Hello everyone! 

Today we’re going to be talking to two of our project managers behind Black Desert. Project managers are an integral role in making sure that things go smoothly on the non-development side of a game. 

Please introduce yourself
Hi, we are Shawn and Serena who are the project managers of Black Desert for Xbox. We’re basically in charge of planning the non-development side of the game for launch and beyond. We work closely with all the teams involved in the game, from the developers and game designers to the community managers and the localization team. We also work very closely with the QA team to follow up on the status of issues before the game goes live. But our other main responsibility is to take care of business related tasks, such as coordinating with our marketing team to ensure that the world of Black Desert is brought to life in the best possible way. 

Most of the feedback from beta was very positive, how do you feel the beta went on your side? 
We feel that the beta went incredibly well. Because of the experiences we had launching the PC version in multiple regions, we had many contingency plans that thankfully we never had to use. 
The beta was a good opportunity for us to let Xbox users experience what we are trying to offer this time around. We received a lot of great feedback from players during the beta, so we are doubly thankful for those who played. 

Not everything was great though. There were some issues such as forcing users to redownload the whole game, the newer content that we ran contained some interesting bugs, and some users inexplicably being unable to access the game server. We learned a lot about how the back-end side of things work, that we could only experience by launching a game. So we will ensure that the game experience at launch improves on these issues. 

What has been one of the biggest roadblocks you have faced when bringing the game to the Xbox One?  
We’ve been running Black Desert Online for more than 3 years now, but the Xbox version is our first foray into the console world. Having Black Desert on Xbox needed a lot of back-end redevelopment. On the surface, everything looked great, but we underestimated just how much of the back-end needed to be changed, which took a long time. Many teams within Black Desert are working hard to ensure the game comes out in its best form. 

You mentioned earlier that you are planning for post-launch, how regularly are we going to be seeing updates and will we get a roadmap? 
We’re planning to bring out new content regularly, and we are also going to be bringing new content (such as new regions and classes) as completely free updates. That means that once you purchase the game, you will be able to enjoy every future update without further purchase. We’ll be getting roadmaps ready once we are comfortable with the process that we need to go through in order to get updates released. 

Much like the beta, we’re trying our best to bring you an amazing gaming experience, filled with events and a great support system. We hope that when the game launches, you will be able to enjoy a near flawless MMORPG experience from the comfort of your sofa.