Crimson Desert is finally here! I have been following development for a while now and am so happy to get my sweaty mitts on it, to coin a phrase. Developed and published by Pearl Abyss, who also released the excellent MMO Black Desert Online a few years back, which is still as popular today as it was on release.
The story itself is REALLY weird. Kliff of the Greymanes (Wolves) gets a blade run across his throat and is then stabbed a good few times and thrown off a cliff by the leader of an evil bunch of similar mercenaries, The Bears. This is following what is essentially a combat tutorial teaching you the ins and outs of blocking and basic attacks. After being murdered, you wake up in the abyss, which serves as a small tutorial section teaching you about some of the game mechanics. You are guided to the local town of Hernand by a kind soul who finds you beside a river after waking up. From there, you will venture into a sewer to speak to someone and then help some locals so you can get into the castle after getting the correct attire to go to the abyss and meet another character, the white witch. Other than that, you are given some land to build a new camp, which is granted after completing tasks for the locals and the noble houses (sounds very Game of Thrones!). From here, you will start finding the survivors of the scattered Greymanes to rebuild and get revenge on The Bears. After just shy of 30 hours, that is where I am at, and none the wiser of the bigger picture or the relevance of the abyss….
So what we have is essentially a single-player action-adventure in a vast, sprawling MMO-style world. You cannot really call it an RPG as such, as it is more like a mash-up of genre greats like Dragon’s Dogma, Shadow of Mordor, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Combat sees you locking on or switching between enemies using the RB for standard attack and RT for heavy. LB is either dual-wield second weapon or shield, and LT is aiming with your bow. The combat flows freely like the Middle-Earth games and the Batman Arkham games, right down to how Kliff finishes enemies off. There are options for the usual gamut of single-handed weapons, as well as spears and longswords, and you also have the option of just using your fists and doing various moves like drop kicks and flying knees, which look like they have been taken directly from WWE!
You get a white bar beside the minimap in the bottom-left corner, and when that fills up, you get an abyss artefact. This fills up from combat and doing deeds round the provinces, but it literally just serves the purpose of getting the artefacts, which you will then spend on a skill tree upgrading attacks and stamina-based stuff or spirit, which is things like the force palm or upgrading health and the things around the gauntlet you can use to grab and move stuff about, etc. Adding points adds new attacks to both weapons and melee (of your choosing), adds abilities to the gauntlet where you can use it for traversal as well as puzzles, and makes spirit attacks more powerful and so on.
As well as the white bar, you will also find artefacts out and about in the world. Some can just be simply taken from plinths, which also serve as a fast-travel point. Some have a puzzle which grants the artefact after completion, or they will have a challenge associated with them, like taking out enemies with a shield bash as an example or some specific attack type, or timed in taking out a number of enemies, and so on. Once a challenge is completed, the artefact opens and can be used to unlock skills. In addition to this, you can also learn skills from seeing enemies and characters perform them in the open world. It is very intuitive and quite handy, as if you look on the skill trees, you will see it tells you which skills can be unlocked through exploration or watching an enemy, so you can avoid using artefacts if it is something you aren’t in a rush to learn.
The world-building is absolutely superb. Granted, like I already mentioned, I haven’t a clue what is actually going on and if there is a huge overarching story outside of rebuilding the Greymanes and getting revenge on The Bears. No idea what the abyss is, except it has something to do with Kliff being brought back to life! So the world-building is where it is at, especially getting past the first few hours of play.
You have numerous factions, guilds, houses, and groups scattered throughout the world. Once meeting them, you will get a faction’s entry under your journal. One of the early houses tasks you with bringing in outlaws, who you will chase down and tackle, give them a bit of a slap about, then sling over your shoulder to walk them back in, or if a bit further out, drop them onto your horse and take them back in. I do feel there really needs to be more areas to drop captured criminals off instead of having to traverse half the province to return to the opening town (may come in one of the many patches released every few days!). Another house is having problems with the Bleed Bandits Clan, so you are set the task of liberating first the quarry and then other key areas to release their grip. Then you have the Goldleaf merchants, who are having a problem with who is running them, bringing their guild into disrepute, so you are tasked with investigation and locating the troublemaker and taking them out so that Shakatu can take over and bring things back in line. The fairy folk in the forest need help retrieving an item from the top of a walking tree (no, it isn’t an Ent!).
