Beynac-et-Cazenac is a medieval village wrapped around a limestone cliff in the southeast of France's Dordogne valley. Perched atop the cliff-face is the Château de Beynac, an imposing fortress built by the barons of Beynac in the 12th Century, featured in films like Ridley Scott's The Last Duel. Beneath the castle, the surrounding village hugs the hillside tightly, its narrow buildings connected by twisting streets so steep they threaten to tip you into the river three hundred metres below.

Here, hundreds of Black Desert players have gathered to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the popular Korean MMO. Beynac is the inspiration for Black Desert's in-game city of Heidel, and as such makes an ideal venue for the occasion. For one cloudy Saturday in June, reality and fiction collide. The castle is adorned with Black Desert banners, while the village's precipitous streets have been temporarily redubbed “the adventurer's path.”

It's on this path where I spent much of the day, speaking to the players, guildmasters, streamers, and cosplayers about their experiences in Black Desert. Across the day, I hear stories of epic wars, murderous outlaws, record breakers, virtual meet-cutes, and a small dog who became the symbol of a nation.

The cosplayers

The day starts, somewhat unceremoniously, in a car park at the foot of Beynac. As everyone signed in for the event, I spot two reserved-looking guys sat on a wall near the riverbank, away from the larger crowd, and went over to chat. They introduced themselves as Lotus and Setheal. Lotus has been playing Black Desert for two months, Setheal for nearly a decade. In fact, Setheal has been playing since before the game was available in the West, joining a Korean server via VPN. “It was not really allowed,” he says. “The first thing I saw was actually a leak from the game in 2013, and I was like 'that's the best-looking MMO I have ever seen', and that's why I joined the Korean server first.”

While the two men clearly get on, their vast gulf in their game experience makes them an odd pairing. That is, until I ask Setheal what his favourite memory from the game is:

“Probably the fact that I met my girlfriend thanks to Black Desert.”

Both Setheal and Lotus, it turns out, are partners with two of the event's professional cosplayers—DrawMeACosplay, and Kazy. 

They introduce me. Kazy, like Setheal, is a long-time Black Desert player. “I saw the game before it even came out, like in 2014,” she says. “I think I downloaded the Korean Server when it was in alpha and managed to play a little bit.” Kazy says she was drawn to the game by its horse-breeding life skill, which lets players pursue a life of raising and training horses. Her cosplay for the event is of the Black Knight class's Rosa Cassius armour, which she made in 2017. But she has done multiple cosplays for Black Desert in the past. “During the Archer release, I made the Archer costume for them for TwitchCon. That was a huge privilege to do that,” she says. “Most costumes usually take us hundreds of hours, so they're a big time investment and money investment.”

DrawMeACosplay, meanwhile, was drawn into Black Desert by Setheal, after they met via a mutual friend. In the game, she specialises in collecting herbs from different towns. “Every time I find a new rare one, I'm pretty happy about that,” she says. “I remember waiting hours to collect one that just pops in the morning. Just waiting for it to pop and collect it.”

While DrawMeACosplay met Setheal online, they largely play individually. “I like to do my own thing because I'm really a casual player,” she says. They both work together on the cosplays, however. The costume she's wearing at the event—the Ranger class—took 18 months to complete. “I wanted to find challenging costumes, because I see all the details on that and I knew I was probably going to learn so many skills because of that costume,” she says. “A second reason was probably to honour my relationship with my boyfriend, because Black Desert is so precious to us.”

The PvP players

Trekking up the streets of Beynac, I come to a raised dais with a stone bench that looks out across the valley, where I take a short rest. A group of players are descending from the castle, and a cheery American voice calls out “You're almost halfway!”

This turns out to be Blue Squadron, a streamer and content creator for Black Desert. A player for eight years, Blue Squadron formerly ran a hardcore PvP guild for the community. “The most active communities in the game are all the PvP communities,” he says. “Node wars, siege wars, large-scale PvP, small-scale PvP, everybody's in the battle arena all the time.”

