In a press release, the studio has also confirmed that the current-gen version of the title will make use of the more powerful hardware to provide shorter loading times and generally improved gameplay.

The content plans for Black Desert after its PS5 and Xbox Series X/S release will start on July 10 with a major update that will bring with it the fan-favourite class Deadeye to the game. The update will also bring with it the new region of Ulukita. The studio has said that these updates will make full use of current-gen console hardware in terms of visuals as well.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of Black Desert will also allow players that started on PS4 or Xbox One with a seamless transition, with all of their progression, history, and character information being preserved in the switch to newer consoles.

Black Desert was originally released for PS4 all the way back in in August 2019. The online RPG, known for its real-time action-based combat, was released on the console with a host of content, albeit only content that could run on the hardware of the at-the-time aging console.

Generally speaking, Black Desert has fostered a massive player base. On PC alone, the game boasts of more than 20 million registered users, and the console versions have only pushed this number higher.

For more details about Black Desert, check out our coverage of its Land of the Morning Light expansion, which was released back in June 2023. Also check out our review from back in 2019.

True to the aforementioned leak, Volition’s reboot of Saints Row – which launched last year to less-than-stellar reception from critics and audiences alike – will lead PS Plus’ lineup for the month of September. It will be joined by Pearl Abyss’ MMORPG Black Desert (more specifically, its Traveler Edition), and Systemic Reaction’s alternate history open world first person shooter Generation Zero.

All three games will be available from September 5 to October 2 to anyone subscribed to the base PS Plus tier, PlayStation Plus Essential- which, of course, means they will be free to claim for PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers as well.

Sony has also announced that it will be raising the prices of 12-month subscriptions for all three tiers of PlayStation Plus starting September 6. Read more on that through here.

Recently at Summer Game Fest, Pearl Abyss unveiled Black Desert’s next expansion. Titles Land of the Morning Light, the expansion will bring to the table a variety of new boss monsters to take on. Inspired by Korean folklore, these monsters will include a massive snake-like creature, a large and terrifying tiger, and even a few of the supernatural variety. Check out the trailer below for a glimpse at what the expansion will have in store.

Black Desert: Land of the Morning Light is due out less than a week from now, on June 14.

After launching on PC and Xbox One, Pearl Abyss has announced that its MMO Black Desert will arrive for PS4 on August 22nd. You can currently pre-order the game on PlayStation Store, which will provide 48 hours early access and some in-game items. Check out the most recent trailer below.

Black Desert is known for its action-based combat and detailed visuals, not to mention a strong character creator. Numerous regions like seaside towns, deserts, and much more are available to explore, along with a range of classes, each with their own trademark abilities. You can also take up different life skills, like fishing, hunting, and crafting for different rewards.

With over 20 million registered users worldwide, Black Desert has a pretty healthy playerbase. It’s already surpassed $1 billion in revenue as of April 2019. Check out our review of the Xbox One version here, and stay tuned for more details on the PS4 launch.

Black Desert, the game from South Korean based Pearl Abyss, has been incredibly successful for the company. It’s revenue has soared passed $1 billion and has slowly made its way to most of the major platforms after being on PC for a long time. Earlier this year, it came to the Xbox One, and the mobile version will come to the west soon. Another big milestone is also the game is finally coming to Sony’s PS4.

You can see the teaser for the upcoming release below. It doesn’t say much, but it’s on the nose as it sets up that the game is coming to the console and when you can preorder it. The game is a fantasy MMO and as of now has over 20 million registered accounts.

Black Desert Online is available now on Xbox One and PC and mobile (in some regions), and it will be available for pre-order on the PlayStation 4 July 2nd. To see our take on the game, check our review.

We’ve had a string of months where some excellent titles have been added to the Xbox Game Pass catalog, with both March and April seeing some strong games joining its ever-growing library. May is looking similarly exciting, and offers a number of great games. Of the eight games being added, the most notable is Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, which is probably among the best stories and single player campaigns you’ll find in a first person shooter.

Chucklefish’s recently released turn based strategy title Wargroove also joins Game Pass. With solid gameplay, a decent campaign, and excellent creation tools, it’s a great game regardless, but at the price of free, it’s an absolute steal. Also part of the new games is Fullbright’s excellent science fiction adventure title Tacoma, while Paradox Interactive’s unique simulation game Surviving Mars joins the library as well.

Deck13’s Soulslike sci-fi title The Surge is also coming to Game Pass, while the recently released Xbox One version of the MMO Black Desert, Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, and strategy RPG For the King are included as well.

You can get the details on exactly when each of the eight titles joins the Game Pass catalog below:

• Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus – May 2
• Wargroove – May 2
• Surviving Mars – May 9
• Tacoma – May 9
• Black Desert – May 9
• For the King – May 10
• The Surge – May 16
• Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham – May 16

Developer Pearl Abyss, the South Korean based company, recently issued a press release today to talk about the success of their massively multiplayer online game, Black Desert. The game has made $1 billion dollars in gross revenue, and reportedly has 18 million registered users across 150 countries in the current versions of the game (the game is available on Xbox One and PC, as well as mobile in some regions).

