Black Desert

In the West, the character editor came out before the game itself. In January 2016, ahead of the European and North American launch, it was released on its own for free, with a promise that your creations would carry over into the game.

There are peaceful pursuits too: you can fish, farm and trade. Mounts are tamed in the wild and bred, and they can die too.

Pearl Abyss wrote its own engine to handle the seamless world and large castle sieges. And in 2018 the studio started Crimson Desert as a prequel to Black Desert, which grew into a separate game with its own story during development.

Two reviewers criticized the weak tutorials, and one of them found the story impenetrable. A third called much of the game convoluted but admitted few games make a virtual life this absorbing. If that life appeals to you more than a story, this is your game. Players leave 75% positive out of 63,365 reviews, and critics give it 61 on Metacritic. By our Recommended Score it is #3,874 of 4,736 games.

Liked it? Try Albion Online, a medieval MMORPG drawn from the Arthurian legends, and Throne and Liberty, which NCSoft started as part of the Lineage series.