Adventurers,
As many of you have heard, Cross-play is coming to Black Desert Console on March 4th. This will allow Adventurers on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 to co-exist as one singular world. Before we release the update, we want to share some of the details about cross-play. Please note that this is not the patch notes, and more details will be coming in the near future.
Cross-play Server Structure
There will be cross-play and non cross-play servers that people can join at will. Cross-play servers will have cross-play in their name, then the platform specific channels will be shown only to that platform (i.e Xbox Players will not be able to see the PS4 only channels and vice versa.)
Xbox Asia Server and Languages Added
Along with cross-play, Asia servers will be opened up to our Xbox service, complete with languages such as Korean, Japanese, and traditional/simplified Chinese. More details regarding Xbox Asia will be announced via a separate notice.
Node and Conquest Wars
After cross-play launches, Conquest and Node Wars will take place in the cross-play servers of their specific region. This means that Balenos, Serendia, and Calpheon Node/Conquest wars will be open to all adventurers regardless of platform. All nodes and regions that are owned before the update will be liberated, and there will be no Node/Conquest War starting from March 4th until March 7th. The first Node War after the cross-play update will take place on Sunday, March 8th. Please note that since all Node/Conquest War data (including tax data, and tax wagon data) will be reset. The tax you receive from the first wars after cross-play update might be slightly lower than before, and all War related structures (forts etc.) will be removed during the maintenance. You will find more details regarding Conquest Wars and Node Wars in our Patch Notes released on the day of the update.
Guilds
PlayStation and Xbox players will be able to unite under the same banners after cross-play. Please note that the apprentice system will be re-added back to PlayStation 4 after the update. The apprentice system is a trial period with the guild, where new members have diminished responsibilities, and cannot be promoted higher in the guild until their apprenticeship finishes.
Family/Character/Guild Names
Cross-play requires us to merge specific parts of the game database, which includes things like family, character and guild names. Since it is impossible to have identical names in Black Desert, we will need to add suffixes to names that are identical between the two platforms. We will be supplying those affected with name change coupons in order to change their names if they wish. For those who are affected by these changes, we are incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.
Due to this, we will also be temporarily halting the sale of name change coupons sometime before the cross-play update [which will be announced via a separate notice in advance], until after the cross-play update to prevent people squatting on name changes which would take effect during the update.
Central Market
Black Desert Central Market prices are based on a free market principle which reacts to supply and demand. Right now, with the split, prices differ between each platform. With the cross-play update, we will merge the Central Markets of PlayStation and Xbox. When this merge occurs, we will be selecting the higher of the two prices for the market price to start at.
Any withstanding pre-orders will be canceled during the update, and the silver will be sent to your in-game mail. Same applies to sales which were completed but the silver was not collected. If pre-order was successful, purchased items will be moved to the Central Market wallet. All the items registered for sale will be removed from the market and also returned to your Central Market wallets.
Content
As we head towards crossplay, we will be making sure that game content can be accessed by all players. Both Xbox and Playstation will have access to the same content.
Game Accounts
Unfortunately, we will not be able to transfer accounts between platforms. So even though you can play together, you will not be able to switch from one to the other.
Patch Size
The cross-platform update requires a number of major adjustments and additions to the game file. As such, we are expecting that the file size of the game will increase by about 3-4GB.
We are truly looking forward to introducing cross-play so that Adventurers on both platforms can come together, and experience the game in a new way. We will continue to work tirelessly to provide a quality game environment that we can now enjoy together.
