Just in time for the Olympics, Kakao is bringing east and west together in Black Desert. In the game’s latest dev letter, the studio explains that up until the latest patch in Korea, attack efficiency for Korean players was different than on western servers. Recent patches, however, brought them into parity.
“Effectively, with the aforementioned patch for the KR server, all regions now have the same balance systems applied,” says the studio. “We aim to develop Black Desert Online as a Single Global Build. By doing so, we believe that it will benefit both our players and us, as developers. It will allow the latest patches to be applied to all regions more quickly than any other game, and enable us to quickly reflect even the tiniest detail of valuable user feedback. Anyone who enjoys Black Desert Online will always have the same optimal experience from any region.”
There’s more to the plan than optimal experience, however: The company is also looking ahead to global PvP.
“By implementing the same balance change to all regions, we will be able to move one step closer to one of our future goals, a Global Arsha PvP Tournament and Global Siege War. As much as we want to share more details to our players, unfortunately, it is not possible for us to do since it is still in the early concept phase. It excites us just by imagining a system which will allow players to compete with others from different regions. We will strive to make this a reality in the near future. We apologize again for not delivering sufficient information in advance, and will do our best to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.”
The dev blog also asserts that the game has “grow[n] steadily to what it is now,” with “new and returning Adventurers are on the rise, and tons of new content is being added to the game in North America & Europe region, faster than ever before.” Western players are getting a seven-day combat booster as a thank-you. Yay free stuff!
