Black Desert Online's Land of the Morning Light Update Shows Pearl Abyss Is Willing To Take Risks

mmorpg.com:

When Pearl Abyss announced it was releasing a new major content update, complete with a new zone and story back in December at the Calpheon Ball, I was pretty excited to see what the team had in mind. 

I’m not sure I would have predicted what the team showcased, however. 

Black Desert is an MMORPG steeped in a design that evokes medieval European fantasy, complete with European-style cities, castles, weapon and armor types, and much more. 

And that’s not a bad thing — Pearl Abyss has taken that design language and put its own unique spin on it, creating a world that feels familiar, yet is also very much unique in its own right. Dotting the landscape are monsters of all varieties, from the ever-growing goblin hordes to the millions of Centaurs culled in 2022. 

Last year’s expansion content, the Mountain of Eternal Winter, had some elements that weren’t quite inspired by the European setting roots of BDO , but it didn’t feel like such a departure that it was unfamiliar. However, the upcoming Land of Morning Light does feel this way because, at its core, it is a fundamental departure from the design language that has defined the world of Black Desert , instead opting for something closer to home for its Korean developers.

Throughout the years that Black Desert has been in operation, the MMO has slowly started to lean into non-European settings. Classes like the Hashashin come to mind, and my personal favorite, the Lahn, doesn’t share any of the design language of a medieval knight. It’s been refreshing to see, slowly but surely, Pearl Abyss’ designers ebb and flow across the range of real-world influences they have to play with.

This is something the Pearl Abyss team talked to us about during the Calpheon Ball,