Crimson Desert feels like it was designed in a lab by someone who wanted to combine elements of all their favorite big budget action RPGs into the ultimate video game. It’s got the open-world adventuring of The Witcher 3, the slow horseback conversations of Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-ended puzzle solving of Tears of the Kingdom, and the do-whatever-you-want dynamic world of something like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto 5. And while it tries to smash all these things I love into one package, it ends up being a jack of all trades but a master of none. The adventuring and combat fall far short of the best open-world RPGs, the dialogue, characters, and story are laughably bad, the puzzles are unintuitive and janky, and the reactivity of the world around you is underwhelming. Even still, the fact that Crimson Desert’s massive adventure attempts all this is impressive nonetheless. With such a large game and review code arriving so close to launch (not to mention substantial bugs that delayed my progress), I still have a little bit more to go before I roll credits and finalize this review – but there have been high highs and low lows across the 110+ hours I’ve already played, as well as many moments where I was stunned by the sheer magnitude of the uneven world developer Pearl Abyss has created.
In its best moments, Crimson Desert has you wandering around arm wrestling, fishing, gambling, completing side quests, and just getting lost in an absolutely gorgeous open world where it feels like anything is possible. One moment I was playing a mini settlement builder, managing resources and sending my allies out to earn loot and resources on my behalf, and the next I was hunting wild animals and grilling them into a pile of meat to prepare for a big battle. But there were an equal number of occasions where I was absolutely dumbfounded by annoying choices, like how combat encounters almost always involve dozens of enemies and go on way too long, or how your paltry inventory space constantly fills up and forces you to part with items you’ve worked hard for. (That space was more than doubled during the review period due to an overwhelming amount of feedback and still doesn’t feel great.) Many of these issues get far worse the longer you play, as later on the size of enemy groups goes to ridiculous, Dynasty Warriors-levels, and a complete lack of storage chests to keep your hard-won loot in means you have to get rid of cool, unique gear when collecting fun items feels like a major part of the draw here. That’s right – if you can’t fit it on your person, there’s no way to keep it at all. Insanity!
The world itself is definitely one of the most impressive aspects of Crimson Desert, as you can see people walking around town and actually living out their day in real time. For example, if you send a caravan of followers to go build something, you can drop by during work hours to see them toiling away before heading back to bunk at night. In another instance, you might see a bounty posted for a known pickpocket, then find them one day practicing their trade in a completely different town, and can then choose to bring them to justice or let it slide. Traveling around the massive regions, hunting for loot, solving puzzles, and liberating areas can make for some seriously good times, especially if you’re like me and try to do things it feels like you aren’t supposed to do, like wandering far off the beaten path before you’ve even explored the starting area. It’s a kind of freedom that only games this absurdly large can pull off, and makes for some really memorable moments.
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 they expected 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.
Crimson Desert’s world is also hindered at almost every turn by jankiness and puzzling design choices. Some of the biggest misses are the boss fights, which abruptly take you out of the fairly casual action game combat that surrounds them and drops you into straight up soulslike fights against multi-phase enemies that feel extremely out of sync with the rest of the adventure. In one of the earliest examples, you carve your way through scores of bandits with ease, before concluding with a super long, three-phase boss fight that includes some segments where you’re just mercilessly swarmed by the bad guy while you have to dash around destroying totems. The only reasonable way to get through it is to have a ton of healing items on hand to eat by the fistful as you whittle down the enemy’s health bar. I love soulslikes and consider myself a tryhard who enjoys mastering perfect parry mechanics, and even with my background I found the vast majority of these boss fights to be unfun, poorly balanced, and downright annoying. It’s kind of wild how out of place they feel, and they are common enough to regularly hurt the pacing.
Combat in general is uneven to begin with, as Crimson Desert simply never knows when to end a fight. Most begin with a dozen or more enemies surrounding you, and then dozens more showing up as you take down the first wave, dragging things out for minutes on end. This is fine when you’re taking on some major quest, but when you’re just trying to cross a bridge and are expected to stop and fight 20 samey guards first, it really eats up your time. Even worse are the war scenarios that arrive in the middle and later stages of the adventure, where you’re asked to do ridiculous things like plant a flag in the ground while surrounded by dozens and dozens of enemies, completely unable to defend yourself while you slowly move a giant banner across the battlefield. It’s especially annoying that, although you can level up your weapons and armor to make all this combat easier, your power level almost never scales to the level that your enemies do, and you’re constantly outnumbered by loads of dudes who can take you out with a few lucky shots. As you can imagine, starting an already-too-long fight over again feels especially bad.
