From the outside looking in, Black Desert appears to be a game about grinding, Conquest and Node Wars, and (in my personal case) logging in after some time away and utterly forgetting what attack buttons combo into one another. In short, it doesn’t seem to be a game about dungeon delving and co-operation. Perhaps, then, some of that assumption will be cleared away with this video preview of a new co-op dungeon coming to the MMORPG.
This new dungeon is called Atoraxxian, the Last Stronghold, a location where ancient weapons are created, powered by a structure at its center that operates very much like a CPU in a PC. Atoraxxian is broken up into four different themes — desert, canyon, ocean depths, and forest — and each theme will release separately and see the dungeon’s difficulty increase. Right now the devs are planning to release the desert theme first, with the ocean depths theme arriving second. There will also be different difficulty levels depending on which server PC players are on, while console players will be seeing a normal difficulty version of the encounter.
Atoraxxian will feature special obstacles, a variety of ancient weapons with unique features, and even some puzzle elements for players to work through. Combat encounters, meanwhile, will focus on co-operation while promising not to make regular mob encounters too stressful or extreme. Boss encounters, however, will reportedly require some more tactical thinking to take down.
As Black Desert’s first ever co-op dungeon experience, the video below will likely be of extreme interest to players, offering a mechanical preview, a lore dump, and even a coupon code at the end. Yay coupons! Yay dungeons!
