It’s been almost four years since I last played Black Desert Online. Wow!

Thanks to some posts at Time to Loot and Inventory Full I learned that in order to keep your BDO account, you need to make an account transfer. Instantly, I hopped off to do just that, which made me realize that even though I haven’t played the game in a while, I actually do value my account and progress there.

I remember really liking the life skills, the horse taming/training/breeding system and other things about the game. So in knowing that you’d get some rewards for transferring early, I decided to patch my client (which was no little thing) and see what BDO was up to lately.

There have been a LOT of changes. That’s an understatement. On top of that, there are a lot of new classes to try, too!

I may not have played BDO in a while, but I’d kept up a little bit on some of the updates over the years. I knew about the Shai race, which I was interested in – and almost returned to the game at that point. I also discovered there’s a pretty cool Elf Archer class, which instantly got me thinking about rolling an Amon character there.

So… that’s what I did.

I also think the Shai is adorable in every way, and based on the Foundry’s information, is supposed to be a lot easier to play than the original classes were. After trying one out, I really felt the pull to make her my main. I never got super far in leveling my original Tamer character. But I also don’t want to delete my first ever character who does have some cash shop stuff that’s bound to her.

I rolled a new Shai, anyhow. I had some Pearls in my inventory to spend, so I bought a name transfer scroll, and pretty soon, my new Shai will become “Aywren” on BDO. Problem solved!

Basically, I’m semi starting over in BDO. But, the experience boost I have due to everything stacking up as a returning character is insane. I should easily catch up with my original character and, if I stick with it, easily surpass her. It’s pretty cool that Shai start out with Professional rank Alchemy and Gathering right off the bat, too.

The one thing I need to earn back are all my horse training levels. Now, those actually mean something as an update has added bonuses to things like taming, training speed and breeding based off your training mastery. That’s another change that brought me back to this game.

I still have a bunch of my Teir 6 horses on hand – I’ll have to look and see if I still have that breeding spreadsheet I made all those years ago. One way or another, I’m happy to work on my horse lineage again.

I did notice that the new player questline and story has been altered a bit from what I remember. If anything, it’s more streamlined than before, which is a good thing. I haven’t gotten too deep into the story yet, and I don’t remember much about where I left off with the story before this. So, I’m just along for the ride when it comes to progressing through the quests in BDO from the beginning again.