Remember Shadow Arena, Black Desert’s short-lived PvP battle royale mode? It was announced just before 2019, released a few weeks later, and immediately devolved into hacking and banwaves until it was killed off in April. As our Black Desert columnist put it at the time, the mode was fun – but a little too lucrative, which incentivized cheaters to roll new accounts to cheat with and funnel the rewards back to their “real” account for the regular game.
“Shadow Arena was a great idea and was worth playing,” MOP’s Carlo opined. “But it was a rushed mess. Pearl Abyss was not prepared to handle the implications. It was a good time to attempt battle royale, but this was not a good time for Pearl Abyss and Kakao to learn the intricacies of their game’s PvP balanced against managing hackers.”
Why dredge all this back up again? Well, recall that in its August fiscal report, Pearl Abyss announced that it was planning to re-release BDO’s Shadow Arena as a standalone battle royale game. Apparently, plans for that standalone are still humming along, as MMO Culture caught the Korean trailer for the game, set to debut at G-Star in November.