Beyond combat, there’s loads of stuff Crimson Desert tries that just doesn’t work at all, from extremely ill-advised stealth sections (which are exactly as bad as you’re imagining) to puzzles that often feel like you’re brute forcing your way through them rather than coming up with a creative solution. In one section, I had to climb to a higher area to solve a puzzle, but couldn’t reach that high due to stamina limitations. After searching for the “correct” way to climb up to the next floor, I ended up just cheesing my way up by finding a ledge that let me take a breather in a way that seemed very much unintentional. When I got to the top and solved the puzzle, it felt like I’d done something wrong, but that’s apparently just what you’re supposed to do to get through that section. In trying so many things, this RPG often feels like it’s bitten off more than it can chew, resulting in pockets of gameplay like this that feel very underdeveloped.
As you complete quests, earn loot, and level up, you’ll gain access to some pretty neat abilities that change up the way you play. One branch of each playable character’s skill tree is dedicated to flying or gliding around to improve your mobility, while another unlocks new combat tricks, like the ability to bash enemies with your shield or dropkick foes and send them flying about 50 feet. Many of these unlockables are really interesting, like one that lets you grapple yourself across long distances and scale sheer walls in the blink of an eye. The other half of them are things I never really had any interest in buying, like basically all of the archery skills, which didn’t feel good no matter how much I invested in them. There are also a huge number of combat abilities that seem like they’re almost clones of one another, which would require me to memorize a whole new button combination to use them that I’d surely never remember.
Part of this has to do with the control mapping, which is completely insane by default, and requires you to remember various multi-step button combinations to access abilities you’ll have to use all the time. It took me hours to remember that clicking the left thumbstick makes you crouch, holding down the left thumbstick brings out one of your special gadgets you’ll use all the time, and sprinting is, in fact, not on the left thumbstick at all, but instead asks you to tap the A button repeatedly to run, which seems crazy to me. (What is this, Grand Theft Auto?) There are a whole bunch of little mapping things like this that took me at least a dozen hours to get used to, and which I still occasionally fumble since so many abilities make use of the same buttons and require multiple inputs in a specific order to do the things you want.
One thing that never stops being incredibly impressive, however, is how good Crimson Desert looks and performs. I played exclusively on my high-end PC (we weren’t sent console codes ahead of launch), so I expect it to look glorious there, but it’s run quite nicely across all of the setups our team has tested as well, even lower-end ones. For an open world game of this scale, it’s simply wild how consistently it holds frames and looks beautiful doing it. That said, it tends to be another one of those games that looks better from afar. Environments and the massive number of enemies on screen are stunning to behold, but then you’ll get into a cutscene to talk to someone and their face will be a bit janky, with lip syncing that’s way off. Still, even when this RPG’s frustrating design choices made me want to rage quit, it was hard to stay mad for long when I got back to running around the massive map and just taking in the wildly good looking views.
But just because its performance and graphics are awesome doesn’t mean Crimson Desert is free from bugs and technical issues, and the ones you sometimes get with RPGs of this size are exactly as bad as I feared here. I ran into all sorts of problems, from hard crashes to companions I was supposed to follow getting stuck in the environment until I reloaded. The worst bug came late in the main story, when a vital quest step didn’t register as I completed it, locking me out of progression entirely unless I reloaded a save file from seven hours earlier. I was able to proceed by copying a coworker’s save file (who was at roughly the same part of the story as me) and soldiering on that way instead – if I hadn’t, I would have likely thrown in the towel right then and there. Getting set back so far by a bug like that is devastating, and I know I wasn’t the only person to hit this one, though Pearl Abyss says it’s managed to fix that particular issue ahead of launch. The team is doing its best to address bugs as they arise, but in a game this big, it’s hard to imagine it’ll be able to squash them all anytime soon.
I’ve played over 110 hours of Crimson Desert and already feel like I’ve seen just about all there is to see, but until I complete the main story and explore whatever secrets the endgame holds, I’m not ready to stamp a final score onto this ambitious yet flawed RPG quite yet. So far the highs have been very high, and the lows have been very low, which has made for an amusing adventure that’s also difficult to recommend outright. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story wraps up (though I’m not expecting much from it at this point) and what the post-game experience looks like. I should be ready with a final review in the coming days.
