Crimson Desert feels like it was designed in a lab by someone who wanted to combine elements of all their favorite big budget open-world games into the ultimate video game. It’s got the adventuring of The Witcher 3, the slow horseback conversations of Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-ended puzzle solving of Tears of the Kingdom, and the do-whatever-you-want dynamic world of something like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto 5. And while it’s genuinely impressive that developer Pearl Abyss even attempts to smash all these things I love into a single package, the result ends up being a jack of all trades but a master of none. The exploration and combat fall far short of the best open-world adventure games, the dialogue, characters, and story are laughably bad, the puzzles are unintuitive and janky, and the reactivity of the world around you is underwhelming. But despite all the frustrations I’ve faced across the 130 hours it took me to complete the main story and do a good chunk of the side content, there were still many moments where I was left stunned by the sheer magnitude of the uneven world that’s been created here.
In its best moments, Crimson Desert has you wandering around arm wrestling, fishing, gambling, completing side quests, and just getting lost in an absolutely gorgeous open world where it feels like anything is possible. One moment I was playing a mini settlement builder, managing resources and sending my allies out to earn loot and resources on my behalf, and the next I was hunting wild animals and grilling them into a pile of meat to prepare for a big battle. But there were an equal number of occasions where I was absolutely dumbfounded by annoying choices, like how combat encounters almost always go on way too long, or how your paltry inventory space constantly fills up and forces you to part with items you’ve worked hard for. (That space was more than doubled during the review period due to an overwhelming amount of feedback and still doesn’t feel great.) Many of these issues get far worse the longer you play, as later on the size of enemy groups goes to ridiculous, Dynasty Warriors-levels, and a complete lack of storage chests to keep your hard-won loot in means you have to get rid of cool, unique gear when collecting fun items feels like a major part of the draw here. That’s right – if you can’t fit it on your person, there’s no way to keep it at all. Pearl Abyss has said it plans to add storage later, but it not being available at launch is a pretty wild miss.
The world itself is definitely one of the most impressive aspects of Crimson Desert, as you can see people walking around town and actually living out their days in real time. For example, if you send a caravan of followers to go build something, you can drop by during work hours to see them toiling away before heading back to bunk at night. In another instance, you might see a bounty posted for a known pickpocket, then find them one day practicing their trade in a completely different town, and can then choose to bring them to justice or let it slide. Traveling around the massive regions, hunting for loot, solving puzzles, and liberating areas can make for some seriously good times, especially if you’re like me and try to do things it feels like you aren’t supposed to do, like wandering far off the beaten path before you’ve even explored the starting area. It’s a kind of freedom that only games this absurdly large can pull off, and makes for some really memorable moments.
While the world you’ll explore is full of fun stuff to do, the stories you’ll find in it are consistently bad. From the moment you’re introduced to the first of its three playable characters – Kliff, a viking-coded warrior who is on a low stakes revenge quest against another group of barbarians – there’s very little to become invested in, and it only gets worse from there. The story is aimless, the characters are forgettable across the board, the dialogue is often pretty hard to listen to, and there’s an entire multi-chapter arc in the main questline that’s centered on a character who dies offscreen before the story even begins – they continually try to make you care about this person through multiple funeral scenes separated by hours and hours of game time. It’s odd because, with long sequences of talking to your companions and a lot of time spent watching cutscenes as part of the main story, it does seem like Pearl Abyss wanted people to care about this stuff, but almost none of it is really worth paying attention to and much of it is actively cringe worthy. That said, there are also a lot of cutscenes full of cool, anime-style fights – those are pretty sick.
Crimson Desert’s world is also hindered at almost every turn by jankiness and puzzling design choices. Some of the biggest misses are the boss fights, which abruptly take you out of the fairly casual action game combat that surrounds them and drops you into straight up soulslike fights against multi-phase enemies that feel extremely out of sync with the rest of the adventure. In one of the earliest examples, you carve your way through scores of bandits with ease, before concluding with a super long, three-phase boss fight that includes some segments where you’re just mercilessly swarmed by the bad guy while you have to dash around destroying totems. The only reasonable way to get through it is to have a ton of healing items on hand to eat by the fistful as you whittle down the enemy’s health bar. I love soulslikes and consider myself a tryhard who enjoys mastering perfect parry mechanics, and even with my background I found the vast majority of these boss fights to be unfun, poorly balanced, and downright annoying. It’s kind of wild how out of place they feel, and they are common enough to regularly hurt the pacing. It’s worth noting that Pearl Abyss has already put out a patch that nerfed at least one of these encounters, and I suspect more will follow. I’m not sure patches alone will be able to make these numerous, sluggish fights feel all that good, but it’s at least a start that they seem to be aware of the issue.
Part of the reason I doubt boss fights will be fully salvageable is because combat is pretty uneven in general. A big part of that is in how Crimson Desert simply never knows when to end a fight! Most begin with a dozen or more enemies surrounding you, and then dozens more showing up as you take down the first wave, dragging things out for minutes on end. This is fine when you’re taking on some major quest, but when you’re just trying to cross a bridge and are expected to stop and fight 20 samey guards first, it really eats up your time. Even worse are the war scenarios that arrive in the middle and later stages of the adventure, where you’re asked to do ridiculous things like plant a flag in the ground while surrounded by dozens and dozens of enemies, completely unable to defend yourself while you slowly move a giant banner across the battlefield. It’s especially annoying that, although you can level up your weapons and armor to make all this combat easier, you’re constantly outnumbered by loads of dudes who can take you out with a few lucky shots. As you can imagine, starting an already-too-long fight over again feels especially bad.
