Crimson Desert is a fascinating video game. It’s an open world adventure of frankly absurd scope, taking blatant cues from notable examples of the genre, like Red Dead Redemption 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and The Witcher 3.
But where those three titles have a clear identity right out of the gate, Crimson Desert is a cacophony of systems and mechanics that only begins to take shape hours and hours into the experience. In so many ways, it’s like nothing we’ve ever played.
And we mean that in both a positive and negative sense. Initially, this fantasy jaunt can feel impenetrable; the game’s now infamous opening hours funnel you through a series of tutorial-like quests that lack any kind of narrative cohesion — and this is after a barnstorming prologue that sees protagonist Kliff unceremoniously slaughtered.
Let’s be clear: you won’t be playing Crimson Desert for the plot. While the storytelling does start to resemble something of actual structure once you’ve pushed through those early beats, it never evolves beyond loosely-tied character threads and stunted world building.
In particular, the script is often incredibly dull — salvaged only by some stellar British voice acting and plenty of swearwords. It’s ultimately difficult to become invested in Kliff’s fight to reunite his clan of proud Northern warriors because everything’s just so one-note.
Fortunately for Kliff and his pals, they inhabit a gigantic open world that’s a joy to explore and exist within. There’s absolutely no doubt that Crimson Desert comes into its own when you push the story and quests aside in favour of just roaming the wilderness.
Developer Pearl Abyss has crafted one of the most dynamic open worlds we’ve ever seen. It’s teeming with activity as animals scamper about and NPCs travel the roads, all while a gorgeous day and night cycle envelops the scenery. It’s a breathtaking achievement at times.
The sheer scale of the map is consistently impressive, with huge draw distances helping to sell the vision. It’s one of those open worlds where you can point to a landmark off on the horizon and simply… go.
Granted, there’s quite a lot of elevation to contend with, but Kliff’s able to scale, er, cliffs just like Link in Breath of the Wild, allowing for a fantastic sense of freedom.
The only obstacle that stands in the way of this freedom is the fact that some locations are meaningless unless you’re guided there by a quest — and there are hundreds of quests.
The vast majority of these tasks would seem right at home in a stereotypical MMO; busywork back-and-forths that are only bearable because of how lived-in the surrounding world feels.
And this is where Crimson Desert starts taking the p*ss. Completing these mundane quests nets you additional inventory space, and you’re really going to need it.
Every individual item — except stuff that can stack, like arrows — takes up one slot in your inventory, and it’s a nightmare. Pick up a bounty poster? That’s a slot. Capture an insect by mistake? That’s a slot. Loot multiple items from a single slain bandit because there’s no way to filter what you’re picking up? That’s every slot you’ve got left.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the inventory was easy to manage, but it’s just rows and rows of junk. Grouping items into categories certainly helps, but then you’re clicking through two menus instead of one, and the second’s just a vertical line of icons.
In short, Crimson Desert doesn’t know what ‘quality of life’ means. There are menus buried inside of menus, parallel to other menus that you can’t access because you’re not on the right tab, but closing the current tab will take you back three screens.
This is a game that feels like it’s in early access with regards to interfacing. It’s completely caked in the kind of convoluted menu and control layouts that would be very quickly reworked based on player feedback.
But even with all of these little frustrations nagging us at almost every turn, we couldn’t stop playing Crimson Desert. Hell, we couldn’t stop thinking about it. If you can muscle past its litany of baffling design decisions, it can be like living a second life.
The depth is insane; you can spend hours just hunting, fishing, gathering, improving your base of operations, and taking advantage of a trade economy to rack up ridiculous amounts of dosh. The scope for freeform content borders on ludicrous — and that’s without mentioning the myriad minigames, or the full-blown crime system that lets you hijack caravans and rob banks.
The thing is, so much of this stuff is barely even explained. You’ll get a quick tutorial pop-up when you first check something out and that’s your lot. It’s genuinely mind-blowing to stumble across entire gameplay systems that some players will never even know exist.
And to an extent, that perspective also applies to combat. On a surface level, the action is pretty standard, built around light and heavy attacks, blocks, dodges, and well-timed parries. But it only takes one good look at the skill tree to realise just how batsh*t things can get.
Kliff isn’t just a swordsman — he’s a pro wrestler and, eventually, an elementally-charged superhero. You won’t know it until you’ve tried it, but being able to clothesline or suplex an enemy in between sword slashes is genius combat design.
The learning curve is quite steep; there are loads of button combinations to commit to memory if you want to unlock Kliff’s full potential, but boy is it a satisfying process.
