Crimson Desert has hit a new Steam concurrent player peak during its second weekend, after another game-changing update brought a raft of improvements to the open world action adventure.
Developer Pearl Abyss released update 1.01.00 (patch notes, courtesy of Steam, are below) this morning, sparking excitement within the Crimson Desert community as a number of significant changes kicked into gear. For example, the patch added five summonable mounts (the lack of summonable mounts was a big criticism in the wake of the game’s release), decreased loading times for fast travel and revival, and improved the controls further. But these are just a few examples of the positive changes — the patch includes a long list of pretty meaningful tweaks that combine to make a big impact on the overall Crimson Desert experience.
Pearl Abyss has pumped out these big updates remarkably quickly. Crimson Desert hasn’t even hit the two weeks on-sale mark, and already a series of patches have helped turn what was a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating into a ‘very positive’ rating. Now, Crimson Desert has actually increased its peak concurrent player count on Steam, hitting 276,261 on Sunday. At the time of this article’s publication, Crimson Desert was the third most-played game on Steam, behind Valve’s own Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.
Of course, none of this takes into account how Crimson Desert is doing on consoles, so the game’s overall player count will be much higher (neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers public).
This week, Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young responded to questions on Crimson Desert at a Q&A session following a shareholders’ meeting, and, according to reports from the South Korean media, the game is on its way to 5 million sold having hit the 3 million mark just this week. According to the Korean business press, Pearl Abyss reportedly spent seven years making Crimson Desert, with development costs coming in at 200 billion won (approx. $133 million).
As part of the Q&A, Heo Jin-young acknowledged criticism of Crimson Desert’s story. “I sympathize to some extent with the disappointment users feel regarding the story,” Heo Jin-young said, as reported by Yonhap News Agency. “I think it would have been nice if we could have done a better job with it. The production team tried to make up for the shortcomings in the remaining time, but ultimately, we focused on strengthening the gameplay, which is what we do best.”
Meanwhile, there are no solid plans on any DLC, and don’t expect official mod support any time soon, but a Nintendo Switch 2 version is apparently being explored.
Crimson Desert update makes game-changing improvements
So, let’s have a look at this patch then. Yes, the five summonable mounts are welcome, but there are a number of other highlights for me. Here’s a big one:
