A huge amount of promise is shown in Black Desert Online

Black Desert Online, the Korean MMO famed for its extravagant character creator, is launching in North America, Oceania, and some European regions on March 3, Daum Games announced today. I had the chance to spend some time in the closed beta of Black Desert Online, the new MMORPG from Korean developer Pearl Abyss. The game has been in development since 2010 and will be coming to Europe and America as a full release in 2016. The game shows a huge amount of promise.

Right away you get introduced to the most in-depth character creator working with the most beautiful character models you can find on the MMO market today. A few preset options can make the experience as short as you’d like, but for those willing to craft their perfect character, the option is there. Black Desert’s character creator holds a mixture of sliders, colors, and the ability to drag any body part to the shape you’d like it in order to be as in-depth as possible.

Meanwhile the launch seems to have gone quite well, especially for an MMO, with the main worry of the community being the cash-shop and avoiding it becoming a pay-to-play game with pay-to-win elements. For the unaware, getting into Black Desert Online is a matter of a normal-priced box, no subscription. However, like most other games of similar scale using this system, it also has a cosmetic cash shop for character outfits and the like. The worry is that this will eventually evolve to letting you buy in-game currency or other tangible advantages.

In terms of what your character wears, however, there aren't many options. Even the cash shop has a limited supply, especially for males. This brings me to another complaint I have, gender-locked classes. There are some fun classes to play in Black Desert Online, but I don't like that almost every one is locked to a specific gender. For a game that really want you to be immersed in the game, this was an odd choice.

If you’ve noticed that NPCs are mute in the Black Desert Online alpha test, don’t worry: this will be fixed by launch, though it’s a considerable effort since Daniel told me that there are around 2.8 million words in the game and this figure increases every time Pearl Abyss (the Korean developer of the game) adjusts some quests. Previously developed and released in Korea in 2014, North American and European players can now dive into an apparently gigantic mix of action-heavy gameplay, gorgeous and expansive sandbox environments, and plenty of quests and side activities.

This is what happens when I have too much creative control and too little time. In many other games with character creation, a quarter of an hour is plenty of time. In Black Desert it might be enough to get your character’s nose just right. It doesn’t help that each of the default characters for the six currently available classes looks amazing. How am I supposed to choose between the sprite Tamer.

Black Desert is rated PEGI 16, and so far has only been released in North America and Europe. I did not manage get through every single quest in the game during beta testing, but the language and themes were overall fairly tame. I did notice some disappointing conversation text worth discussing with young players, but this was pretty minimal. A furniture vendor said something about women only caring about pretty furniture, and some non-player characters hit on my female character. The humans also owned some of the goblins, which made me uncomfortable.