The MMORPG Black Desert will get the new expansion “Land of the Morning Light” in the first half of 2023. This dispenses with the usual grind spots and replaces them with boss fights. But it also offers some unusual innovations. We at MeinMMO present the content to you in more detail.
What’s in Land of the Morning Light? A big focus of the new expansion is on the story. However, this should not be told linearly through a quest series, but relies on 15 different, small story chapters that you can follow in a new “story book”. As in the “Eternal Winter” expansion, there should be cutscenes and spoken dialogues.
The typical grind spots that Black Desert is well known for are also omitted. Instead, there is the Boss Rush. A total of 8 bosses, each with 10 levels of difficulty, await you in the new area. The fights should be challenging and provided with different mechanics.
The interesting thing about the boss fights is that your equipment doesn’t play that much of a role. Instead, you can level up new attributes specific to these battles. This is especially helpful for players who have not yet found any strong equipment.
The extension also brings:
You can watch a first trailer here:
Black Desert – Trailer “Land of the Morning Light”
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Beautiful setting, immersive story and new boss fight mechanics
What is the setting of the expansion? The new areas should look graphically beautiful, with huge bamboo trees and colorful flower fields. In addition, several new enemy races await you, including the Horang – tigers on two paws – as well as the Hare (rabbits) and the Tortoise (turtles). New workers and a production node are also included.
Black Deserts Executive Producer Jaehee Kim said in an interview with us:
With Land of the Morning Light, players will be able to experience stunning new graphics not only from the Korean Joseon Dynasty [dem letzten Abschnitt der Königszeit] inspired, but have never been seen before in any video game currently on the market, allowing them to experience something entirely new.
We believe that the new expansion will bring a certain freshness to the game that goes beyond the weekly updates that Black Desert offers players.
Part of that freshness comes from the story. This is told in over 100 cutscenes and 5,000 voice lines. However, it deviates from the big, overarching story of Black Desert and instead only focuses on the island and especially the bosses there.
There will be 15 story chapters in total, all starting in the new town of Dalbeol Village. You activate them via a story book. The order doesn’t matter, but you can only follow one story at a time.
While developing stories with such a focus is expensive and requires various review processes and localization, we will continue to address these challenges as we want our players to enjoy our game in an even more immersive and exciting environment.
Jaehee Kim
By the way, if you complete all 15 chapters, you get +1 AP and +1 DP for the entire account family – a nice little bonus.
What’s behind the boss rush? At the heart of the new areas is the boss rush, replacing the traditional grind spots. There are 8 bosses, each with their own theme, 10 levels of difficulty and attribute, including sun, moon and earth.
You should be able to defeat the low-level bosses without the special attribute, but for the high levels you have to focus on it. There are also the “Jewels of Light” that you can collect in the new area. You can then invest this in an attribute. However, their number is limited, so you can only specialize in a few attributes and are not ideal for every boss. However, you can reset the distribution at any time for 2 million silver.
According to the developers, around 80% of your damage and defense comes from the new attributes and only 20% from your normal gear. In this way, players who do not yet have an ideal endgame equipment can also be useful.
The system should deliberately be aimed at new players, say the developers. However, for the veterans, there are rankings for speed kills. Then every small percentage of equipment also plays a role. Each boss can be defeated up to five times per week.
What new content is there? In addition to new endgame armor, work was also done on life skills. There is a quest line for collecting plants, which then unlocks a mini-game. This then appears randomly in further collection campaigns and if you are successful you will receive more loot.
There is also a new Marni rifle for hunting, which deals more damage and brings more loot if you kill the creatures with a headshot.
How do I get into the new content? To access the new expansion, you must complete the Abyss One: Magnus questline. That’s a total of 110 quests that start at level 15. For newcomers, this should be feasible in a few hours.
Land of the Morning Light will be out in the first half of the year
When is the expansion coming out? The expansion was released in Korea on March 29th, for the western version there is no fixed release date yet, but a statement from Jaehee Kim:
The localization process for Land of the Morning Light is going smoother than previous updates, and we expect it to be completed sooner than originally planned […].
We will announce the global release date through the most appropriate means. However, it will not appear after the first half of this year.
Is the new entry worthwhile with the expansion? We also asked Jaehee Kim this question. He says:
Black Desert welcomes anyone in the world who wants to join our adventure. We want to provide an experience where each player can enjoy the game on their own terms, so we always keep the new player experience in mind.
What we’re really trying to do is bring joy to all players, whether they like fishing, gathering, or fighting monsters, to the point where they don’t realize they’re just staring at the ocean and thinking all day how beautiful he is. […].
We hope that Black Desert will be more than just a game: a companion and a place where players can come together and share their joys, heartaches, frustrations and happiness in life.
A good time to start in Black Desert is the new seasons. In them, your characters level up faster, get useful equipment from quests, and PvP is temporarily disabled. The spring season is currently running until April 19th. The next season will probably start in May.
What do you think of the new expansion? Do the ideas and concepts appeal to you? Or do you just not like Black Desert? Feel free to write it in the comments.
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