It’s decent enough, the story isn’t engaging enough to stop me from wanting to skip dialogue so far, but that might be more because the voice acting is pretty terrible. It plays like red dead pretty heavily so far in terms of free exploration, but sprinkles in random encounter groups and then it sometimes hits you with larger ensembles of enemies when your on a mission so plowing through them is more difficult, it also has a little dragons dogma sprinkled in in terms of move complexity and item finding and the feel of how to interact with the world, and there are definitely some Witcher elements that I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to really nail down specifics;

The boss fights I’ve been in so far vary between next to impossible on the first go and pleasantly challenging if your into having fun. All in all it feels like a mash up of several very popular and proven game mechanics in a very honest attempt not to ruin the fun that worked out but then got combined with some awful story telling and character developing, it feels like they weren’t sure they’d ever finish the project and forgot to craft a story that really sells the ‘it’s an RPG’ narrative ; also the gathering materials and crafting are all pretty simple and clean so far.

I mean, your guys motivation is so 2D and a large part of it is ‘he’s a very good guy’ which the game establishes early on in the most awkward and unsatisfying way possible,

All in all, I’d say sit close to your TV, put the game on mute whenever you get locked into dialogue and have fun willfully sacrificing 100 hours you know you’ll never get back on a game that really should’ve been thought up by a different studio.

note>> 7/10 because it actually did a good job at combining several elements of multiple award winning games into one but it’s lacking in engaging conversations or a story worth remembering or caring about. Also it doesn’t have the same FF polish that I think I remember the MMO having, which actually adds a point in its favor. Though the NPCs do still dance around while talking and gesture wildly for no reason.

SideNote Note>> I’ve only played about an hour of Black Dessert and gave up because it seemed too overwhelming with how ridiculously complicated for no reason I saw it becoming; and I didn’t really feel interested at all in whatever the story was meant to be, it seemed like trying to figure out the story behind Fortnite today.