Users were able to mine and leak extremely sensitive game data that helps players better understand stat efficiency on their gear. The year rounded out in a not-so-great way for the people behind Black Desert Online. You can do nothing but fish or cook all day, and you'll eventually be able to power level your character and make good money. It's non-linear in the way that you don't have to grind mobs or quest if you don't want to. The hurt brings the joy for hardcore players, though, and this game is incredibly addicting. The item upgrading in this game is just as unforgiving, and you're going to eventually lose pieces of the best items in the game just by sacrificing them to a completely RNG-based enchantment system. It gets to the point where that next percent becomes the goal. Players hit the soft level cap and will work for months and months just to get to that next level. When you grind in Black Desert Online, you grind hard. When it did drop on Steam, popular variety streamer summit1g helped Black Desert Online hit a new peak when he was addicted to it on stream for several weeks.īlack Desert Online came to the West at a time when MMOs had already gone soft, and this game is anything but that. Bear in mind, these are statistics from before it came to Steam. It came straight out of Korea, and when it hit North America and Europe, it sent hardcore MMO enthusiasts into a frenzy.īlack Desert Online closed out its first year in March of 2017 with 1.5 million NA players and 1.7 million EU players. It'd be a cliché to say Black Desert Online came out of nowhere. Both happen to be some of the most hardcore games of the year, too. That's not to say that they were necessarily the two best MMOs of 2017, but they far exceeded my expectations. There were two games this year that really stood out to me. Let's talk about what happened with MMOs in the past year. Are MOBAs and battle royale shooters taking over? There's no questioning the success of games like League of Legends and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as of recent, but let's not count MMOs out just yet.
I see a lot of people saying that MMOs are a dying breed, though. An immersive gameplay experience combined with social and competitive interaction with other players is something magical. These are the games where you could be something online that years before you could have never imagined creating and experiencing. These are the games 20-somethings like myself went to as a kid when they got home from school to escape reality. Since the days of EverQuest, Ultima Online, and The Realm Online, MMOs have been the backbone of online gaming.