BLACK DESERT ONLINE'S DARK KNIGHT CLASS GOES LIVE IN KOREA ON DECEMBER 15TH

It's been quite a long wait for Black Desert Online's Dark Knight class, which was first announced way back in April, at which time it was known as the Dark Elf, but the wait is finally almost over. Daum announced today that the class will be made available in the Korean version of the game on December 15th. Some new details about the class have been unveiled in the form of its backstory and you can enter to win various prizes between now and December 14th by either entering a South Korean phone number or liking the official Facebook page. Specifics about the class' skills and some new screenshots are set to be released on December 8th.

A teaser trailer showing the class in-game was released alongside the announcement. You can find it embedded below.

One brief editorial comment: I’ve long groused about the queue times in Armored Warfare, sometimes taking as long as 10 minutes to find a match, and I’m sure the AW dev team is well aware of this issue. If this update does “squeeze” the tiers together a big more, say, allowing tier 3 tanks to be competitive against tier 8 tanks, it should do wonders to improve those queue times. And it speaks to the wider point I’ve been making for quite a while, that sharp vertical progression in online multiplayer games is more of a hindrance than a help, spreading out players and making it difficult to find friends (or foes, in PvP games like AW) to play with.

That said, especially in a game like Armored Warfare, getting a bigger and badder tank feels like it should represent a significant power increase, even more so than, say, leveling your mage in an MMORPG from 30 to 40. It’ll be interesting to see how the dev team handles this kind of change and whether they can keep the power fantasy of the game intact while making it more accessible to more players.