Chapter 2131 – 2131. A New Game
Bang Joo-hyuk uploaded a game review video to his channel. It was a video he had stayed up all night to make.
Black River Game was already a hot topic on the internet, so the view count started to climb rapidly. It turned out that streamers, both domestic and international, were all playing Black River. The popularity of Black River was skyrocketing.
“Everyone, a crazy game has appeared like a comet today! A proper hack-and-slash game has appeared without any warning. The price is a whopping 0 won! It’s free! Usually, when you think of free games, you think of trash games. That’s only natural. If you invest in a game, you need to suck up more money than you invested. The quality of a game goes up as much as you invest in it.”
Bang Joo-hyuk’s video started with a basic principle. He emphasized that Black River was free.
“Okay, let’s get started. I’d love to dive deep into the black river, but… I don’t have time. This video is an introduction to Black River. I don’t know everything about this game yet.”
Four characters appeared in the video.
Warrior, Archer, Mage, and Rogue.
“Each of the four character classes can choose their gender. As you can see, the illustrations are very well done. The male characters look cool and strong, and the female characters are… very, very sexy. It’s been so long since I’ve seen such sexy female characters… I’m almost in tears. You say it’s unrealistic? That the characters don’t fit the game’s background? That’s all fine. I’m satisfied. I can give it a positive review just for this.”
PC.
Political correctness.
In Korea, its influence was small, but in the West, it was different. PC had permeated not only games but also cultural content in general. Black River was a game that didn’t care about such PC at all.
Even if overseas communities were burning with PC issues, they didn’t even make a statement, completely ignoring it. Even when PC advocates sent aggressive inquiries to the customer center, they answered calmly. Most of the answers were along the lines of “we will consider it,” with no sincerity felt at all. What made the PC advocates even more annoyed was that the answers were not macros. They even answered in 1-on-1 chats. It was impossible to think they were macros.
“Each character has flashy characteristics. The Warrior fights head-on. There’s hardly any retreating or running away. They fight while drinking potions. As their skills and items improve, they become unkillable. The Archer keeps their distance. There’s a fun feeling of kiting. They also have a few close-range skills, so they don’t need to be afraid of close combat. The Mage is flashy and powerful. If you only consider single-target skill damage, the Mage will be the best. The Rogue I’m raising is strong in terms of utility. They use poison or assassinate with stealth. I really like this assassination.”
Next, Bang Joo-hyuk mentioned the story.
“The original story of Black River is a long novel called Black River. Alien monsters suddenly appear from a black river and mess up the world. The playable character, the protagonist, loses their family to the alien monsters and becomes a monster hunter. They kill monsters for revenge.”
A sleek and well-designed female rogue character moves. Every single walking motion was carefully crafted. Her swaying hips and bouncing breasts. The leather clothes the character wore highlighted her figure rather than concealing it.
“But here, you meet an NPC named Charon and learn that the black river is not a natural disaster but an artificial one.”
He talks to Charon, the main quest NPC. In Black River, every time you talked to an NPC, an illustration appeared on one side of the screen. Even the NPCs had high-quality illustrations that were impressive.
「The black river. I saw it clearly 10 years ago. A mage used magic to summon the black river into this world! What did the mage’s face look like? Well, it was night, and the mage was wearing a robe, so I couldn’t tell. However, since they were a mage who could summon the black river, they must have been a very powerful mage, right?」
“This is where the protagonist’s revenge story begins. It takes a total of 6 hours to complete all the main quests and reach the ending. But there’s plenty of content. If you complete achievements, your stats go up, and some sub-quests give skill points as rewards. Dungeons are for item farming. There’s also a content called the Infinite Battlefield. It’s not PVP, but it’s a competition with other users to kill monsters. Ah, here, stats and skill points are fixed. In other words, it’s a content that tests users’ hunting skills.”
Bang Joo-hyuk’s character hunts monsters. At least 30 of them. A large swarm of monsters rushes in. But when the female rogue uses stealth, the monsters can’t attack her and look around. The stealthed female rogue sets up a bomb mine and detonates it. The 30 monsters are caught in the blast and die instantly.
“Damage is increased by at least 1.5 times in stealth. If you invest more in the stealth skill, the damage increases even more. But this also affects traps. Using that, you can hunt monsters that swarm like this. But the highlight of the stealth rogue is when facing boss monsters.”
The female rogue, facing a boss, uses the stealth skill tree. She moves around like a ninja. And the stealth state is almost constantly maintained. Even the large boss monster doesn’t last long and dies.
“The stealth rogue is weaker at hunting monsters compared to other classes… but the thrill of hunting boss monsters is overwhelmingly superior! How can you resist this damage dealing!”
