Driving into Hollywood, California, during two severe weather warnings over the weekend, I questioned why I was doing so as I started to crest the San Gabriel mountain range. The cloud cover was so low that I couldn’t see too far ahead of me, while winds and rain pelted the roof of the sedan car as I ate up the miles.
The event I was heading to was meant for players, not necessarily the press. I found myself driving over three hundred miles for what ended up amounting to a four-hour party for players.
Yet, by the time I arrived at Academy LA, the location for Pearl Abyss’ Black Desert Adventurer’s Oasis Anniversary Fiesta, the sky had, thankfully, cleared. And with it, any doubts that I had made a mistake by weathering the storms to get there.
Celebrating its 8th Anniversary here in the West, Black Desert developer and publisher Pearl Abyss put on a party for its players, dubbed Adventurers. While no earth-shattering game announcements were made to tease players with what’s to come, Black Desert was celebrating very meaningful and important milestones with its adventurers - three separate anniversaries in March.
Hitting Milestones
Pearl Abyss announced last week that the MMORPG franchise has racked up 55 million registered users across all platforms. Speaking with Pearl Abyss America CEO Jeonghee “JJ” Jin at the event, I was surprised to learn that the PC version leads the way, with Mobile either on par or shortly behind. Though this does make some sense in that the PC version was the first to release in Korea 10 years ago, and it’s the version that leads the development (it’s also important to note that the Mobile version of Black Desert is a wholly separate game).
Alongside the 8th anniversary of the MMO on PC in the West, March is also a month celebrating Console milestones. Five years ago, Black Desert Console launched on Xbox One, while four years ago we saw the introduction of cross play with the Xbox and PlayStation servers.
As a result, the MMO has brought in $2.2 billion USD in revenue in this time, which is huge for the Korean developer, especially since the “live services” genre of games have only exploded since then, with more games trying to edge out others for a piece of a consumer’s wallet.
Yet, despite these impressive numbers, Black Desert’s developers don’t seem keen to just rest on their laurels. Speaking with JJ, she feels that there is still room to grow and reach players, especially younger ones who might not have the rose-tinted glasses many of us wear about the MMORPG genre, purely because they haven’t been as exposed to pure MMORPGs.
“I think for, you know, ‘seasoned’ game players in their 30s [or] 40s, MMORPGs are more of an established genre. I think, actually, for younger players, this is a new genre, because most of them are exposed to other genres first when they enter games - it’s shooters mostly, or survival games. Or just kind of Roblox.”
If Pearl Abyss can capture those younger players looking for something different, they won’t want for content, for sure. In an infographic shared with MMORPG.com last week, Pearl Abyss highlights some of its development milestones, including the reveal that since its launch, the MMO has added 3.4 new classes per year, and currently sits with 27 classes to choose from. There are over 100K quests in the MMORPG to tackle, new content to look forward to with the Seoul addition to last year’s excellent Land of the Morning Light expansion due out sometime this coming year.
Yet - surprisingly - when I spoke to players at the Adventurer’s Oasis event, while they all acknowledged that this is what drew them to the MMO in the first place, the community, guilds and developers are what keep them there.
A Tale As Old As Time
We’ve all heard the stories of player’s meeting their life partners in an MMO or online game, or have experienced for ourselves the lifelong friendships that can be forged during a raid or PvP session. One adventurer, Jonathan “ToxicBlitz” Bush, spoke about how he met his current partner in Black Desert - as well as how he has made those lifelong PvP friends along the way.
During the event, Bush shared two stories from his days playing Black Desert Online - both with the common theme of finding friends through PvP.
One fateful encounter was with a player who mained a Witch named Shyzie, which Blitz ended up being crushed by in their first duel.
“I got my ass beat quite a bit,” ToxicBlitz explained in an interview with me this past week. “I was brand new, so I was just getting beaten. But it was a really cool experience.”
From there, the two became fast friends, and she gave some tips and tricks to help Blitz grow as a PvPer. The two, over time, became dueling partners, playing day-by-day with each other. However, after a while, Shyzie left BDO.
Then COVID happened, and one day Blitz saw her log back in, having kept the Witch player on his friends list.
“I saw them log in, and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m running a PvP Guild, and you were a great duelist at the time, you’re good at PvP, so I want to invite you,’” Bush recalls. And low and behold she joined, and then over time the two grew closer, first by hanging out in game, but then through Discord. Eventually, the two developed and genuine interest in each other, and became a couple.