It’s honestly hard to think of a decent comparison for the combat as a whole. There’s a bit of modern Assassin’s Creed in there with contextual moves and finishers, but there’s obviously way more mechanical depth on offer.
Kliff kind of magnetises towards foes, so it doesn’t feel like a full-on action outing like Devil May Cry — but the scope for player expression is certainly similar. We suppose, like much of the game that surrounds it, combat is essentially a hodgepodge of existing ideas that somehow ends up feeling fairly unique.
Many of the game’s encounters actually revolve around fighting large groups, which is an uncommon approach in itself. Basic opponents will fall with just a few swings of your blade, and so the challenge is derived from keeping your numerous aggressors at a manageable distance.
But it gets to a point where Kliff’s skills outweigh said challenge by a considerable margin, leading to a serious power fantasy when dealing with common thugs, soldiers, or beasts.
That’s fine by us because there’s a great sense of progression as you work through skill trees; you can even outright learn new techniques by watching enemies use them against you, which is an amazing incentive to get out into the world and explore its farthest reaches.
Plenty of players will hit a roadblock with battle, however, when they’re pitted against one of the game’s many bosses. Kliff might as well be in a Dynasty Warriors title when he’s putting grunts to the sword, but the dynamic can shift dramatically when a big baddie comes along.
Indeed, there are some major difficulty spikes at play here, and with no indication of how strong an opponent actually is — there’s no fundamental levelling system, just equipment stats — you may find yourself running straight into a brick wall on more than one occasion.
For what it’s worth, some of these boss fights are spectacular, but they can almost feel like they’re part of a completely different game due to their sudden demand for skill-based intensity. It’s jarring to go from mowing down tens of bandits like they’re nothing, only to spend every health-restoring item you have in order to tank your way through a surprise boss.
To be clear, we don’t think Crimson Desert is a brutally difficult game — it’s just in desperate need of some signposting every now and again. The open world’s more than expansive enough to accommodate an Elden Ring-style approach where you can return to a roadblock once you’ve geared up, but prior warning would still make a massive difference; the recommended levels attached to quests in The Witcher 3 immediately come to mind.
So, again, we’re prepared to look beyond Crimson Desert’s numerous flaws because of what it offers as an immersive open world — but one part of the experience that we can’t overlook is its technical performance on PS5 and, to a lesser extent, PS5 Pro.
We’ve tested the game on both consoles and the difference is largely night and day. On base PS5, at the time of writing, you’ve got two options.
The first is a performance mode that’s crippled by rampant screen tearing, awful frame rate fluctuations, and an extremely fuzzy 1080p resolution. The second is a 30 frames-per-second quality mode that’s more stable in general, but 30fps isn’t ideal for such an action-heavy title, and even with the boosted resolution, visuals can still appear muddy thanks to low quality texture work.
It’s rough to say the least, and the reality is that it’s simply not good enough; potential players shouldn’t be pushed towards buying a PS5 Pro just because the latest open world game runs like crap on base hardware.
As alluded, the Pro itself handles Crimson Desert far better. Frame rates are much smoother across the board — especially with v-sync enabled — and the system’s new-look PSSR upscaler can work wonders on details out in the open world.
But even the Pro has to deal with a range of technical issues. For one, pop-in is constant when traversing the wilds; foliage snaps into existence all the time, and the game’s dynamic lighting can cause problems in the middle distance, resulting in noticeable shadow flickering.
Interiors are the worst, though. PSSR basically sh*ts the bed whenever you’re inside a building, as it attempts to reconstruct light and shadow details against various wall textures. This leads to some horrible artifacting and distractingly unnatural lighting; even character models can be given an ugly metallic sheen, indicating that something’s seriously wrong with how the upscaler’s being utilised.
The real kicker, though, is that the frame rate can still crumble on PS5 Pro depending on the in-game location. Large enemy hideouts, for example, can see frames plummet to sub-20 levels as you fight for your life. Dense cities are stuck with a similar issue, as the increased CPU load clearly becomes a problem.
Crimson Desert is a monstrously ambitious open world game — we get that — but these performance woes need to be straightened out before we can recommend the title to anyone who isn’t totally up to speed on what they’re getting into.
It all goes back to what we were saying about this feeling like an early access release. Crimson Desert could be outstanding, but there are so many — so many — aspects of the experience that can, and absolutely should, be improved upon.
As it stands, we’ve been hit with yet another highly anticipated PS5 game that requires post-release support to reach its potential. Buyers deserve better — it’s as simple as that.
