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Expect zero seizures from today's Black Desert features reel
OK, so you don't like the spazzy shaky-cam and motion-blur of Black Desert's videos. Fortunately, you can turn it all off inside the game. Even more fortunately, there's more to the game than bouncing-off-the-walls, eye-spasm-y hack-'n'-slash, as today's video from Daum demonstrates. There's farming, fishing, boating, gathering, and other crafting skills, plus what looks like an elaborate minigame attached to harpooning sea critters. There's also an extended section on horse taming and associated mount activities like mounted combat. (The horses are gorgeous.) The sandbox is slated to enter closed beta in South Korea on December 17th. The video's below!
The Soapbox: A violent scene
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. When Star Trek Online was first released, it had more than its fair share of critics, and one of the chief complaints was the fact that the game seemed to focus largely upon combat. Sure, Star Trek had always featured combat, but it had also featured negotiation and diplomacy and unknowable phenomena alongside human drama. The idea that the entire universe could be pared down to ships and ground teams firing disruptor beams at one another didn't sit well with a sizable portion of the fanbase. Of course, Star Trek Online is hardly the only culprit. MMOs have always had a heavy focus on combat as far back as Ultima Online -- the PvP that people look back on with fond memories wasn't a game of cards, after all. Sometimes it can seem as if we have a sea of games with nothing to them except fighting and killing things, without any other meaningful interactions with the world. In a genre that offers us such a wonderful tool for social interaction, why are our games so violent? As it turns out, for a lot of very good reasons.
