BDO: Discovering Heidel
I haven’t had a lot of time to put into BDO lately, thus my absence of posting about the game. I decided to change some of that this weekend and actually make some more progression to level 20, when I can finally start to tame horses (which is my major goal).
Quests, Quests, Quests!
I logged in on Friday at a little more than halfway through level 15 (earned mostly by AFK fishing), and went heads-down in organizing and knocking out the slew of quests that still hung over my shoulder from Veila and Olvia. I told you I haven’t been able to play much! It was kinda nice, actually, since most of the first wave of players has moved on from the two cities, and I could actually navigate through them easier than I could a few weeks back.
So, I finally finished the quests… like the one that asked me to get sea water in empty bottles… but didn’t provide bottles (or tell me where to find them) and didn’t tell me how many bottles the NPC wanted (I had to look it up). And that annoying Rumored Cave quest! I searched up and down the coast through the caves trying to figure out where I needed to go, only to determine later that it was some completely different tiny cave up ON the cliff and not UNDER the cliff… like the quest text seemed to indicate!
Aside from that, I chanced to battle the first summoned boss quest that my Buddy, the black spirit, dropped on me at level 13. I’ve been putting it off because the quest said two things – suggested level 15 and co-op (suggesting I find a party to take down the boss). So, seeing that I had neither, I didn’t actually try the fight until this weekend. It was somewhat challenging, but nothing I couldn’t handle in the end, so I guess I must be on the right track. I eventually killed the next boss at level 17, as well.
Funny thing, only when I defeated the boss did the black spirit finally suggest that I head to Veila, which I’ve been hanging out in since day 2.
The Buddy also dropped more goblin killing quests, on top of my kill 100 goblins and 50 goblin fighters… which I’ve discovered one is a daily quest! Yikes. Honestly, though, tripling up on all the kill quests got me through them really quickly and pushed me right on through level 16 and into level 17. The Tamer has a lot of AOE battle skills, which makes it pretty easy to take 3-4 enemies down at once.
The only time I had any problem was when it turned night or when I ran upon a goblin marked as “Vicious.” Wow, that thing wasn’t dying at all!
More Sandboxing
So, I finished up as many refining, fishing and gathering quests as I could handle, too. These seem to keep popping up, however, including the one quest that wanted me to mine copper, melt it down and make copper ingot from it. Only, some research I did informed me that I didn’t yet have the knowledge to make the ingot on my own (despite the quest telling me to), and chances are, I wouldn’t get it until around level 30. So, I learned about how to get my workers to refine the metal into ingot instead – very useful!
I also got an ongoing quest to make my first raft. I forgot to check in on my workers last night, but I’ll assume that’s well under way as I was following the instructions the quest gave me.
The quest flow in BDO is really wonky. It tries to teach things like refining, gathering and crafting, but I usually find the quests a good deal of time after I actually needed to know the info and had already researched it online. Despite that, I’m still learning from the quests and figuring things out when it comes to owning houses, nodes and organizing workers.
That free beer that they’ve been giving out for the daily St. Patrick’s Day celebration has been so wonderful!
The Black Spirit
I’m happy that after fighting the Imp boss that I’m finally getting what I consider “story” quests from my Buddy, the black spirit, again. He continues to be a major curiosity to me. Over time, through quest text, he’s been revealing more and more of his nature.
Sometimes things he says takes me by surprise as they seem to contradict the character I’ve seen in him before.
Most the time, I never know what’s going to come out of his weird teethy mouth, and have just learned to roll with it.
I have to say that I’ve begun to look forward to black spirit quests because each one gives me a little more sense of what he is. It’s still quite confusing, though, as there are people who have constant nightmares due to the black energies, and the alchemist in town warned me that eventually, the black energy would be my death.
Yet, at the same time, Buddy seems to be concerned about not just strengthening me, but (usually) keeping me alive. For his own sake.
Discovering Heidel
Somewhere along the way, all the quests started pointing me to the next settlement, Heidel. I haven’t yet explored all of it since I’ve been overwhelmed and bombarded with a huge amount of quests along the way already. But I did decide to move my housing residence to the bigger city, where it seems to be a little more upscale and has a nicer view.
Running out of things to do is not going to be a problem for me in Black Desert Online. I feel like this game has still just begun. I’m only level 17, and I’ve put in way more than the 22 hours recorded by Raptr – some of my time wasn’t recorded because Raptr didn’t detect the game the first few days, and some times I leave the game running on my laptop to AFK fish while I play other games on my desktop. I can get an exact count from within the game, but I’m going to venture I’ve clocked in somewhere between 40-50 hours.
Update: I was right. I got the achievement for having 50 in-game hours later this afternoon.
I’ve only created one alt, but have never logged into him. I still have way too much to do and learn about on my main character! I’m super excited to spend some more time exploring this new city, and to continue on my track toward level 20, where I can finally get my beast and start working on taming horses!