Crimson Desert: A majestic giant with feet of clay

When you have the chance to be one of the first people to experience a phenomenon, the best question to ask yourself once you've played it is whether you're truly looking at something that could change the medium, or at least its genre. Crimson Desert could be the first step towards the open worlds of tomorrow, the first of its generation. And although the light shines, and reflects (and bounces!) off most facets of the prism that is this single-player game from Pearl Abyss, sometimes that reflection reveals a flaw at its core. Don't panic, Crimson Desert is a great video game, but it has too many facets, and not all of them have been executed with the same mastery.

The world of Pywell, a rich land brimming with life and history, finds itself at a crossroads. Political tension is mounting amongst formerly allied nations, which now see peace crumbling. At the same time, hordes of bandits are harassing the citizens, whilst omens of the awakening of powers from an ancient civilisation begin to emerge. You are Kliff, leader of the Greymanes, a band of mercenaries defending the ancient nation of Pailune who, at the start of the game, are defeated by the Black Bears, a rival faction. Having survived certain death, Kliff awakens in a place outside of time and space known as the Abyss, where mystical powers awaken within him, which will later be revealed as the weapons that will enable him to become the saviour of this world. A task far more complex than it seems, and hardly one to be tackled alone, so the main priority for our protagonist is to reunite his scattered band of friends and begin to set things right.

To truly begin to understand what Crimson Desert is like and what you should expect from it, you must journey to another desert created by Pearl Abyss. Black Desert has been established for over a decade as one of the most prominent and challenging MMOs in history. Its deep worldbuilding is rivalled only by its exhaustive emergent gameplay and its elaborate combat system, which is as varied as it is demanding. It's important to understand this, because it's easy to sense that at one stage of development, Crimson Desert was conceived as a different kind of MMO, which later evolved into the single-player experience it is today. That means there are certain design choices inherited from a different approach to game-making—some successful, others less so. Fortunately, they're also designed so that everyone can find something in it that motivates them to explore this land.

Although it is an open-world experience, Crimson Desert more or less leads you by the hand to where you need to be at that moment. The quest tracking system is literally copied from Rockstar games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, where an X will always appear on the map that you must head towards, and once there, within a quest area, find the next milestone in the quest chain. When you arrive, the mission usually involves solving a puzzle, activating an object, or engaging in one or more combat encounters. The mission system, whether main or side quests, is fairly linear, and simply requires persistence in understanding what the task description is asking of you at that moment, or the puzzle you're facing.

Crimson Desert is a vast open world that lets you entertain yourself with almost anything, but it is not an RPG, rather an action-adventure. There is no level-based progression, nor are there decisions that alter the course of the adventure. Kliff's strength increases solely through upgrading his weapons and equipment, as well as via a three-branch progression tree unlocked by collecting Abyss Artifacts. These allow you to improve combat and exploration skills, your stamina and health, and so on. These artefacts also serve to upgrade weapons to higher tiers, so there comes a point in the adventure where you need to manage very carefully why you're collecting them. Although the game guides you from one place to another, that doesn't mean there isn't a small stumbling block in every location that you might not be able to get past. Crimson Desert relies not only on a combat system, but also on puzzle-solving, and many of these puzzles lack a clear clue, or it will be difficult to find a logical solution. This is a deliberate design choice, encouraging you to stop and think about what you really need, or whether you can utilise the game's systems to find a solution either in the intended way, or in a way you discover yourself.

Let me give you an example from my own experience: In one of my first main missions, I had to burn some vines blocking the entrance to a building, but at no point had I acquired anything like fire arrows. However, there was a torch nearby, which I could use to light the tips of my arrows. The problem was that I missed the shot. I ran out of arrows. My first thought was to reload the game or put that mission aside and come back later, but I found the solution by hitting and dropping the torch in the right direction onto some nearby branches, setting them alight and letting the fire spread far enough to clear the path. A solution worthy of Breath of the Wild that Crimson Desert has managed to include within its world.

Although ideally you should follow the story (which is what will unlock new areas and grant you access to more exploration tools) the game is designed so that this progression from point A to B can be as long and full of detours as you like, and that's because there are a thousand things (not literally, but almost) to do in Crimson Desert right from the start. Cooking, fishing, hunting, mining, taming horses, acting as a courier, a bounty hunter, taking part in mini-games, from underground fights to a simple game of rock-paper-scissors with some children in the square. Just to pass the time, just to let yourself be immersed in its world. And once you're there, it's easy to get carried away and then realise that, two hours later, you're still exactly at the same point in your progress as you were before.

