Gaming

You should definitely not drive the way I do in video games. The other day I was travelling to a crime scene in LA Noire and didn't realise that the road ahead was a dead end I went straight off a cliff edge at high speed.
Hilariously, I managed to nail the landing on a completely different road a hundred metres further down and calmly continued my journey.
I don't think real world physics are quite so forgiving.

Black Desert Online continues to be a series of frantic Hack-N-Slash quests punctuated by short bits of exposition which are rather confusing because the characters don't actually speak the important bits that appear on screen but instead just repeat the same generic few lines. Either let us read (Morrowind-style) or let us listen. Don't make me read one thing while listening to some completely different dialogue!
And the crowd isn't thinning out yet. The other day I did have one peaceful moment when I caught sight of a fox on a rock and went over to have a quiet look all by myself....



...but a couple of seconds later twelve people came bouncing along, swinging their swords and screaming "Hyah! Hyah!"
Oh, well. It was a nice moment. And as you can see from the screenshot, one thing I rather like is the way the anime girl looks at the camera when you move the viewpoint.
My wizard character doesn't do that so I must have turned off that feature during the creation process. But I liked it so much that I trawled through the Nexus site and found a Skyrim mod that does it too, so I can have vain, attention-seeking characters in that game as well.

Even if they did kill it, everything seems to respawn every couple of minutes so that someone else in the crowd can have a go at killing them.
That's another little quirk of MMOs that make them seem shallower than single player games.

I did die for the first time yesterday while taking on a big baddie called Red Nose.
Actually I'm not even sure it was "my" Red Nose because I couldn't work out how to summon him. Perhaps I did it without realising or maybe it was "someone else's" Red Nose and they'd moved on and left him there. I did kill him eventually and it said Quest Completed, so I'm not complaining.

Yay! I worked out how to take off the big Gandalf hat!



And the wizard DOES look at the camera too, it seems all the characters do that when you put your weapons away, but it doesn't feel right being a wizard and not having the staff to lean on.

Those are Imps. Their soldiers are the baddies that I've been hacking through in all those recent quests but these ones in the cave seem harmless enough.

And I don't know about "Minions' but you can have lots of little pets that follow you around. Right before I took this screenshot a player on a horse rode past and they seemed to have a little army of critters scuttling after them!
But like so many things in this game, I don't know how to do any of that yet.