Black Desert Online: Land of the Morning Light Edition

metacritic.com:

This is arguably the only Korean-made game that has improved by leaps and bounds since its initial release in the West. PearlAbyss was aThis is arguably the only Korean-made game that has improved by leaps and bounds since its initial release in the West.

PearlAbyss was a small developer with a mere 10 million US$ budget back when it started developing Black Desert in Korea in 2010 and people don't realise how amazing a feat it was to develop such an intricate and complex character creation system back in the early 2010s with such a meagre budget. PearlAbyss' head of studio, Kim Dae-il, was an award-winning game director and game designer [he received multiple awards even before BDO was released and received the Presidential Award by the Korean government in 2017 for his contribution to the propagation of Korean culture in the global scene through Black Desert] before he founded PearlAbyss.

Kim's dream since a child was to create games, and his aspiration is to create games, as a Korean, that will one day win the Game of The Year Award. Unfortunately, due to the financial circumstances of PearlAbyss at the time of its founding, Kim was unable to publish Black Desert on their own so they signed a publishing contract with the infamous and unscrupulous KakaoGames, who was called Daum Games back then.

Some of the P2W elements that were in the game when BDO was initially released in the West were an inevitable result of having to work with KakaoGames, and PearlAbyss knew that in order to realise its aspirations, it had to become independent. That's why in 2019, when the contract with KakaoGames finally ended, PearlAbyss, against most industrial speculations, made the decision to not renew the contract and publish Black Desert