MMORPG: There are complaints of a gear disparity above the soft level cap of 50. How does the dev team see this issue, and what are you doing to address it?
DGPA: It is true that a gear gap exists, but there are also misunderstandings about it. That is, a gear gap is inevitable between new and existing players. However, the gap in Black Desert is not that great if you take the time and effort. Moreover, in the case of the North American/European version, we are making an extra adjustment after realizing such concerns. We will constantly adjust the balance of the game so that the players are happy.
Also, we are always trying to prevent the price drops of existing items caused by new items, or a sort of “glass ceiling” where it becomes almost impossible for new players to catch up the existing players. Different players may take different amounts of time, but aside from the traditional way of obtaining gears such as “grinding,” we will make it possible to obtain gears through other activities such as fishing, production, gathering, farming, and so on.
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MMORPG: There was an issue with the Twitter account last week where an image was claimed as Daum's own work, when in fact it was a Redditor's post. Was this an issue with a language barrier in any way, or what exactly happened there? We know Daum's hiring more localization folks, does that mean the company is planning to expand into other territories soon?
DGPA: We are still a relatively small team. That is both a burden and a virtue. It allows for swift communications and adaptations to the game, but we also make mistakes. We liked the image and it is depicting our future content quite well. We thought someone in our team made this mock-up and ran with it without verifying its origins. It was in no way my intent to not give credit to its creator and we quickly corrected the issue. UPDATED 4/21 at 230pm ET - Additionally, there are French and German localization folks being hired right now, and we're constantly working on improving the localization across the board. But there are no new territories to report right now.
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MMORPG: To close out, can you talk a bit about what players can expect over the coming months for Black Desert’s content updates?
DGPA: PA and Daum (Korea) have made announcements with regards to upcoming 2016/2017 content, but a lot of this stuff is still in concept stage and can be changed, so all of the following has been announced, but not everything is confirmed just yet. These plans can change, but in the spirit of openness, here’s what we know is in the works so far:
- Maritime content - There will be naval combat (guilds can build boats and fight each other)
- Merchant ships and battleships
- Major oceans will be added to the world and you need to navigate by use of compass and sea charts + intercontinental trade nodes
- Navigation – a new category of leveling earned by water navigation and/or naval combat
- It will be possible to dive for treasure, and partake underwater exploration
- Dark Elf class and the Kamasilvia region will be added (land of elves). Grandir is the capital city and the land is governed by two queens, Brolina from the Ganelle clan and Herawen who are in charge of domestic and foreign affairs.
- Dregan region will be added (the land of Giants)
- New horse tier 9!
- Deepening and expansion of professions and crafting
- Character Awakenings
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And of course there will be miscellaneous improvements as well such as:
- voice chat support
- A Wanted Player system
- Various co-op contents
- Baby elephant pets!
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