BDO: Debating the Future

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about BDO – it’s also been a while since I truly played BDO in any capacity. I have been logging in every day for daily rewards, but mostly to use loyalty rewards to buy items to awaken my courser.

Lately, I’ve been pondering my future with BDO. Not because I’ve failed at courser awakening 13 times – and I have a second courser waiting in the wings. Honestly, I could continue patiently log in every day for loyalty rewards – I’m not frustrated with the courser failure as it takes very little time from me the way I’ve been doing it.

Courser Woes

It’s really the other part of courser awakening – obtaining Krogdalo’s Origin Stone. I had a handful of those last year, mostly won from the boxes you get for finishing the Black Spirit’s board game. But once those run dry, it’s much harder and more time consuming to obtain the swaying wind shards and rumbling earth shards required to craft one.

Without a stone, you can’t attempt an awakening. To earn them in game means running horses for Imperial rewards or races (which I’ve never done). I have heard that you can get them as drops for content that I don’t think I can complete, too.

You can’t normally find the Origin Stones on the marketplace, and swaying wind shards seem to be mostly sold out or ridiculously priced if they are in stock. So your best option is to AFK run horses for exchange.

For a while, I had horse training in two separate towns – one for my own high tier horses and one for random wild horses I caught around Duvencrune. The wild horses were fodder for the turn-ins, but eventually those became hard to find when BDO featured a horse event. I just haven’t been in the mood to burn AFK time in this game on my PC (the machine tends to get toasty).

Farewell Oasis Gear

Let’s not mention that while I was logging in every day, I wasn’t paying attention to updates and they removed all the Oasis gear and goodies from our characters. This happened back in November, but it was only today that I logged into a character that once had Oasis stuff and realized they had no gear aside from a few things I happened to save.

I knew this would happen sooner or later, of course. But the Oasis gear is what motivated me to level my characters to 56. It was also super nice to have free carrots for horse training (I did save some carrots from years back), maps, food and compass.

My main Shai has decent gear, but the rest who were level 56 were naked of major gear pieces when I logged in to look at them. Thankfully, I’d taken some time a while back to buy weapons and offhands that were decent equivalents for most of the characters I was interested in playing. The rest still have some Naru weapons I held on to.

I was able to hit up the market to purchase some non boss gear blue stuff for Amon and Ben with the silver I’ve saved up over last year. It’s not quite up to the Oasis gear standard, but for a complete casual player, it will do. But this is something that will curve my alt-creation or playing for the alts that aren’t so lucky.

Considering the Future

Even before I realized the loss of the Oasis stuff, I had been considering whether or not I wanted to put time into BDO in the near future. As much as I do enjoy many ideas in the game, really, the PVP aspect, action battle, time sinks required, and huge focus on gearing up bugs me.

Basically, I want to play BDO for the horse breeding and life skilling. The truth is, I can get those itches scratched from other games.

FFXIV remains my main MMO and I don’t see that changing going forward. If I want to play games that have similar lifeskill systems without the PVP worries, there’s other games that offer a similar type of gameplay with far less a time sink.

Housing in BDO is easy to pick up, but it’s so focused on the cash shop in terms of decorating. The new manor system is rather disappointing in that it’s a huge silver sink I cannot even begin to afford. Not to mention, I’d never have the furniture to decorate it, anyhow. Again, there are other games that allow for house decoration without the real money price tag.

Horse taming, training and breeding has always been the main highlight of this game for me. However, I can pick up a horse-focused games that scratch the same itch without this whole struggle and AFK grinding that BDO requires.

While I appreciate the dream horse I already have (Unicorn), my true dream will always be the Pegasus. I lucked out and now have 2 Krogdalo’s Origin Stones in my inventory, which gives me two more chances at awakening. Hopefully, I’ll be able to snag some more stones for the future… but if I don’t, I’m not sure that my daily log in in BDO will continue.

I’ve also started to AFK run my high tier horse wagon on my old laptop just to test if this is something do-able. This will enable me to continue breeding and turning horses in for Imperial seals that provide materials to make more Origin Stones. It may be possible that starting at this point – with two stones in the inventory – I’ll have enough time to train/breed/exchange to keep the system going.

But the question is… do I want to? I’m not closing the door on it all just yet – I might rediscover my interest for BDO in the future. I’m just not sure right now.

Comments