As Crimson Desert players make their way further into the game, they’re coming to understand some of its more puzzling design choices. Chief among them is that creature mounts other than your horse are not permanent. And while the coveted endgame dragon is a permanent addition, its use has a 15 minute real-time time limit, and then a 50 minute real-time cooldown that’s impossible to speed up.
Some players of Pearl Abyss’ open world action game went into the experience wanting to ride around on the back of a dragon – as pre-release videos had hyped up – as soon as possible. Why wouldn’t they? With a dragon you can fly anywhere and breathe fire. It’s a game-changer for sure.
As IGN’s guide to unlocking Crimson Desert’s dragon explains, you’ll need to work your way through to the end of the story to do so. Afterwards, you can summon your dragon as you would any mount. But once your 15 minutes is up or your dragon is defeated, it’s on a 50 minute cooldown that can’t be sped up by sleeping or waiting. For a single-player game, that seems harsh.
Crimson Desert subreddits, Discords, and social media are littered with requests for Pearl Abyss to address this issue, with some pointing people directly to the developer’s support page. However, there may be some method to the madness. Riding the dragon makes you particularly powerful, and exploration becomes an afterthought. So Pearl Abyss may have come up with the cooldown idea to prevent players from, essentially, making much of Crimson Desert redundant.
Whatever the case, those complaints are flooding in. “The dragon was shown in almost every trailer, for it to then end up being such a limited use thing is really disappointing,” one player said. “That’s really surprising to read, showing off the dragon like that certainly did imply that it’s a fixed mount for late game and not just a temporary summon,” another added. “Hopefully this gets addressed down the line.”
“Not only is it unlocked super late into the game but it also comes with a time limit and a 50 minute real time cooldown to summon,” another commented. “I never understood ‘balancing’ in a single-player game and I never will. If I wanna be the most OP mfer every why try to hinder me? Is that not what I paid for? I’m not harming any other players by flying the dragon. I hope ppl complain enough for them to change that. Especially since they were doing all that talk about ‘we wanna let players be overpowered’ well now that was a f***ing lie.”
Some are suggesting solutions. Slap a cooldown on the dragon’s attack, for example, but let players fly around as much as they want. “Just dumb it has a limit…. just let the player have fun damn it,” said one player.
And here’s another comment, from a similarly frustrated player: “I’m so sad about the dragon I really am. In any game I just want FULL FREE CONTROL OF A DRAGON WHY IS IT SO HARD??????? I bought this game due to there being a dragon and you can ride it, never once did a TIME LIMIT come to my mind. ESPECIALLY in a game like THIS? I love this game it’s getting closer and closer to my top three but this right here almost just killed it. I know it’s a small mechanic but for me it’s a gut puncher. Please just remove the timer. Really thought it was gonna give us the dragon at the end since it’s such a big MAP. I’d love to ride him to explore I don’t want to use the fast travel locations this world is beautiful and being able to fly over it would be even better but I only get to experience it for 15 min like cmon not even 30 WHY SO LITTLE TIME.”
More generally, there are calls to make the other creature mounts permanent. Creature mounts other than the horse and dragon, like the Dire Wolf and Raptor, are temporary and can’t be summoned or stabled. “We need creature mounts to be permanent, stable-able and summonable. Please help get this message across to the developers,” one player said. “Please, mounts were a big selling point for me, I want a wyvern to be my cute personal tamed dog,” one player added.
Given the pace Pearl Abyss has released significant updates for Crimson Desert (a major update came out just this morning), perhaps the dragon and other mounts will get a change soon. Elsewhere, Crimson Desert’s Steam review rating jumped up from ‘mixed’ to ‘mostly positive,’ suggesting sentiment is improving.
If you’re jumping into Crimson Desert’s huge open world, 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.