CEO Robin Jung also said that the mobile version, both Android and iOS, of the game will be coming to the west soon, and that the company feels the game will see continued growth as it expands globally. Jung also mentioned that over 30 per cent of gross sales of the MMO come from its mobile version- which means that the publisher should be even more willing to make the version more widely accessible across the world.

“We’re proud of what this achievement represents – the hard work and dedication from our teams over the past four years and the support from a community of fans around the world,” Jung said. “With over 30% of gross sales for Black Desert stemming from mobile platforms, which saw an initial release in Asia in the past year, we’re confident that sales are accelerating. Pearl Abyss is optimistic for the future of Black Desert and we look forward to launching Black Desert Mobile globally by the end of the year.”

You can read our review of the fantasy MMO here. The game is available now for Xbox One and PC.

Once there, you’ll be dropped into Black Desert’s character creator. Character creators are pretty impressive in most games nowadays, but Black Desert’s is absolutely nuts. You can change quite literally everything in Black Desert. There’s an enormous amount of depth here, and it would be easy to spend hours stuck here, playing with every slider, making your characters as beautiful or hideous as you like. It’s mostly for you. This is an MMO; you’re not gonna spend a lot of time getting close ups, but it’s a neat system with a lot of options – which makes it very odd that the classes are gender restricted. Warrior, berserker, and wizard are your options for the men; ladies can be rangers, sorceresses, and witches.

"You wake up with amnesia (of course!) in a small encampment with a Black Spirit (naturally) who has given you some of its power and it totally not manipulating you for its own ends haha why you even say that?"

Black Desert pairs an incredible character creator with a gorgeous game. This is easily one of the best looking MMOs on the market. The world is bright and colorful, and everything, from the characters, attacks, and particle effects to the water, textures, and animations looks really good… until it doesn’t. Go long enough, and you’ll notice that a character’s mouth doesn’t move quite properly, that a certain animation looks awkward, that some textures that don’t look like they are texturing the right buildings. Most of the time, you’ll ignore this because it’s an MMO and its big and most of it looks good. But the longer and closer you look, the more cracks you’ll see in this beautiful façade. It still looks good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nowhere near perfect.

The story is straight out of an anime, so stop me if you’ve heard this before. You wake up with amnesia (of course!) in a small encampment with a Black Spirit(naturally) who has given you some of its power and it totally not manipulating you for its own ends haha why you even say that? Anyway, people who get possessed by Black Spirits tend to turn evil, lose their minds, and Hulk out, but your character (and every other character; this is an MMO) just so happens to be immune, so you’re getting enormous power with, like, zero drawbacks. Anyway, you’d better figure out what’s going on with you, and the world’s political situation, and the approaching evil, and… look, you’ve heard all of this before, and heard it better. The story and lore here are just good enough to interest you every now and then (and boy, is there a lot of it), but mostly you’ll probably skip it as you search for the quest that will point you in the direction of the next thing to kill.

This is good, because killing things is by far the high point of Black Desert. Unlike most MMOs, which base much of their combat on hotkeys and cooldowns, Black Desert’s combat is action-based, and it feels really, really good. Attacks are performed be pressing a button, or a couple buttons, and a direction on the right stick. As a ranger, I had access to my bow, knife, and several kicks. Each move has pop and impact and is fun to use. Better yet, the game’s Flow system lets you easily chain them together to make combinations, should you know which moves chain into each other. This generally lets you skip an attack’s start-up animation and go straight to the next attack, allowing you to build chains and do a lot of damage very quickly. You might chain two kicks together, for instance, then launch an enemy into the air with a third and follow up with a series of attacks from your boy. Best of all, this combat works very well with a controller.

"The issue is the missions themselves, which are exceptionally repetitive, even by MMO standards. Mostly, they’ll send you to a place and task you with killing a bunch of mobs, and I mean a bunch. It was not uncommon to be asked to kill 50 things in an area."

Unfortunately, the game is really bad at teaching you how to play it. After a very brief tutorial that acquaints you with your basic moves, the game sends you out to go kill things. The game does have a skill list that will tell you the inputs for certain moves and show you what they look like, but much of what you’ll learn comes from trial and error, and little else. The issue isn’t the combat; the game gives you a lot of your moves out of the gate and lets you go nuts. The issue is the missions themselves, which are exceptionally repetitive, even by MMO standards. Mostly, they’ll send you to a place and task you with killing a bunch of mobs, and I mean a bunch. It was not uncommon to be asked to kill 50 things in an area. To spice things up, the game might also ask you to talk to someone, deliver something, or kill mobs and then take specific items off their corpses. Every now and then, you’ll summon a big enemy, who is usually fun to fight, but that’s about all. There are no instances or dungeons.

