowledge journal." and so it felt like a bit of a slog, trying to do the later stories and remember who was who. it's good that the knowledge journal exists, for sure!! but if you're not also presenting that information front-and-center within the actual story in a way that is easy for the player to digest, it is easy to get lost--especially in a story that requires some basic knowledge of korean history and myth already. i think i preferred mountain of eternal winter's approach to the story, because it felt like a step in the right direction for how confusing the previous story (o'dylitta) was before it. i don't know if the writers should be veering so far from the core formula of the story when they've barely just found their footing in it.

in this way, i think the localization was probably a very big challenge, and it was easy to tell through the quality of the writing itself--not bad at all, but it suffers from the same issues mountain of eternal winter's story did, where the game has a strange, inconsistent tone of voice. they know they need to elevate the text a bit, but then sometimes the dialogue will try to hit you with more modern turns of phrase or a meme. until eternal winter's story, i felt it was pretty consistently "slightly more elevated writing," so it's a bit jarring when there's suddenly modern references in voiced dialogue, rather than take an XIV approach to it and place it in system text, or something a bit futher away from the story.

i am not super familiar with korean myth, but have played enough korean MMOs to remember many of the overarching symbols and figures they tend to use. i do think they made a decent attempt to familiarize players with the land of the morning light in the english text, though it still always felt like there was some piece i wasn't quite understanding, so i tried to do research on certain things myself where i could, especially regarding some of the government figures that were often mentioned in the story.

in english, BDO voice acting has its ups and downs, but sungwon cho played dolswe, the "guide" character for this expansion, and did a really nice job portraying him!! there were some familiar voices all around the cast--jamieson price, alejandro saab, erica lindbeck, kaiji tang, a surprise richard epcar, etc.--though there was plenty of new talent i hadn't heard before too! it was interesting to hear everyone's takes of these characters in english, though i think if i go through the story again on mugi, it'd be fun to hear it all in korean!

content-wise, it's kind of a shame there isn't too much to do on the island once you're done the story, aside from gathering nodes and boss fights. i do hope if they add the other half of the island as content one day (which, based on the story's ending, they might someday??) they add a bit more content to it, to keep it active, but i am at least a fan of gathering in this game, so i'll probably come back for that.

overall though, i would say i had a decently good time coming back to black desert to play it, and appreciate the effort the devs put into sharing part of their culture with the world. apparently the next story content will continue the main storyline again, all the way in southern mediah...so we'll see how that goes...probably a year-ish from now, if the past two updates are any indication.


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