It’s safe to say Crimson Desert is a success with 3 million copies sold (so far) and substantial patches coming in hot. But it’s hard to fix a narrative and quest structure that was described as “fatally undercooked” by Lewis Gordon in Eurogamer’s own review. Now, we’ve learned the voice behind “stoic” protagonist Kliff, Alec Newman (Cyberpunk 2077), was as confused by its nature as many players.
His words on the creative process behind the character, the story, and the journey of making sense of it all come from 29th March’s Friends Per Second podcast (the sister program of This Week in Videogames). There, the actor didn’t shy away from expressing his frustrations while working on the gigantic game: “Nearly two years into recording, they sort of said, ‘Well, we’re going to start recording in earnest now.’ And I went, ‘what the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!'”
Newman is no stranger to working on both huge and small video games, and last year, he won a BAFTA Games Award for his performance in Still Wakes the Deep. While he didn’t outright criticize the writing or creative process in Crimson Desert, he admitted the experience was “very different” before pointing out the developers kept “changing the goalpost,” only giving him “cards of the different parts of Pywel” before they became serious about the direction they wanted to take the story (and Kliff) in. “I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?'”
This lines up with recent reports of claims from anonymous sources linked to the development of the game. Those also pointed to the story and other key elements not being locked “until right before release.” Moreover, internal power struggles and leadership changes greatly altered the game over the course of development. If all that was true, it’s a miracle the game shipped at all and found this level of success.
Even the Greymanes and the “idea of family and trying to bring something back together,” which is essentially the backbone of the story, weren’t completely defined in Crimson Desert’s early days: “After about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate… 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.'”
While Newman seems grateful for the opportunity to work on such a huge game and he’s happy about it resonating with people, he underlined that “those moments were fewer than they could have been” in reference to the opportunities given to Kliff as a character beyond his stoic attitude. “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.”