The issue with making the combat work so well on a controller is that Pearl Abyss seems to have sacrificed the rest of their interface to do it. Want to open your inventory? You have to press up on the d-pad, use the right analog stick to select it in the radial menu, and then select the item, or enter a huge menu that takes up the entire screen. Accessing your mount is even more complicated, requiring you to hold down a trigger while opening the radial menu. Cycling through multiple menu options requires pressing the “use the thing” button, but don’t hold it! That will confirm you want to use the current thing. Everything about this interface feels designed for a keyboard and mouse, and like putting it on a controller was an afterthought.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if the game’s UI wasn’t a cluttered mess, but it is. Every time something goes up on the auction house, an enormous notification takes up the top middle of your screen. This is also around the place where the game will inform you that a guild is doing something, that you’ve completed a quest, or that you’ve entered a combat area. To make matters worse, the chat takes up most of the left side of your screen. You can turn it off, thankfully – you have a controller, anyway; you’re not gonna use it – but this is one of the busiest, least intuitive UIs I’ve ever seen in an MMO, and I’ve played a lot of them. These problems even extend to the inventory. You can’t even tell which sockets on your character’s armor correspond to what kind of gear. And all of this is made worse by the fact that you’re sitting a few feet away from a TV, rather than right in front of a monitor, so everything is hard to read. None of this is gamebreaking; you can navigate around it and play, but it was a constant annoyance to the point that I put off equipping new gear as long as I could.

"These include new clothes, pets that boost your stats and gather loot for you, and items that temporarily give buffs or boost the number of available slots in your inventory."

At higher levels, the game tends to be heavily focused on PVP, but there are skills like fishing, cooking, and more than a few kinds of crafting, as well as a node system to play around with. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t explain this very well either, and it’s very easy to miss it entirely or, if you don’t, not really understand what you’re supposed to do. You can get your own horse, boat, and house, too, but again, these tasks are rote in nature. The game does its best to spice things up; your horse, for instance, can be killed by mobs, so you can’t just barrel into a group of baddies, leap off, and start swinging. It adds a little depth, but none of this really stands out. There’s a lot to do in Black Desert; it all just seems very repetitive.

As this is a modern game, there are a ton of ways to spend money on microtransactions. These include new clothes, pets that boost your stats and gather loot for you, and items that temporarily give buffs or boost the number of available slots in your inventory. The game gives you money pretty freely, but once you realize how much everything costs, it quickly becomes clear that getting what you want will require an immense amount of grinding or spending real money. I don’t want to so far as to say that the game is pay-to-win since I didn’t experience high level PVP, but it becomes clear very quickly that the game is designed to get you to open your wallet.

Black Desert also features several visual bugs. Characters get stuck in objects, glitch across rooms, stand on top of one another, etc. The game also features frame tearing and other performance issues. Most of these errors were minor – even the frame tearing never rose about the level of annoyance – and given the level of in-game communication Pearl Abyss engages in (you see messages from the studio at the top of the screen if something is going wrong), I imagine most of this will be fixed. But it’s still worth noting.

" Black Desert has great combat, and I had a lot of fun with it for the first few hours. But then the fatigue and repetition set in."

Ultimately, Black Desert proves what many of us have been saying for a long time: most MMOs simply don’t work on controllers. However, Pearl Abyss deserves credit for making this playable on a gamepad, which is more than most studios have been able to do. Black Desert has great combat, and I had a lot of fun with it for the first few hours. But then the fatigue and repetition set in. It’s easy to get attached to Black Desert because of its character customization, beautiful world, and great combat, and if you can deal with its flaws, it’s got enough content to keep you playing for a long time. But I think I’ve about had my fill of it. I’m headed back to the desert of the real.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

Microsoft’s audience is primarily strongest in North America and Europe, the sheer size of their userbase over time warrants Microsoft’s ability to command its own exclusives or broker timed-exclusivity deals. In this feature we’ll be taking a look at 12 Upcoming Xbox Console Exclusives of 2019 And Beyond.

Please note that this list includes console as well as timed exclusives.

Crackdown 3

Due for release on PC and Xbox One, Crackdown 3 is the newest entry in the series almost a decade since its last launched game in Crackdown 2. While previous games were developed by Realtime Studios, this newest game is being handled by Sumo Digital. It’s been delayed quite often since its originally-planned target year of 2016, but expect to be able to play this action game that pits powerful individuals against the machinations of terrorists on February 15th.

Black Desert from Pearl Abyss is still going strong on the PC, but was also announced some time ago for the Xbox One. Those still hoping to experience the MMO’s admittedly awesome combat on the console needn’t wait anymore – it’s releasing on March 4th. Pre-orders are already live on the Microsoft Store.

There are three different editions to purchase – Standard ($29.99), Deluxe ($49.99), and Ultimate ($99.99). The Deluxe and Ultimate Editions contain a number of bonuses, like different outfits, currency to use in-game, and early access. The period of early access differs depending on the edition purchased – the Deluxe Edition provides access 48 hours early, while the Ultimate Edition offers access 72 hours early.

Black Desert Online has seen some significant updates since launch. It’s most recent was the Drieghan expansion for PC, which arrived on November 14th. Along with a new continent and a new story, it brought more than 300 new quests to the base game. Will this content be available from launch for Xbox One players? We’ll find out in March.