Alec Newman, the actor who plays Crimson Desert protagonist Kliff, has discussed his work on the game, and revealed how the story and characters changed significantly during development.
In an interview with Skill Up’s Friends Per Second Podcast, (via twiv) Newman, who is no stranger to video game roles having played Cameron “Caz” McLeary in Still Wakes the Deep and Adam Smasher in Cyberpunk 2077, said he worked on Crimson Desert for five years, “recording various iterations of this character at various stages of development for ages.”
For the first year-and-a-half of development, Crimson Desert was just a demo, as far as he knew. It wasn’t until nearly two years into recording that he was told that the work would begin in earnest. “I went, ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!’ So it was, in terms of recording, the gift that really did keep on giving,” he said.
This is in keeping with what we know of the development of Crimson Desert, which began life as an MMORPG prequel to Pearl Abyss’s Black Desert Online. It eventually became a single-player open world action role-playing game, with the narrative coming into focus along the way.
“With this project it was interesting because they kind of… I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel,” Newman continued. “You know, various characters and, he’s from this faction and he’s from that faction. And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
Newman revealed that Kliff was called Macduff for quite a large chunk of his time spent recording for the game. And when Pearl Abyss settled on Kliff, Newman starting banging the story drum.
“When Kliff stopped being Macduff, which was a considerable amount of time into the recording of this, once they settled on Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could,” he said.