Blue Squadron is visiting Beynac with his friend and former guildmate Layfonda, who tells me his favourite memories of the game are the “old-school PvP days” running with the Guild. “You would have like 30v30 people, 40v40 people. And it's just a ball fight, it's just a mess. You don't know what's happening. You just have Blue Squadron going 'guys come on, push up to the frontlines!'”

As the pair are talking, I get the sense they both feel the PvP element of Black Desert isn't what it used to be. Certainly, Pearl Abyss has changed how PvP works over the years, changing guild wars so that they only happen if both sides declare it, and increasing the amount of time solo players can grind in instanced zones, making it harder for PvP players to find people to fight.

Blue Squadron says he stopped running his PvP guild because managing it could be like a full-time job. “HR issues are a big deal,” he says. “Making sure the community is active, people have a voice. People are talking, people are happy, right? Like, if you have a bad fight, you have to worry about the morale of the guild.” Blue Squadron now runs a more general PvX guild, as well as running his channel full time.

Layfonda, meanwhile, is more critical of how Black Desert has altered the status of PvP in the game over the years. “There's more people, but because of the more people, a lot of them don't like the PvP aspect,” he says. “So it's taking the approach of the more casual gamer.” He says the game is still a “blast to play”, but clearly misses the days when PvP was less regimented, and more of a free-for-all.

Later on in the day, during the event's livestreamed keynote, Pearl Abyss announces a new suite of separate, dedicated hardcore PvP servers, where players start at level 60 with preset gear, are completely free to fight one another, and have to fight their way out of a Call of Duty: Warzone like prison when killed. After the keynote, I catch up with Layfonda for his take on these new servers: 

“Very good. Very good,” he says. “Again, I've been playing since the start of BDO, and what they mentioned there was the prime time BDO, where I loved it. It's going to be phenomenal and I cannot wait.”

The dog

As the village of Beynac falls away and the castle walls rear up alongside me, I encounter another group of PvP players, who all belong to a guild called Barcode. With an alliance of 150 players, Barcode specialises in “endgame” PvP, specifically “node wars” and siege wars. The former see guilds fighting over individual points on a map, whereas the latter involve capturing multiple nodes to occupy entire in-game continents, known as territories.

Afuaru, the guild's GM, tells me about the most notable event in the guild's history, namely its participation in the “Game of Guilds”. This occurred when the three main servers in North America were merged, resulting in a huge war between Barcode and another Guild called Manup. “Once they all got into one server, we're like 'Ok, now we got to duke it out for who's top dog?'”

The result was a huge clash between Barcode's team of rangers and Manup's warrior-focussed ranks. “They were just naturally stronger. And we clashed and Manup ended up beating us, and they kind of muscled us for a while.” The war in game also spilled out into an online meme war, the remnants of which are still visible on YouTube.

Also present in the Barcode group are husband and wife duo Thail and Blacksoul, the latter of whom relates an anecdote from their time playing Black Desert. “There was one time when we both, the guild we were in won one of the territories.” 

Now, a fun mechanical quirk of Black Desert is that, if a guild wins a territory, they can change the emblems within that territory, flags, tents, walls, to anything they like. At the time, Blacksoul and Thail had a dog named Tuff.  “We put a picture of our dog as the emblem, and then all the guards in the town had the picture of our dog's name.” The picture also happened to depict Tuff wearing a crown, a fitting embodiment of the guild's triumph.

Tuff, sadly, has since passed away. But let the record state that, once upon a time, he symbolised victory for an entire continent.

The red player

“I'm very involved with other players, whether they want to or not.” This sinister phrase is uttered by Trisiplays, who I encounter across the bridge from the castle gatehouse. Trisiplays is a “Red” player, who deliberately plays Black Desert with a negative karma rating.

Karma is a system designed to regulate player behaviour in Black Desert. Actions like getting caught stealing from NPCs or killing other Adventurers can impact a player's karma rating. “Once you have negative karma, you become a red player,” Trisiplays explains. Not only can red players be freely attacked by other adventurers, they're also attacked on sight by city guards, and lose more combat XP than normal on death. “You're just an outlaw.” Trisiplays adds. “You become a murderer, essentially.”