All these stories are voiced and fully fleshed out, culminating with a boss fight usually. So yeah, the main story may be a bit lacklustre, but everything else is directly on point and making the world feel alive. All these stories also loosely tie in to what you are doing, and you gain fame and folk get to know of your deeds. There have been so many times where I have been heading to a quest objective and noticed a building, cave, or some sort of landmark and just have to investigate, as it is so intriguing. I kinda feel like DeeDee on Dexter’s Laboratory – oooooh, what does this button do? But it is oooooh, just what is that, and my mind is on that instead of the objective I was proactively tracking!
The world of Pywel is absolutely stunning, and the vistas you will see when up high or just taking the time to have a look about never cease to amaze. Buildings and towns that you see in the distance can be visited, and during the night will be lit up with a warm glow. So, as well as the day-and-night cycle, you have weather ranging from snow in the mountains, heavy rain which will leave puddles in areas with no drainage in towns, and if you happen to be in a forest when it is windy, you get leaves swirling about in the air. On launch, performance was a bit hit and miss on PC, with random spikes and drops in framerate and a weird shimmering around objects and characters, especially when using DLSS or FSR. Thankfully, Pearl Abyss have released numerous patches to address issues and also taken community feedback onboard.
The controls were overly convoluted initially, which they have revamped, and literally now, with a patch launched within the last 24 hours, the original controls are back in for those who want to use them. Loading times used to be a few minutes staring into a white background, which has been optimised to less than a minute. A few more legendary mounts have been added to summonable companions, all the graphics issues on PC have been fixed, personal storage has been added so you can offload items as inventory space was and still can be a bit tight, the option to hide headgear like in the more recent Assassins Creed games has been added, and so much more. It is quite different from when I first played it on launch! There have been so many tweaks and fixes; understandably, I cannot list them all here, so you will need to go check out the patches on the official site or Steam forums.
So, 30 hours in and not even out of the opening area, and I feel like this review is doing a disservice to the game and developers, but two weeks after release, I NEED to get this done! The game world is absolutely huge, and there is so much of interest going on round every corner. You can see Pearl Abyss truly love what they are doing and have crafted a world that will have you hooked if you can get past the first 10 hours or so.
Performance even from day 1 has been pretty much on point with proper optimisation done by the developers. I have upgraded my RTX 4070 to a Radeon RX 9070XT, and both cards have performed really well even without using frame gen or upscaling at 1440p with Cinematic preset, Ray Tracing on but Ray Reconstruction off. VRAM usage hasn’t gone above 6GB, and running native resolution on the RTX 4070, I was hovering around the 60fps mark and on the 9070XT around 100fps. Turning on DLSS 4.5 and using Native AA with 2x frame gen saw a stable average of 100fps, and doing the same with the 9070XT using FSR 4.1, Native AA, and 2x frame gen saw a stable average of 160fps. This is running with an AM4 Ryzen 5700x, 32GB DDR4, and installed on a Crucial 3D NAND SATA SSD, so you can see Pearl Abyss have really put work into getting this game scaling and running on numerous systems from lower end right up to high end.
Overall, Crimson Desert is an absolute masterclass in open-world design. Excellent fleshed-out stories outside the main storyline and an interesting, vibrant world make you want to just explore and take it all in. I can see me still playing this in 6 months’ time with hundreds of hours on the clock.
If you enjoy open-world fantasy-styled games, you NEED to purchase Crimson Desert right now!
Thanks to our friends at Pearl Abyss for the review code.
Crimson Desert Remastered is out now on PC / Steam and the digital stores for Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and PS5.
Important info:
- Developer: Pearl Abyss
- Publisher: Pearl Abyss
- Players: Single player, with no online interaction
Crimson Desert – Launch Trailer
FINAL SCORES:
GRAPHICS
SOUND
GAMEPLAY
ENJOYMENT9
8.5
8.5
9OVERALL 9
Retro at heart and lover of all things ’80s, especially the computers, the music and the awesome movies and TV shows! Crazy huge retro gaming collection spanning the ’80s and ’90s with hundreds of tapes, discs and carts for various machines on top of a 600+ strong Steam library that is ever-growing. No I am not a serial hoarder, just a dedicated retro gamer!