Alec Newman, the actor who plays Crimson Desert protagonist Kliff, has discussed his work on the game, and revealed how the story and characters changed significantly during development.
In an interview with Skill Up’s Friends Per Second Podcast, (via twiv) Newman, who is no stranger to video game roles having played Cameron “Caz” McLeary in Still Wakes the Deep and Adam Smasher in Cyberpunk 2077, said he worked on Crimson Desert for five years, “recording various iterations of this character at various stages of development for ages.”
For the first year-and-a-half of development, Crimson Desert was just a demo, as far as he knew. It wasn’t until nearly two years into recording that he was told that the work would begin in earnest. “I went, ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!’ So it was, in terms of recording, the gift that really did keep on giving,” he said.
This is in keeping with what we know of the development of Crimson Desert, which began life as an MMORPG prequel to Pearl Abyss’s Black Desert Online. It eventually became a single-player open world action role-playing game, with the narrative coming into focus along the way.
“With this project it was interesting because they kind of… I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel,” Newman continued. “You know, various characters and, he’s from this faction and he’s from that faction. And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
Newman revealed that Kliff was called Macduff for quite a large chunk of his time spent recording for the game. And when Pearl Abyss settled on Kliff, Newman starting banging the story drum.
“When Kliff stopped being Macduff, which was a considerable amount of time into the recording of this, once they settled on Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could,” he said.
“I have to be honest, I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer with a certain type of game. I’m glad I fought for that stuff because, you can tell when you read the reviews for the game that’s come out. You can tell when you speak to people. I spoke to some people today actually who are playing it and loving it. And whilst they love some of the voice acting and the characterization, the boon of this game is clearly the size of the open world. And the fact that you can pick up a cat.
“That is to do with, I feel, the preferences of the developers and the people who wrote the scripts for these games, which kept changing. So at various stages it felt very much like making a TV series where they kept moving the focus. And in fact it’s not a secret. If you look at the way that Crimson Desert came into being, they did move things around.”
Newman continued by talking about what he called a “bridge point” in development. “After a while, you know, there’s only so far you can go with him [Kliff] kind of being… not flat, but kind of stoic. Now, I know that 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. So what’s been rewarding is that as people have played through over a 100 hours, they’ve found bits of Kliff that do speak of something more emotional sometimes.
“The whole Greymanes thing, after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate. This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. I think that’s the main story strand of the game, or the only story strand of the game when you begin it.
“And so that was the bridge point. 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.’ So we brought it in gradually and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out.
“But I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.”
This will all make sense to anyone who’s played Crimson Desert, whose story has become the subject of criticism. While some players are perfectly happy treating Crimson Desert as more of a sandbox game than a story-driven adventure, most agree that the actual plot, storyline, and characters leave a lot to be desired. Indeed, part of the discussion around Crimson Desert’s storyline revolves around main character Kliff, who many have said lacks personality.
Last week, Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young agreed that Crimson Desert’s story could have been better, saying: “I sympathize to some extent with the disappointment users feel regarding the story. I think it would have been nice if we could have done a better job with it. The production team tried to make up for the shortcomings in the remaining time, but ultimately, we focused on strengthening the gameplay, which is what we do best.”
Despite all this, Crimson Desert is a monster hit having already sold 3 million copies. And Alec Newman is already seeing players’ opinion of Kliff evolve as they spend more time with him.
“And my hope for the game is — it seems to be happening — as people spend more time with Kliff and they spend more time in the game and in the world, they kind of live in that level of his existence,” he said.
“I’ve been reading and hearing a lot of people going, ‘I didn’t know what the hell this was when I played it, the first eight, 10 hours, and now I’m 200 hours in and I can’t turn it off.’”
If you’re jumping into Crimson Desert’s huge open world, we recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
