With a name like Black Desert Online Remastered, I was excited for some big improvements to the Black Desert experience. The update touted better graphics and audio amongst various other QoL improvements.

However, I was disappointed by the end result of this large update. More than anything it feels like an extra graphical setting. Normal settings are the same as they were pre-update unless you turn on “remastered mode” in the graphical options. But I hope you have the rig to handle it because it’s extremely taxing.

This is fair enough though, because it looks gorgeous, if not a little over done, in remastered mode. Light shining off armor, rays of light beaming through trees, and reflections off puddles on the ground all look great, but a lot of the time the lighting feels really overblown. And while the really in your face lighting may turn some people off, what really bothered me was the lack of performance improvements.

The game doesn’t run any smoother at all, and worst of all the pop-in is still painfully bad. You would think in a mostly graphical remastering of a game one of the biggest graphical issues would be fixed, if not at least worked on, but it hasn’t been touched.

There have been some slight exp increases in the end game levels, but other than that not much has changed in Black Desert Online.

If you haven’t played the game before it’s worth the free trial to see if you like it, and it might even be worth your 10 dollars to play casually. If you’ve been away for a while now waiting for this update though, it’s a disappointing graphical update.

Check out our review for Black Desert Online HERE.