Most who have played Crimson Desert will be aware of the discussion around main character Kliff and his lack of personality. The gruff Greymane is a man of few words; ‘Alright,’ which he responds with to even the most dramatic of lines of dialogue from other characters, has become a meme within the community.
But Kliff’s empty personality is just a part of Crimson Desert’s overall story issues. Certainly, the game has been praised for its open world, combat, and many, many systems. But the story and Kliff himself are generally thought of as the weaker aspects of the game. From IGN’s Crimson Desert review:
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.
We’ve already heard from Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young on this. Shortly after Crimson Desert came out, he agreed that the story could have been better. “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.”
Similarly, Alec Newman, the voice actor behind Kliff, has revealed how the story and characters changed significantly during development, explaining: “After a while, there’s only so far you can go with him [Kliff] kind of being… not flat, but kind of stoic. Now, I know that as a Scotsman myself, I know what that means. But it’s very very hard to play 150 hours with somebody who doesn’t give anything away ever. So what’s been rewarding is that as people have played through over a 100 hours, they’ve found bits of Kliff that do speak of something more emotional sometimes.”
“The whole Greymanes thing, after about two-and-a-half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate,” he continued. “This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. I think that’s the main story strand of the game, or the only story strand of the game when you begin it.
“And so that was the bridge point. I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to care about his comrades.’ And I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue.’ So we brought it in gradually and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out.
“But I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.”
Now, the performance capture actor and model behind Kliff has chimed in. In a reddit AMA, Trevor McEwan, a Canadian actor based in Korea, was asked whether Kliff’s “detachment” was deliberate. McEwan replied to suggest it was, and that Kliff is actually suppressing his emotions throughout the story.
“Everything was done intentionally for the most part from my interpretation of Kliff and his character,” he explained. “He has a lot going on under the surface but is very guarded of that. The family he made with the Graymanes and their mission is the most important thing to him. So he attached himself a lot to that.”
McEwan also responded to a question pointing out the barebones plot to say Crimson Desert excels in other areas.
“Yeah, I get that, but I think what it lacks in narrative it more than makes up for in other aspects,” he said. “There’s also lore hidden across the world as well, if players don’t mind a bit of reading.”
This will all make sense to anyone who’s played Crimson Desert, whose story has become the subject of criticism. While some players are perfectly happy treating Crimson Desert as more of a sandbox game than a story-driven adventure, most agree that the actual plot, storyline, and characters leave a lot to be desired.
Still, Crimson Desert is a monster hit, selling over 5 million copies in less than a month. We’ve got plenty more on Crimson Desert, including praise from the director of The Witcher 3, a hidden food consequence system that a modder has restored, and an impressive character creator mod. We recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