“We’ve been together for four years,” Blitz says. “It is the first relationship I’ve had out of a game or common hobby and it’s been the best relationship ever, since.”
Anniversary hype! ??Having a blast with everyone here at Adventurers’ Oasis - Anniversary Fiesta in Los Angeles! pic.twitter.com/Ovn6pLfZJ9
— Black Desert Online PC (@NewsBlackDesert) March 3, 2024
Blitz has a penchant for meeting friends in-game through PvP it seems, though. His second story he shared centers around a moment that, if any of us had witnessed, might have felt like one giant troll job.
In fact, it seems to have started as one.
Grinding near the Mirumok Ruins, Blitz spotted a group of three people grinding the area, with a fourth hanging around and griefing them. Knowing full well his intention was to find some players to fight and mess with, he offered to take care of the fourth person griefing and then to help with the grind.
After dispatching the griefer, Blitz gave the other three an intriguing offer. Recruiting for his PvP guild in Black Desert at the time, he issued a challenge: The three of them duel him at once, and if he loses, he’ll disband his guild.
“It was a Succession Wizard, a Ninja and a Dark Knight, and I was an Awakened Wizard,” Blitz recounts. He won the duel.
“I won the first duel, and I’m like, ‘You know what? I’ll do best two out of three for y’all.”
And he won that, too.
As a result, ToxicBlitz recruited three new PvPers to his guild, calling the spectacle a “pretty good recruitment method.” However, the friendship didn’t just stop there. Bush mentions that ever since then, the four of them hang out seemingly every day on Discord, and he has since met up with these players in person a few times—including the Adventurer’s Oasis.
Taking A Breather
We all know the rigors of being in a raiding guild. Raiding in MMORPGs can be one of the most rewarding experiences in any gaming medium, yet it can also be the one that requires the most commitment. From ensuring you have the best gear possible to scheduling whole weekends to spend in front of your computer screen, your group surrounding you for hours on end to complete a raid, it’s not for everyone.
We’ve also, for the most part, been in a bad raiding guild—one in which the raid group seems more important than the real lives outside the gaming sphere of its members.
Timothy “GotFireTTV” Sheehy attributes his desire to keep playing Black Desert down to the guild members he keeps, thankfully finding himself in a good raiding guild - something that was put to the test most recently after having his first child.
“I did feel like if I wasn’t playing 24/7, they’re not going to want me anymore,” Sheehy says of the first guild he was part of before finding his current playgroup.
The lone console player of the people I spoke to at the event (Console player here as well - you’re not alone), he’s been playing since release.
“I can’t find anything like this,” Sheehy explained. “This is what I always come back to.”
Sheehy mentions that joining a guild in Black Desert Console was the best experience for him, and something he was keen to hold on to “desperately.”
However, real life happens, so to speak, from work to the birth of his daughter. As a result, he took a break from Black Desert Console.
“[It’s] the only game I play, and it really tore me down,” he says.
Sheehy likened the feeling to someone who works for decades at a job, only to find themselves longing for something to do after retirement.
“That sounds kind of funny, right?” he mentioned with a laugh. He continued, “Because it’s just a game. And I understand that. But when you play something for so long, it becomes part of your routine, your daily life, just as if you’re going to work.”
He took a step back from the game, telling his guild at the time that he needed to drop by to soak in the moments with his newborn. When he returned, he joined another guild, but something was off.
“I just couldn’t find that sense of belonging that I so desperately love about the game, of belonging to a guild that truly cares about its players. [...] I tried joining a different guild at the time to try to get that back, and I just didn’t feel that drive, like I was part of something.”
The solution was simple: he asked to rejoin his previous siege guild.
“I want to come back home; you guys are my home,” Sheehy says of his current guild, which welcomed him back with open arms. Until that point, he was still joining group chats on Discord with his old guild and interacting with them, so the move back seemed simple.
And despite the fact that the guild still has gear requirements and attendance requirements for seiges, that pressure to perform 24/7 or get booted just isn’t there, which is a load of pressure off their member’s minds for sure.
Strengthening Family Bonds
One angle of MMORPGs that I feel is underrepresented by media like myself and other creators is how family bonds can be strengthened in games. We talk about the relationships we build with strangers and other players across the digital highway of the internet, but games like Black Desert can be just as powerful in strengthening the bonds we have with those already closest to us.
This memory, shared by player Jeremy “Merlynx Ayedonne” Ciaramella, is actually what piqued my interest in writing these stories, as it hits close to home for me as well.
