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Play the Black Desert Beta Free This Weekend on Xbox One

The journey to bring the fantasy world contained within Black Desert to Xbox One has been a long time in the making. Our team has learned a lot in our own quest to bring this fully-fledged MMORPG to Xbox One, and we’re so excited to offer all our hard work for you to play, available starting today in the Black Desert open beta. Read on to reveal more about the adventure we’ve prepared for each player that steps into Black Desert!

Throughout the development of Black Desert, our team strived to make an experience that any player could enjoy and personalize with their own unique expression of themselves. The result is a world where every choice matter and you are allowed the freedom to be different than any other character because of your own path. The destiny you choose will include your prowess in combat, how you look to others, and your professions and skills.

At its core, Black Desert is known for delivering high-octane, real-time combat, and for our introduction to Xbox One, we’re delivering a system that is responsive to every weapon swing, spell cast, and shield block. There’s nothing quite like bringing down a heavily-armed foe without a scratch, and with that in mind, our team is presenting players with a combo-based combat system. React to your adversaries’ moves with well-timed inputs that use your character’s unique skills to win every battle.

To truly realize your own unique adventure within Black Desert, we made sure that character customization would allow players to assume their own identities in-game – or something else entirely. The in-depth character customization tool on Xbox One became a major challenge for us since it was incredibly difficult to incorporate all of the sliders and functions that allow each character to be special and different from one another.

In-game, you’ll see that we’ve assigned three special inputs on your Xbox One controller for each action in sculpting your character. By using the left or right thumbsticks, you can control the rotation, scale, and transformation of every part of your character as you see fit. We’re really proud to have been able to put this together for Black Desert and can’t wait to see what sort of colorful characters the community comes up with.

When all is said and done in Black Desert and your foes are laid to rest, there’s nothing like kicking back and relaxing. After all, Black Desert is a living, breathing world with a player-driven economy that allows you to interact with other real people in a shared, open landscape. Whether you’re interested in specializing in cooking, horse training, gathering resources, fishing and hunting (or all the above), life skills are a major part of bringing a sense of realism to your adventure. With an extensive trade mechanic, a worker management system, and a fully simulated weather system for farming, your character can be more than just a leader in battle.

We wish we had more time to explore other features within Black Desert, but we don’t want to ruin the surprise. With a central focus on combat, character customization tools, and expansive skills and professions to explore, Black Desert offers an entire world to unearth and make your own. This is at the heart of our guiding philosophy for the game: Become Your True Self. Discover and explore everything that Black Desert has to offer during our open beta, available now for free on the Microsoft Store until November 12!