For how wildly vast and ambitious Crimson Desert is… its controls kinda suck. They’re clunky, awkward, and exist in a game where there are dozens of different inputs and combinations to do any manner of things. You’ll realise that almost instantly when the game asks you to perform Blinding Flash during the intro.
And hey, I know we’re PC Gamer. Mouse and keyboard is absolutely my favourite way to play most games, despite having grown up for 25 years as a console enjoyer. But you owe it to yourself to play Crimson Desert on a pad, if you own one.
(Image credit: Pearl Abyss)
Controller play isn’t perfect, either, mind. All of those inputs have to be bound to a much smaller number of buttons. Yes, there is a 50% chance you will jump instead of picking up an item or talking to somebody. You will accidentally melee your horse a bunch of times instead of mounting it because for some reason it is a different button to get on and off your steed. You might even accidentally unleash a flurry of attacks instead of initiating Blinding Flash.
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But that containment is also good, in my opinion. At least when a boss is knocking off half your health in a single hit, the binding to quickly heal up with some food is right there, on the d-pad. On a keyboard? You’re gonna have to reach those fingers sky-high all the way up to F3. Yeah.
There’s also the bizarre choice to bind sprinting, either as Kliff or on your horse, to Shift. For some reason sprinting with Kliff only requires a couple taps before he starts running, but your noble steed will need you to constantly hammer that Shift key to keep up the pace. You know what also happens if you rapidly hit Shift? Sticky keys, baby. If that’s something you have enabled on your PC, it’s not gonna mesh very well with Crimson Desert’s default keyboard bindings. It will also destroy your pinky over the course of a multi-hundred-hour action RPG, as our guide writer, Sean Martin, unwittingly discovered.
(Image credit: Pearl Abyss)
In a game where you’re constantly dancing around, doing dozens of different attacks and switching weapons (and possibly even armour) on the fly, I don’t want my fingers to be frantically dancing around the keyboard to hit all the inputs. I suffered through too many hours of that in Final Fantasy 14 before I finally gave in and coughed up the money for an MMO mouse.
The one thing I will hand to keyboard controls in Crimson Desert is that you can rebind them to suit your preferences. An option frustratingly not actually available on a controller—not natively in-game, anyway.
But even for that one-up, I still think controller is absolutely the way to go in this game, provided you’re not willing to redesign Crimson Desert’s control system yourself. Hell, it’s literally what Steam recommends you play with when you boot the game up for the first time. Listen to Steam. Even if you never normally do, let this be the one time that little controller pop-up steers you in the right direction.
