Crimson Desert Review

I have restarted this final review for Crimson Desert no fewer than three times now, and each time I only get a couple of paragraphs in before developer Pearl Abyss releases a substantial patch or update, forcing me to cross out many of those words and begin fresh.

So, before that happens again, I’m putting my foot down, and that’s that. I’m going to put it plainly - Crimson Desert is a flawed but breathtaking, annoying yet fantastic, game of excess that has managed to infuriate and delight me in almost equal measure. Even with all the improvements so far, it continues to shift towards the net-positive region with each update.

A few weeks back, when my review-in-progress went live for Pearl Abyss’s massive Crimson Desert, my head was jumbled and thoughts scattered as to how exactly I felt about it. Looking back, even though it wasn’t all that long ago, so much in Crimson Desert has changed. In the span of less than two months, the game has received nearly 15 patch updates, bringing with it not only performance improvements but massive gameplay adjustments and added features. These are just some of what players now have, with even more coming in the coming months:

• Additional fast travel points, including one at your camp
• New control options
• New crafting materials
• New difficulty settings
• New pets
• Increased storage capacity
• New summonable mounts
• Reworked tutorials and puzzles
• General gameplay improvements

The Crimson Desert that folks are playing now is so improved from the one I first explored that I envy the people who get to play this new version from the outset.

All that said, during this extra time of contemplation and sinking more time into it, the torrent of thoughts that were in my head has settled, and much like the Marge Simpson meme of her holding the potato - I just think Crimson Desert is neat. The most fun and enjoyment I get from CD is when I can just exist and do my own thing, be it chopping down trees (which I later discovered other, quicker ways to do after mentioning being annoyed by it in my previous piece), hunting down outlaws, or just exploring.

Crimson Desert's gorgeous world left me awestruck more times than I care to count, with the only other game that comes close to the same numbers being Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. Whether I was riding my horse along the road through a forest, crossing a high-up bridge, or standing atop a vast mountain range I had scaled, my hard drive quickly filled with photographs, and when I wasn’t taking pictures, I was busying myself with the plethora of activities that CD has crammed inside.

I’m not sure if it was when I first played rock-paper-scissors with random street kids, found the jet pack, or took off on the dragon for the first time that it took me to really realize just how much of a Frankenstein’s monster sort of product Crimson Desert is. It’s a strange hodgepodge of mechanics and systems that parody and are clearly pulled from other games (cough Zelda glider), but Pearl Abyss has managed to patchwork it all together with some flair of their own and in a package that ended up surprising me, even if it suffers from just how much there is here, and that it could benefit from a “less is more” approach. As novel as it is that I can fly around the skies with a jetpack before dropping in on some bandits with a Kamen Rider-esque flying kick, I would have liked a bit more polish out of the gate, like being able to rebind my controller keys.

All that relaxing fun I have in the lands of Crimson Desert comes to a screeching halt the moment I have to actually take part in the story. There is a direct correlation between the game forcing me to get on my horse to follow someone else on a horse and spikes in my blood pressure, higher than when my toddler is throwing a tantrum.

Despite all the improvements (so far), the story and its characters remain the worst aspects of Crimson Desert and the biggest reasons I want to set down my controller. The beginning of the game does a great job in setting up this great revenge story with the slaughtering of your group of mercenaries, only to spiral, rather nonsensically, into a supernatural, magic-y adventure surrounding the mysterious “Abyss”.

Even from the get-go, details of what is going on are muddied and confusing, with Kliff, the legally distinct “Not John Snow” protagonist, seemingly killed and, within moments, with no real sense of how long has passed, fully recovered and in a fishing village. Interactions with characters make it sound like it has been ages since the events transpired, but the in-game tracker at the bottom of the screen only showed a few days had passed, causing this strange disconnect for me, mere minutes into my time on Pywell, the world where Crimson Desert takes place. Little did I know then that this was just the first of dozens, if not hundreds, of head-scratching moments that were to come.

The playable characters Kliff, Damiane, and Oongka didn’t leave much of an impression on me, either, finding sliced Wonder Bread to be more interesting. Playing as Kliff, and frankly, any of the characters, feels fine, from flinging Damiane’s shield like she’s Captain Carter to his heavy hits sending enemies flying. Crimson Desert, unfortunately, doesn’t do a great job of incentivizing or encouraging you to actually use anyone besides Kliff, with the story occasionally even having them become unavailable at all to use alongside separate skill trees. The fact that the two other characters have a distinctly smaller pool of skills to pull from (though this is being addressed in a patch) meant I never found myself wanting to spend the Abyss Artifacts on either of them instead of Kliff, who I use 99% of the time.

Even in all that narrative gloom, there were still the occasional bright spots - some of the puzzles were legitimately tricky, requiring clever solutions, and the boss fights (especially prior to some of the recent patches) offered me a souls-level challenge. How I wish, though, that a patch would come along and at least let me skip the story scenes instead of simply fast-forwarding through them. That alone would alleviate part of my headache. Maybe one day.

Even with my grievances with Crimson Desert, the more I spent wandering the woods and lands of Pywell, the more I came to realize that I was enjoying myself more than when I had played both Red Dead Redemption 2 and Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. To head off the mobs right away, I do think those three games are all better video games than Crimson Desert as a whole. It’s similar to how I would say that James Cameron’s Titanic film is a better movie, but I enjoy watching Austin Powers more.

I continue to have a good time with Crimson Desert, and I still look forward to plopping down on my couch to unwind with the odd task and taking in the views of Pywell after work. Even with all the work that Pearl Abyss has put in here to improve, there are still big issues that I have with the game that keep me from having a great time with it. Some are larger - there are ones I don’t see being improved via patches (the story and dull characters, for instance), with other seemingly smaller ones that I am waiting to get addressed (more control binding options, please), among other things. Regardless of the state the Crimson Desert finally settles into, I have a feeling that the game will become an intriguing case study for players and developers in the future.

I wouldn’t be surprised that, when the dust settles, Crimson Desert’s evolution is looked upon in similar ways that No Man’s Sky and Final Fantasy XIV are. There is a lot to love, and a lot to still be let down by in the lands of Hernand and beyond, but it’s still a game that lets me ride a dragon and jump in a mech suit, so that is reason enough to keep it installed on my PC and console! Who knows what other goodies lie hidden still in the desert sands that I will be digging up for months, if not years to come?