In the video, the main quest ending was briefly mentioned and skipped over. This was to prevent spoilers for the story. In fact, the story wasn’t much. The boss was the protagonist’s friend, and the black river was summoned by the power of an outer god. The conclusion is that the final boss is killed by the protagonist.
“I recommend that you only focus on the main quest on your first playthrough. Especially if you set the difficulty to the lowest and skip the entire story. Then you can see the ending in about 4 hours. Why do you have to do that? Because a new class opens up after the first playthrough.”
All-Master.
A class that can use all the skills of all classes. It’s also a cheat class that can become infinitely stronger without level restrictions.
“You can become a warrior who uses magic, a sniper who uses stealth, or a true ninja who uses ninjutsu! Game balance? At least I haven’t found any balance issues. It might be because there’s no PVP content. It’s not a pay-to-win game either. There’s no monetization model at all. Overall… it’s a god-tier game! Of course, there are some downsides. The end content feels lacking, and it’s simple due to the hack-and-slash nature. But for people like me who like that simplicity, it’s not a big drawback. Now, I’m going to raise my All-Master. My female rogue will now become a female ninja.”
The video ended. Positive comments and likes were quickly posted. It was clear that people were feeling favorable towards Black River.
Posts related to Black River were quickly uploaded to game communities.
「Class Recommendation. Not All-Master.
Everyone knows that All-Master is a cheat class. But other classes also have their charms. It’s the class characteristics that All-Master doesn’t have.
The class characteristic of All-Master is that it can learn all skills. But it doesn’t have class characteristics.
The class I recommend is the Mage. The class characteristic, Mana Circulation, is almost meaningless in the early game, but it’s a different story in the late game. The cooldown time and mana recovery efficiency after using skills increase tremendously, making it possible to spam magic.
Anonymous1: Yeah. All-Master is the best~
Anonymous2: The hottest build right now is the All-Master Mage Archer build. You should try it too.」
「Found a seriously severe bug in Black River!!!
(Halcas)
Anonymous1: Ack! You bastard!」
「There are no bugs in Black River.
It’s my hobby to find bugs in games, so I did all sorts of things for 5 hours to find bugs in Black River.
There were no bugs….
Black River is a programmatically perfect game….
Anonymous1: A programmer guy praised the coding as perfect during the day.
Anonymous2: This kind of game suddenly appears.
Anonymous2: What kind of company is Black River anyway….」
「I recommended an idea to the Black River customer center, and they said it will be patched next Monday.
(Image 1,2)
I like games where you raise characters, but Black River didn’t have that feeling of raising characters? So I asked the customer center to add something like pets. Half-jokingly?
But I got the answer as shown in the image above lol.
They said they’ll do it lol.
Adding pets and mercenaries. They’re also introducing a raising system.
I’m so excited right now that I can’t sleep. I have to go to work tomorrow.
Anonymous1: Next Monday is two days away.
Anonymous2: Does the poster work on Sundays? lol
Anonymous3: Come on. They’re not patching it because of what you said, right? They were going to do it anyway.
Anonymous4: If it’s Black River’s developers, they might be patching it because of what he said.
└Anonymous5: Do you think updates are a joke? This kind of large-scale update takes at least a few weeks. It’s not something that can be done right away.」
「6 more modes have been added to Black River now ㄷㄷ
If you go to the site, the developers have added 6 modes.
One is a level scaling mode, two are convenience-related modes. The other three are for fashion.
Among these, the two convenience modes are what I asked the customer center about 1 hour ago after seeing a Superglitch video. A mode that allows you to move even if it’s not a waypoint and a mode that increases inventory.
They made these in 1 hour? Looking at the other modes they made, it means they made 1 mode in 10 minutes…. Maybe Black River is a company of aliens?
Anonymous1: 2 more modes have been added lol
Anonymous2: What kind of company is Black River really.
Anonymous3: Ah lol. I’ll go infiltrate Black River and find out their secrets. But where do I apply for a job?」
「I tried to hack Black River’s official SNS account and got hacked back
I was curious about what kind of company it was, so I tried to hack it, and I got completely owned in 3 seconds.
I’ve even hacked large company websites before, but this is… sigh. Don’t hack Black River. All your computer data will be deleted. The 3 terabytes of treasures I had collected are gone….
Anonymous1: Isn’t that the guy who hacked a game before and revealed the probability manipulation? You really got hacked back?
Anonymous2: Sue Black River gogo
└Anonymous3: You got hacked first, so why would you sue lol
Anonymous4: You can’t even do that? Your skills are all gone lol I’ll show you.」
A hacking frenzy broke out against Black River. But the winner was Black River. Among the numerous hackers, not a single person managed to hack Black River’s official SNS account.
