I’ve been trying to throw as much time as I’m able at BDO each night while the 1000% XP boost is active. Earlier this week, I finished leveling my Archer, Amon, to 56. I got him his Oasis gear and went through his Awakening questline.

It was neat to venture into the realms of the Elves, which were his homelands, for the first time. I’m looking at some of the big houses there as a possibility for my main residence. The only problem is that the city feels so far away from everything else!

Overall, I enjoyed the Shai’s awakening quests more, but that’s to be expected.

The third character in my roster is Benjamin who was a wizard that I rolled not long after launch – back when they finally gave wizards a young appearance to choose from. This means that this character is locked into the original old main story quest line – something I didn’t know until I started messing around with him sometime last month.

Any characters rolled before the change to the main story retain the old main story up until you hit the quests for Mediah. At first, I thought to reroll him since he was only level 18 when I picked him up to level him for this event. But then, I decided I was curious to see how much the story had changed.

And boy has it changed quite a bit!

Not only does the old story take you through nooks and crannies (and stories related to these locations) that the new one never touches, but there’s lots of fully voiced cutscenes that were removed throughout the game as well. I puzzled about this because that seems a waste of resources.

These stories were interesting, though suffered poor translation, and somewhere in the middle of the storyline, they just vanished completely for some reason. I don’t know if it was a consequence of the new story revamp, but I never got to see the ending – what happened to Edan and company – that kind of thing.

The game suddenly flitted from this main story with cutscenes and characters to a series of quests that lead you from one point to another across the map to fight battles and kill things. Still, I’m glad that I went through the old scenarios because it seems that some of the titles you earn may be locked behind boss fights that you got there.

Also, it took me to places I’d not explored before during the new quest lines, so that opened up a lot of new knowledge and NPCs. Though the ending of the old storyline is a lot more lackluster than the new. Basically, after you go through quest after quest to kill stuff, the Black Spirit just tells you that you’re all done here.

The new storyline, in contrast, has you face down Kzarka and gives you a nifty cutscene – but no one really explains much about who this guy is until after the fact. The old version, they actually mention him several times and explain way ahead of time that this is a dark god… but then, you never see him or face him at all. Again, I don’t know if this was how the old story worked back in the day or if it’s just fragmented now (or if I missed something).

Anyhow, it’s done on Ben, and I’m now merged into the Mediah quests just like all the other characters I have. Following in the footsteps of those who came before, I poked around at the bandits near Altinova for a while last night and pushed Ben up to level 55.

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So, getting him to 56 should be a bit more grind on bandits tonight. And then off to get his Oasis gear.

With all of my characters almost at the same point in the game, I’ve been working on the Chenga Tome quest line on the side. I’ve heard that this substantially increases quest rewards and is a viable way to level from 56 to 61. So obtaining that is a goal, as is starting to work on my lifeskills soon.

I don’t think grinding for silver or doing boss fights is going to be a viable playstyle for me, so I’m looking at ways that lifeskills can earn me the silver I need to look at upgrades eventually.