Just a day after Pearl Abyss’ announcement of the various improvements it said were coming soon to Crimson Desert, we have a new patch that adds many of them already — and even a few changes fans hadn’t expected.
The highlights of the patch, as detailed on the Crimson Desert website, are a new weapons display option, which means you can hide weapons from the back of your character (so long, shield!), the addition of skills for the secondary playable characters, which makes them more viable to play, and various user interface improvements.
But there’s a lot in the update (patch notes below) that Pearl Abyss hadn’t mentioned. For example, Pearl Abyss has improved the usability of the Greymane camp (I won’t say how exactly, to avoid spoilers), made the Abyss puzzles easier by adding more hints and making it easier to recognize when certain gimmicks are available to be attached by using Force Palm, and gave Kliff an entirely new ability called Focused Aerial Roll.
For me, the highlight of the patch is the improvements to Damiane and Oongka, who I’ve pretty much ignored up to this point because of their limited functionality. Now they have pretty much the same abilities as Kliff, so you’ll be able to use them to complete much of the open-world gameplay. The main story still revolves around Kliff and you’ll need to use him for the majority of it, but clearly Damiane and Oongka are more viable now.
The patch also improves fast travel so it can be used while mounted, falling, swimming, or climbing walls, which means you can pretty much fast travel at any non combat point now. And there are some welcome quality of life improvements, too, such as icons for treasure chests already obtained now being displayed differently, visited and unvisited caves are now displayed with different icons, and restored and unrestored Abyss locations are now displayed with different icons.
