Is Black Desert Online Alt-Friendly?

• MMORPG
• Musings

• Black Desert

I’ve been thinking about alts in BDO. I saw a lot of comments early on about how alt-friendly it is, but I disagree.

When I think of an alt-friendly game, I think of a game where each alt has a different gameplay experience. So that if you get tired of playing with one character, you can log in with another to see or do something completely different. The most famous example of that is, of course, WoW, where every race has a different starting zone and their own storyline for 20 levels or so. SWTOR might be an even better example, since those class stories go all the way up to level 50 I think. Rift is very alt-friendly to me because of the wide variety of playstyles you can put together with the soul system.

I’m not seeing anything like that in BDO. Each alt follows the exact same story, talks to the exact same NPCs, goes to the exact same places. Every class even has the same trainer. From what I can tell, the only gameplay difference between alts is the style of the combat.

So what are people talking about when they say BDO is alt-friendly? I think they mean that your storage space is account-wide, so you share storage between all your characters. They also mean-much more importantly to min-maxers-that each character has their own energy pool, so you can log in with different characters to invest that energy in the various account-wide tasks. I’m still not entirely sure what investing energy in a town actually does, but with four different characters doing it, it would obviously go four times faster.

That’s too much work for me. Honestly I’m starting to get a bit exhausted with the amount of multi-tasking I’m doing in BDO, just using one character, without even adding any alts into the mix. I really need to start focusing on progressing one thing at a time or I’m going to burn out really fast.