Trisiplays describes to me the day on which he, as he puts it, “went red”. It happened during a guild war that broke out between two guilds over a disagreement about a particular spot for experience grinding. “My guild leader at the time tasked me to target their protected members,” Trisiplays explains. “You can protect members from guild wars so they can't get attacked without a penalty. But I was open to take those penalties to take those targets out.”

The way Trisiplays explains it, the opposing guild's PvP players were “literally” hiding behind their protected players. “I didn't like that, so I was, how do you say, balls to the wall? I [ran] up, killed them all, and I was like 'well, that's my life now'.”

In fighting for his guild, Trisiplays essentially cursed himself to a life in exile. He's been a red player since 2017. But he says he still tries to play in an honourable fashion. “I actually don't attack if somebody doesn't attack me first. I used to be much more aggressive, but I toned it down.” 

Indeed, Trisiplays is fascinated by how other players respond to his red status. “It has a lot of potential for honour, right, because if somebody treats you well, even though they could just kill you and destroy your stuff, and they don't do it, it really shows the character of the person you're interacting with” he explains. “Some people challenge me to a duel as well. They're like 'I'm not going to attack you in a safe zone, but you have to fight me outside of town.' So very respectful.”

Nonetheless, playing with a red name is significantly more challenging than playing the game regularly. Trisiplays must often resort to elaborate trickery simply to get around. “I definitely walk a lot on the roofs, because down in the streets is just not a thing,” he says. 

I ask Trisiplays whether he thinks about trying to recover his karma, but he reckons he's too far gone. “It wasn't always like this, you could farm it back easily by killing a few monsters,” he says. “But now if you go deep, it takes really long to recover.” Yet despite the added inconvenience, Trisiplays finds it a compelling way to experience Black Desert. “It's a very interesting game mechanic that's kind of slept on.”

The life skills master

Black Desert is known primarily for its spectacular combat, but it also lets players pursue a more peaceful virtual existence through its life skills. Life skills are in-game pursuits that would be considered side activities in most games, such as fishing, hunting, alchemy, gathering herbs and so forth. But each of these has its own levelling system that lets them become a player's entire focus if they so choose.

Each life skill is designed to keep players occupied for countless hours, but that hasn't stopped one player from trying to master all of them. Enter BairogHaan, a streamer and Twitch Partner who has been playing Black Desert since its inception. “Basically, my goal in the game is to get a high level life-skilling in many different life skills.”

Of the ten available life skills in the game, BairogHaan currently has reached the max level of 50 in five of them, a process which has taken him most of the time he's been playing. He says that his favourite life skill to play was initially gathering “for the first three, four years of BDO”. But this has since changed to hunting “because hunting is much more profitable at the moment.”

Even with half of Black Desert's skills at level 50, the challenge ahead of BairogHaan is steep. As he points out, there are some life skills that basically cannot be maxed out. One example is sailing. “Sailing is one of the hardest life skills to level up. It takes literally a hundred years to level up to max level.” In addition, developer Pearl Abyss recently updated the max level for life skills to 100.  “So I can go further, but currently, the goal is to get to 50.”

I ask BairogHaan what it is about Black Desert's life skills that intrigue him so much. “It's part of my daily routine. Time where I can just chill and focus on getting the goals.” Also, while the destination may be unreachable, the journey has amassed BairogHaan quite the following. In the last few years, BairogHaan has built a Twitch account with 20,000 followers. “I know a lot about life-skilling, so they come to ask questions, what is good, what is bad and so on, so I try to teach and help other people.”

The record breaker

Late afternoon in Beynac, it starts to rain hard, and many attendees take shelter in a building adjacent to the castle gatehouse, where drinks are being served. As I wander around, I'm gently told by a player that I overlooked him earlier in the day, and that he has a story to tell.

That player is RisingSun, aka PvEnvironment. “I'm currently the highest player on combat level in Europe,” he tells me. It's a record he has set several times, becoming the first player in Europe to reach levels 66, 67 and 68 for combat in Black Desert Online.