These tasks, clearly inherited (given their exhaustive implementation in the game) from an MMO game concept, are justified here because they require you to move around the world and explore its nooks and crannies. And that is Crimson Desert's greatest strength. No one - not Rockstar, not Bethesda, nor any other AAA single-player adventure studios - has gone this far, or in the way that Pearl Abyss has achieved here. The studio's proprietary engine, BlackSpace, has been further optimised to deliver a resolution, sharpness and sense of the world that set a new benchmark for the industry, even surpassing the Decima engine that Kojima honed so well in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. You see the morning sun filtering through the trees, reflecting off a river ford and the trees nearby, and yourself riding across the riverbed on horseback, splashing beneath its hooves. I would go so far as to say that the sensation of exploring the world alone has only been this satisfying in Kojima's latest title, or in the most recent Zelda games. You'll spend a good part of your adventure simply wandering through meadows, forests and mountains, visiting points of interest and completing area-clearing missions, hunting animals, or simply adding entries to your world compendium, with nearly 3,000 entries. Blimey, there are about 30 mounts, or 70 different species of butterflies, and each one has a use in alchemy...

So is everything that glitters on the hills of Crimson Desert gold? Well, unfortunately, not quite. Even with the nearly 100 hours I've spent playing the game on PC at the time of writing this review, I haven't finished it yet, not by a long shot. And it's not that I've got lost in the side content, but rather that I've come up against poor game balance design. The puzzles may be more or less complicated, but what isn't is the balance of power among the enemies. Whilst you can face hordes of a hundred or two hundred rank-and-file enemies in an area before reaching the boss, the boss is always light years above anything you've faced before. And it's not that it's difficult due to a lack of skill (we've played plenty of Soulslikes by now), but rather that it's an artificial and unfair challenge. Upgrading your gear is the obvious choice, but even then, every encounter will be a struggle. You'll have to stockpile cooked food to heal yourself in the middle of combat, and you'll likely have to be 'farming' or scouring every vendor in the region to get enough uses to chip away at the boss enough to defeat him. This creates an artificially long gameplay experience, which also disrupts the organic development of the story. Speaking of the story, the game's main narrative falls short this time, in favour of minor side encounters and optional missions. The playable characters are rather one-dimensional, and apart from Kliff, who is the main character, the other two are utterly forgettable and unnecessary.

It doesn't help that the game has a menu that's so complicated to understand, with so many systems to keep track of, and what may be the worst inventory system in the history of video games. Even in its moderately patched state (it was one of the final pre-launch fixes), you'll find that the poor organisation of items in your bag, and the limited space available, will take its toll. At the time of writing, there is still no item storage system, which means that you will sometimes have to throw away or sell very valuable items that you've worked hard to obtain, and which you can't carry because you have nowhere to put them.

And while we're on the subject of management, the camp section feels like another system tacked on early in development and then somewhat neglected, so neither the camp-building nor the management of the Greybeards' tasks is particularly well executed. I also have issues with how certain investigation-focused quests are resolved, and often solving puzzles is almost pure luck rather than down to any mistake on your part. After spending some time in the game, even moving around won't always be that much fun, because after taking the same route 30 times towards the city or your base camp, you'll miss the fast travel options. They do exist here, but they aren't as common or convenient as you'd like, and sometimes you need to progress through the story or overcome an unclear challenge to activate them. This even happens with the game's most important fast-travel point, one I haven't unlocked yet and which leads to your home...

Too many loose ends that don't ruin the experience or make me want to stop playing, but they certainly don't elevate it to a contender for Game of the Year. Crimson Desert can be a place where you can lose yourself for months as a player, but don't expect all those hours to be spent on an enriching adventure in a world that, I repeat, is wonderful. I can overlook certain technical issues given the scale of the project and because they may be fixed with a patch, but there are simply too many design conflicts across all the systems operating simultaneously for me to call it a 'masterpiece'. If you can simply live with that and enjoy the journey, even without necessarily understanding where it leads, then this open world is worth a try.

I don't feel entirely comfortable giving Crimson Desert a final score. There may well be parts where I'd have wanted to lower this rating, and moments where I'd have raised it significantly. Simply take this as an indication of the current state of a game so vast that it's bound to offer something for you, just not to the extent you might have hoped.