What to expect for Black Desert 2nd CBT
Black Desert 2nd CBT will be staged in a region called Kalpeon[칼페온] which is larger than both Valenos[발레노스] and Serendia[세렌디아] combined with more towns as well.
Kalpeon is a faction without any access to the valuable resource, dark fragments, and instead concentrates their efforts in increasing their military strength after having acquired Hidel Castle.
Aside from being a much larger scale region compared to what was tested during the first CBT, Kalpeon will feature new elements such as rafting, gigantic monsters, and siege warfare.
The UI and quests have been heavily worked on after feedback listing many complaints about how uncomfortable the UI was to use and the quests being too difficult.
Quests in Black Desert are not tracked in a linear fashion but instead players will be allowed to progress with quests at any order they please. This is because many of the quests can be done during any point of progress and there won't be any pressure to finish all the quests of a certain area before moving on to a new area. There will also be hidden quests that appear when returning to a town that you have ventured before.
Choice and specialization is an important part of Black Desert as it can be seen with it's quest system. The player must decide which content he/she will play and concentrate on. For example, you can use your contribution points, which can be recovered unlike the first CBT where spent contribution is permanently lost, to invest in your facilities but this will result in you not having enough contribution points to invest in nodes, trade routes, or production bases.
Another example of choice comes with their party play system. There will be roles but these roles won't necessarily be tied with a class so that players can choose the role they prefer without being restricted by which class they are playing. The choice won't be as flexible with small sized parties but the developers are working on making class synergies work well in small groups as well as large ones.
The south-west area of Kalpeon will host gigantic monsters that can only hunted down with a party. These hunts will be for farming, not grinding.
While the developers are working on making contents for light users and designing quests so that a player can easily reach level 40 without any party play, it seems like they aren't intending to make Black Desert a game that holds your hand and baby-sit you throughout your adventures.
One of the complaints with the first CBT was that the testers felt like a lot of content was thrown at them without any explanation. The developers answered that this was originally their intention although they didn't mean for it to be that extreme so they worked on their in-game guides to give players a better grasp of the systems. But it looks like the developers wanted people to learn from experience.
They're also holding strong to their initial decision to not add any kind of portal based transportation, ever. So methods of transportation will obviously be very important.
Kalpeon will have various types of landscapes featuring large mines, flying monsters, rafting areas, and war zones.
One of the new features to be tested is siege warfare. There are domains where players can claim ownership and to do so a guildmaster will have to spend time and resource to construct a stronghold. Construction can be sped up by hiring workers and if there are more than one stronghold in a domain then the owners of these strongholds will have to engage in stronghold combat which doesn't have any set time period and will persist until there is only one stronghold left standing.
The victorious guild will then be able to gather tax from the domain. Siege warfare on the other hand has a set time period where the offensive will build a command post to engage a stronghold. Individual players can participate as well but be warned, siege warfare is not for those of fragile body and light wallets.
An area engaged in siege-warfare will become a non-restricted PvP zone and death penalties will match that status. Players that are killed during siege warfare will either drop a random item from their inventory or lose a portion of their experience points. Although there are conditions where the penalty can be greatly reduced it would still likely result in a hefty repair bill.
The second CBT will be opened within the first quarter of this year and there is an ongoing event on their brand new official facebook page with 400 cbt keys as the prize.
Apparently only Koreans are allowed to apply.
Sources
Inven
TIG