To reach such a level in Pearl Abyss' MMO requires an enormous amount of grinding. Levelling up from 66 to 67, for example, took him an entire year. “A lot of people ask me how you can grind more than two hours a day,” says PvEnvironment, who works in computer science by day. “For me it's relaxing. I love grinding, so it's relaxing for me.”

For PvEnvironment, grinding in Black Desert is a fundamental part of his daily routine. It's also netted him a small Twitch following, with 4,000 people tuning in to watch him push his combat level ever higher. But that routine was upset last year, when he was unexpectedly banned from the game. The ban was allegedly for macro use, which is a bannable offence in BDO. “There was a banwave,” he says. “They didn't explain it in detail, but we think it was the anti-cheat programme,” he says. 

PvEnvironment livestreamed about his ban, and says the stream resulted in a flurry of news stories across specialist media, such as the German site MeinMMO. After 28 days, the ban, which was supposed to be permanent, was lifted.

Despite this, PvEnvironment is clearly still bothered by the ban. “I got a lot of support. But I needed, I think, three months to be a normal player again.” Throughout the duration of the ban, he struggled to focus on his work. He tried playing Black Desert with a new account, but he says he couldn't escape the spectre of the ban. People who recognised him from social media would accuse him of being a cheater, while some would try to be reassuring, saying “nice that you are still trying.” “It was amazing, but at the same time heartbreaking,” he says.

PvEnvironment says he never found out what caused the initial ban, nor what spurred Pearl Abyss to lift it. He says there was no acknowledgement that an error had been made, despite many players as well as him having their bans lifted. “There was no refund or something for the time [I] missed playing. But at least I was happy to play again.”

After the event, I contacted Pearl Abyss to ask what the developer's policies are regarding player bans in Black Desert for using macros, whether there was a wave of erroneous bans last year, and its policy regarding bans that are issued by mistake. On the subject of banning players for macros, Pearl Abyss states “Yes. We regularly (permanently) ban accounts that use unauthorized programs and macros. For accounts that are suspected of usage of unauthorized programs and macros, we first apply temporary bans while we perform investigations.”

Regarding the alleged wave of erroneous bans, Pearl Abyss quotes from a report on an investigation the company conducted last year, looking into restrictions on 'unauthorized program users', which “reconfirmed that there were no issues with the detection results of our ‘unauthorized program and data tampering detection system'”. However, Pearl Abyss “discovered the possibility that our strengthened restriction criteria included outlier cases unrelated to Black Desert, such as PCs infected by viruses, malicious code, or certain ‘PC management programs,’ which could affect the detection systems.” Taking these variables into account, the company “determined that imposing restrictions on accounts without major abnormalities in their in-game records would be unjust and made the decision to lift the restrictions on these accounts.”

As for Pearl Abyss' policy on bans handed out by mistake, Pearl Abyss referred players to Article 16 of its terms of service, adding “Not every case is completely black-and-white, so we handle detections of cheating on a case-by-case basis. In the case of such players affected by the ban wave, we maintained active communication with them all throughout their ban appeal process, and addressed any issues individually with them as best we could.”

Since the reinstatement of his account, PvEnvironment has continued to pursue new combat levels, pushing to level 68 and building his Twitch following. “I learned about so many people who [also] have goals like me,” he says. “South America, North America. It was amazing to find these people and we are all kind of friends now.” He's also part of Black Desert's Ambassador program, through which experienced players share their knowledge of the game with newcomers.  “It's normal players but they like to help new adventurers,” he says. “It's a nice community. I really like it.”

As night falls at Beynac, everyone gathers together for dinner, after which a prize draw is held for the community members. For most of the day, I've encountered Black Desert's community as individuals or in small groups, hearing their experiences in the game as disparate, isolated tales. Here though, the passion of the community as a unit becomes clear. As each winner is called forth, the front of the room (where most of the community is sat) explodes with cheering and roaring, entire tables of community members often leaping from their seats. With fans like this, it's clear why Black Desert has thrived for ten years, and why its creators are confident it'll be around for ten more.