Merlynx actually submitted this memory as part of a memories contest hosted by Pearl Abyss a few years back. And he won, which netted him some cool real-life and in-game gear. And he seemed to think that was the end of it.
However, something I’ve learned in my thirteen years covering games as a career is that developers have long memories—especially when those memories are meaningful.
Ahead of the Adventurer’s Oasis event last Saturday, Pearl Abyss reached out to see if Ciaramella would be interested in sharing this memory on stage at the event.
The memory? A Daddy-Daughter date in Black Desert.
“Initially, I wanted to find something to stimulate my kid’s imagination,” Merlynx tells me. “I wanted to find something that would connect us on a different level, somewhere she could exercise her creativity and at the same time have fun and hopefully be able to do something with me.”
During COVID, this became a way to go somewhere and experience something together while the world shut down. While Ciaramella mentions that the mechanics and such might have been too complex for his youngest at the time, his oldest was potentially interested, thanks to an ancillary interest in fantasy such as the Lord of the Rings movies.
“I said, ‘Hey, let’s go on a daddy date, but we’re gonna do something special,’” he recalls in our interview. “She was all excited about it when she was a bit younger. And I said, ‘So we’re gonna go someplace, kind of outdoors.’ And she was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Interest piqued.
From there, Merlynx describes his daughter's becoming fully enamored with the character creation tool, saying she “must have spent a day” playing with the character, the different sliders, colors, and more. But when she was ready, the two went in-game to Lynch Ranch, a misty mountain overlooking the world with sheep grazing nearby. The two shared an in-game meal and just talked.
“At the end of the day, we went to Lynch Ranch together and just talked. Took some pictures, talked about the game, talked about how she felt about COVID - just had a conversation. [..] [W]e just talked, and we had our lunch together, in game and in real life.”
While this was an introduction to Black Desert with her father, Ciaramella says that through the years, she has played more, off and on, though not as often as she used to now. But occasionally, the two hop in together and do something, or it’ll be another point of conversation that draws the father and child closer together.
This is something I experience with my kid, too. While my daughter isn’t really the MMO-type (though not for lack of trying, mind you), we play many fighting games together. They compete at EVO, and despite my decades of experience over them, my kid typically beats me now. It’s a shared language that, through gameplay, we can become closer as a family.
Coming Back Each Time
One throughline in each of the interviews I conducted for this piece that was clear was one major reason why each player kept coming back to Black Desert: the community. The players themselves have built lasting friendships and relationships that have helped to grow and cultivate the BDO community these last eight years.
Yet, each player also gave a special shout-out to the developers and game masters who interact with the players on a daily basis. Each one expressed immense gratitude for the people who make this MMO possible, citing the number of in-game gifts they shower players with and even the out-of-game events that are put on free of charge.
At the Adventurer’s Oasis event, Pearl Abyss was raffling off some high-end items, including an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and a few Ryzen 7 CPUs. I mean, those aren’t cheap at all, yet it seems like second nature for Pearl Abyss to do so.
At nearly every event I’ve been to for Black Desert, players don’t leave empty-handed. Players don’t leave hungry (there is typically too much food, in fact, as JJ implored players to eat as much as they wanted during last week’s event). There is often a quasi-adversarial relationship between players and the devs that exist, yet with Black Desert that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least with its most active players out of that 55 million registered user base.
Back at TwichCon, JJ compared the relationship that Pearl Abyss and the players have as a committed romantic relationship. It has its ups and downs, its triumphs and failures. Yet, both are committed to making each other better, both care deeply about the other and want to see it succeed. This was something echoed by everyone I spoke to, both in this interview series and just randomly at the event.
“The game developers, in general, really care about their players,” Sheehy says. This wasn’t his first Black Desert event; he went to 2022’s Calpheon Ball in Los Angeles and witnessed Pearl Abyss’ generosity firsthand with gift backpacks, Razer headsets, and more.
Yet, it’s not the gifts per se that touched the players I spoke to, but rather the feeling behind them that means the most. The graciousness they feel from Pearl Abyss for spending time on their game, that matters to players.
“I think that’s super cool,” Sheehy explained when talking about the developers. I want to see somebody show me a better community and especially a better development team that truly cares about their players to this extent—especially from a developer that’s not even from the States. A Korean-based game developer comes here and treats their player base with such respect, like almost a family member, and expects nothing back. That’s truly moving, and I think that really says something.
Photos via Pearl Abyss. In-game screenshots via Jeremy Ciaramella. Full Disclosure: Travel and lodgings were paid for by MMORPG.com.
