Crimson Desert Review - Close To Greatness
Crimson Desert is a game dripping with potential. You can see it early. Combat feels tight, you’re introduced to the abyss and that feels weird and exciting, and when you are given access to the open world and scroll out the map – it’s big. Like, really big. It’s packed to the brim with potential, but being packed with potential isn’t always enough, it depends if you can capitalise on it.
You play as Kliff, a Greymane whose people have been displaced after an attack on your camp wipes out a bunch of your group and kills you, only for you to be brought back to life by a mysterious power. After your resurrection, you set out for revenge and to reclaim your homeland.
Open world games are hard. You want a world that’s engaging and immersive, with plenty of variation and not too many open spaces with nothing to do. Crimson Desert does some things amazingly well, and some, not so much. Pywel is an interesting map and each zone feels unique. Fast travel is done by teleportation to Abyss Nexuses, once activated. These are scattered around the map in a useful way, but not so many that you’ll ignore your horse. I think my main issue is that the world feels like it exists for the player, not that the player exists are part of the world. Travel around the map offers some collectibles which give skill points, and other points of interest, like mining and gathering spots. Random events don’t really exist, so once you’ve seen an area there’s very little reason to pay attention to things outside of vibes. You might walk past a group of bandits and they’ll attack, but that’s about as interesting as it gets. It doesn’t seem like things interact with each other either. Guards will walk past bandits and not bat an eye, for example.
This doesn’t mean there’s no reason to explore. Gathering is important to upgrade your gear, and there’s so many quests in the game that will send you hither and yon. There are also outposts to take back from enemies, and small puzzle areas that offer useful rewards. Quite a few of the puzzles are tough too, but I look forward to going back to try and solve some of them. The outposts weren’t all too interesting to me. Sometimes you’ll take an outpost as part of a larger warfront, but I felt these were a bit hollow. Clearing groups of enemies causes two outcomes – your group will just stand around doing nothing, until enemies randomly respawn. There’s no momentum to things, so I found myself just running past the hordes of enemies to kill the boss. Generally, you wipe out enemies until the bar empties, the screen fades to black (even if there are enemies left!) and you win. I wish you could push up against the enemy, or that there was a chance of losing or something to make it more interesting. Instead, these big set piece moments felt a bit flat.
Those bosses though. There are 75 bosses in the game and most are varied and interesting. This is where the best part of the game shines – the combat. Some of the controls feel a bit weird, but soon enough you’ll be flipping, dodging and sword slashing your way to victory. In many ways it reminds me of Dragon’s Dogma, a game close to my heart. It doesn’t have the monster climbing or elemental affinities, but the ebb and flow of action is important. There’s a beat to it. When can you push the advantage, can you block those attacks or do you need to dodge? Do you need to stuff your face with a thousand meals to heal up? This is augmented by your varied choice of weapons or armour and their buffs, to supplement your skills. One sour point is in multi-phase bosses, where there is a cutscene between every phase and it cannot be skipped. It’ll also play every try of the boss too, just in case you needed more salt in the wound.
One bugbear is the inventory system. The developers have a bandaid fix implemented to increase starting inventory, but extra slots are earned by pretty basic sidequests called requests. I didn’t keep absolutely on top of these, because most of them weren’t that interesting, but there was never a time I was not hurting for inventory space. I’ve been told a weapon/armour storage system will be coming in the future, which will help, but currently the only way to keep your extra gear is to lug it around with you.
I want to be clear. I really like Crimson Desert. I finished it and in a few months I’ll return to it and give it another play, once things have been patched and more information is out there. There’s more than a few times where quest objectives were wrong or unclear. I’m no idiot, but there were times I was lost for a while before fumbling my way to a solution. Sometimes that was the right answer, but more often than not it was a very wrong solution to progress. A tiny bit more guidance would be nice for some things, but hell, once the public has their hands on it and wikis get built out it’ll all be fine.
Wandering the world does fill me with awe though. Night’s not as dark as I’d like, but the world does feel fleshed out. There’s also just a lot going on onscreen most of the time. Cities are actually packed and the game runs really well. The optimisation team should be lauded, they’ve done some truly amazing work. The game runs buttery smooth on my PC, and it’ll only get better with time. I have faith it’ll be the same with consoles.
On those cities, as a final point. I love that there’s a bunch of NPCs in every town and whilst most of them aren’t important at all, I would’ve liked if people had a routine. It’s weird to have NPCs just standing at their shops 24 hours a day. It’s weird to have NPCs try and engage me in conversation just by looking roughly in their direction.
Crimson Desert is a marvel, for all its warts. There are a few design decisions like inventory management, NPC immersion and those large-scale battles that hold this back from being a truly great game, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I think this’ll be remembered fondly by a strong community, just like Dragon’s Dogma is. For people thinking this will be the next Red Dead Redemption or The Witcher, it absolutely isn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth playing. I honestly look forward to a potential sequel, because this game has some really strong chops. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a lot to this game I am yet to fully experience.
Crimson Desert was reviewed on PC with a code kindly provided by Plaion AU.
