Crimson Desert feels like it was designed in a lab by someone who wanted to combine elements of all their favorite big budget open-world games into the ultimate video game. It’s got the 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’s genuinely impressive that developer Pearl Abyss even attempts to smash all these things I love into a single package, the result ends up being a jack of all trades but a master of none. The exploration and combat fall far short of the best open-world adventure games, the dialogue, characters, and story are laughably bad, the puzzles are unintuitive and janky, and the reactivity of the world around you is underwhelming. But despite all the frustrations I’ve faced across the 130 hours it took me to complete the main story and do a good chunk of the side content, there were still many moments where I was left stunned by the sheer magnitude of the uneven world that’s been created here.
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 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. Pearl Abyss has said it plans to add storage later, but it not being available at launch is a pretty wild miss.
Crimson Desert – March 2026 Screenshots
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 days 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 Pearl Abyss wanted 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.
This world is full of fun stuff to do, but the stories within it are consistently bad.“
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. It’s worth noting that Pearl Abyss has already put out a patch that nerfed at least one of these encounters, and I suspect more will follow. I’m not sure patches alone will be able to make these numerous, sluggish fights feel all that good, but it’s at least a start that they seem to be aware of the issue.
Part of the reason I doubt boss fights will be fully salvageable is because combat is pretty uneven in general. A big part of that is in how 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, 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 tons 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 apparently that’s just what you’re supposed to do to get through that section. In trying so many things, this adventure 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 abilities, you’ll at least 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.
How Well Does Crimson Desert Run On PC?
Crimson Desert might end up being one of the most well-optimized PC games in years. That’s in spite of the vast view distances and incredible lighting on offer. Pretty much every modern graphics card will be able to run Crimson Desert without any kind of upscaling. Of course, DLSS and FSR are both supported, which can make the game run even better without really impacting the visual quality of the game.
Even on the Xbox Ally X, which is significantly weaker than any of the desktop graphics cards I tested, Crimson Desert runs just fine. It’s not going to fully saturate the handheld’s 144Hz display, but it doesn’t really need to – it’s still a great way to play the game when you’re away from your PC or your Xbox. Of course, just because the game is optimized to run well on a wide swath of PCs doesn’t mean that it’s not also chock-full of bugs and other quirks. – Jacqueline Thomas, March 19, 2026
Read the full Crimson Desert PC Performance Review.
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 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 frequently , and sprinting is, in fact, not on the left thumbstick at all, but instead asks you to tap the A button repeatedly to go faster than a 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 of the more amusing ones comes when you get a dragon mount much later on, but trying to summon it is an absolutely huge pain in the neck every single time – you have to press a button to mount it at just the right time, but it’s super finicky and most of the time you just tumble off the side and go plummeting to the ground. Truly infuriating stuff.
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 runs 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 its 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.
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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 open-world games 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.
To its credit, Pearl Abyss says it has patched out that particular issue already, though it doesn’t seem to be the only one like it. For example, after finally completing the last main story quest (I’ll avoid any spoilers), I went to do an epilogue quest where you stop by to chat with all the friends you made along the way, only for some of them to simply… not be there initially. They did eventually show up a while later, but it meant I didn’t even get the proper send-off I was supposed to after 130 hours of playing (though there’s no “endgame” to speak of after that sequence anyway). Pearl Abyss is doing its best to address issues as they arise, and it’s also done things like add extra fast travel points compared to the review build, so the full version already has a few less frustrations across the board – but in a game this big, it’s hard to imagine it’ll be able to squash all these problems anytime soon.
