More than a month has passed since the launch of Crimson Desert, and this review has become one of the most challenging we’ve had to undertake. We received the game for its launch, and since then, over four patches have been released, radically changing the experience. In a way, I could say that the game we played is different from what colleagues who received their copies before the game’s premiere experienced.
While it’s positive that Pearl Abyss is focused on improving the game, it has raised our suspicions about how it feels like the game was released incomplete. Every week we played, something changed for the better. With this, I can say that the game I started playing is not the same one I’m reviewing. However, some details remain that the game cannot change, modify, or hide, and that is its general concept: Crimson Desert is, in itself, a mixture of systems we’ve already seen in various games, but surprisingly well-adapted.
Not always coherently, not always with a clear direction, but with something that ultimately becomes more important: it works. And it does so sufficiently to keep us playing, exploring, and trying new things for many hours.
A Boy Scout Exploring Pywell
In our playthrough, what we did most was explore. We didn’t advance the story; we didn’t focus on following the main objectives… we explored.
And that fits quite well with the type of protagonist the game proposes. He is a somewhat good-natured and occasionally naive character who rarely questions what happens around him, making him seem like just another piece in a narrative where he doesn’t feel like the focus, even though the story, paradoxically, is clearly centered on his destiny. The combination of a huge world and a protagonist who simply moves forward based on what he encounters reinforces the feeling of playing as a “boy scout” who discovers everything as he goes and finds techniques to survive in his environment.
The world of Crimson Desert is built for this. It’s immense, varied, and constantly invites you to stray from the path. There are puzzles, events, strange structures, and areas that seem to hide something, even when the game doesn’t explicitly say so, evoking games like Breath of the Wild.
But there’s another important contradiction in how the developers have presented exploration.
The map has several regions, but the game doesn’t truly push you to leave the first major area: Hernand. For tens of hours, we stayed there. Not because we were forced to, but because there was too much to do. There’s a large quantity of varied missions. That in itself isn’t bad, but it does create a sense of saturation. There’s always something pending, something else to check before moving on.
When you finally decide to leave this area, which, mind you, is still the same map, new mechanics begin to appear that make life easier and that, honestly, would have been very useful much earlier. This late discovery makes the progression feel a bit disorganized.
Even so, when you decide to ignore that structure and simply explore, the game finds its best version. That’s where it shines and where the world of Crimson Desert is one of the most enjoyable I’ve explored in years.
Assassin’s Redemption
Crimson Desert doesn’t try to hide where its ideas come from, and its formula undoubtedly draws from each of the ‘blockbusters’ of the last 15 years. There’s action/RPG combat, gear-based progression, crafting systems, and constant exploration. It all sounds familiar, and the difference lies in how it connects its various mechanics.
Combat is one of the most solid points. Weapons are well-balanced, skills have impact, and fighting is constantly entertaining. Facing the bandits that appear in the world never becomes a mechanical task.
Furthermore, character progression doesn’t simply depend on defeating enemies. It’s tied to gear, exploration, and what you find. It has something I find brilliant: for example, some skills can be learned by observing enemies or allies executing them.
And new mechanics constantly appear. Some don’t make much sense at first and seem to be there just to show that the game is large and varied. But most, over time, end up being useful in some way. It could be fishing or building relationships with vendors. At some point, we’ll find something useful from these.
Overall, this excess of mechanics is gradually integrated as we progress through the story and/or explore the map. Although, not everything is essential; learning some things can expand our possibilities. It’s a constant accumulation that, while disorganized, ultimately works.
What is Crimson Desert?
One of the curiosities, so to speak, is that you can play for over 50 hours and still not be clear on what “Crimson Desert” really is. In fact, in my playthrough, many hours had to pass before I even found a mention of it by a character.
The story itself is not weak in concept, but its narrative has clear problems. The pacing is too inconsistent. There are missions that feel slow, others rushed, and several that simply don’t make sense; I still remember a main mission where you literally had to sweep a chimney.
Furthermore, something confusing is that there are too many open storylines. The game tries to tell many things at once but fails to prioritize them. It’s easy to get lost in understanding what’s important because, despite there being a “main quest,” there are other side quests that seem more necessary or give more meaning to the main one, even though the game often doesn’t mention it or imply it; as a player, you realize it.
The clearest case within the plot is that one of the few elements that tries to function as an axis is the gathering of the Gray Mane. In theory, this moment should give direction to the player, act as a convergence point for various stories, and justify the journey. In practice, it gets diluted within the volume of content. It doesn’t feel like it carries the weight it should within the experience.
Kliff, the protagonist, also doesn’t contribute much to resolving this. As we mentioned before, he’s a good-natured character who acts statically, is predictable, and rarely makes decisions that we feel mark the story. He functions more as a player vehicle than a real character, and if it were like in many games, a generic one whose appearance we could select, it wouldn’t matter either. The same goes for two other playable characters, completely forgotten and whom we will never select unless necessary.
Is Crimson Desert a Single-Player MMO?
Crimson Desert feels, at times, like an MMO adapted for single-player. The world, the structure, and especially the NPCs reinforce this idea. There are many non-player characters; they are useful, but they don’t feel unique. They repeat phrases, have few routines, and function more as a system than as characters. Some react to the weather, the day, or have curious behaviors, but overall they lack depth.
There’s also the game’s technical state, which has been chaotic since its launch. As I mentioned at the beginning, patches have been released that clearly listen to the community and improve the experience, but it also feels like the game is moving away from the developers’ initial vision for the benefit of the players – and perhaps criticism. The way it releases patch after patch reminds us of many MMOs that change mechanics out of the blue with a large patch.
On the other hand, there are bugs, and there are quite a few of them, but the interesting thing is that they don’t break the adventure. In many cases, they make it more interesting. It happened to us several times that we reached areas ahead of time and encountered situations that made no narrative sense. Instead of being frustrating, those moments ended up being anecdotal.
Visually, the game can be very powerful if you have the equipment to run it with high graphics. There are details in the water, shadows, and weather effects that stand out quite a bit. But it’s also demanding. On mid-range PCs, many of these details are not appreciated as they should be. We ran it on our adventure with an RX 5700 XT, 32 GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 9 3900x processor, running just barely smoothly.
In other technical details, we appreciate that it has subtitles in Latin American Spanish, which are quite accurate, but we would have liked regional dubbing. Its soundtrack and music are quite pleasant but definitely don’t have an impact that makes them memorable.
Review conducted with a digital copy of Crimson Desert for PC provided by Pearl Abyss.
