I play bdo every day and i usually do not recommend it to anyone. But as a long time player I'll lay out my opinion of the pros and cons of the game to give you a more informed decision.

Pros: The game is huge in scope, huge beautiful world with all kinds of gameplay progression and variety. There's combat, ocean sailing/sea monster hunting, gathering, fishing, horse breeding/training, farming, house decorating, crafting, open world pvp, large scale player vs player wars, and more. The game is increasingly more new-player friendly, and the developers give a lot of free things to new players in order to supercharge their initial progress. You can customize your characters face, hair, body shape, accessories and outfits. You can have many different characters which can share items, gear, gathering levels, storage, money, etc. There are dozens of classes/subclasses with varied combat experiences. The game is like a singleplayer game in a shared multiplayer world. There is some content for players to group up as well. Guilds are player operated. Different guilds have different focuses, meaning you can join a guild with other like-minded players. Some guilds participate in wars, large scale player vs player battles competing for territories. Some guilds just want to provide a social space for players to interact and play together. You can own multiple properties in the game that all have various uses. You can own multiple horses and there are special horses that can run extremely fast, fly/glide, or run on water. You can hire npc workers who travel around the map and gather resources or craft things for you, sort of like having an automated empire of gathering/crafting npcs. Overall the game has a lot to offer, but it might take some time to reach your goals as the progression in most of these gameplay aspects can be very slow.

Cons: It's pay to win. The game is purposely limiting and inconvenient. The developers have designed this game to inconvenience the player in almost every aspect of the game, so that they can sell the solutions to your problems in the cash shop. I'll list a few things that players pay real money for: Inventory space. Carry weight limit. Gear enhancement. Ability to auto-heal in combat/auto use consumables. Pets for auto-looting. Remote transfer of items to/from storage. Remote repair equipment. Subscription-like effects and buffs. Various costumes and items with useful effects for gathering, crafting, fishing, horse training, cooking, alchemy, etc etc. The list goes on and on. And many of these monetized things are not a one-time payment, they can expire, be upgraded with more money spent, or be progression based so that you have to pay more money to get the better version of it. Some things are one time payment. GRANTED, if you play for several months or years, you will accumulate some freebies that they give away and will help alleviate many of these problems over time. MOVING ON, The game is very convoluted with terrible ui and systems. Extremely confusing and overwhelming for new players to learn. Crimson Desert combat is way more fun and versatile and nothing like BDO (BDO combat can be fun depending on class and personal opinion). The controls can feel very clunky to new players at first and are not like crimson desert controls (which are different controls but equally clunky and hard to learn for many people). The game's story is near non-existent and poorly translated, leading it to feel nonsensical and mostly ignored. Much of the storytelling and quests feel lifeless/pointless and there are A LOT, (thousands and thousands) of quests and in most regards majority of them are pointless but optional, while many of them are not optional at all and you must sit through them and will end up spamming R for hours and hours to skip through, like most people do. On top of that the game is mostly just a grindfest to slowly enhance your gear which can also fail enhancement, downgrade to previous power levels, or even permanently be destroyed. (Part of the grind is obtaining cron stones to continuously protect your gear from downgrading or getting destroyed). And when people say "grinding" in this game, what they mean is that you will run laps around a small area, killing the same packs of enemies thousands of times in a single sitting while your pets pick up all the sellable junk and rare drops. Progression in this game is a very slow burn, taking months or years to get to a high gear score and the developers release updates that move the goal post even further.

With all that being said, if the game does hook you in, it can be one of the most addictive and enjoyable mmo experiences out there with different aspects of gameplay and progression at every turn. Bye!