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| Here we go again... |
Crimson Desert has no right to be installed in my Steam library.
It is clunky, buggy, has terrible controls, a nonsensical story, and is full of baffling design decisions. It feels like a 10+ year old MMO shut down and, at the last second, the developers slapped together an offline single-player mode so players could still wander around the world one last time.
And somehow I'm loving it.
Also hating it.
Mostly both at the same time.
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| A beautiful game world |
With the MMO apocalypse seemingly underway between games like New World Aeternum closing and Ashes of Creation forever existing in a perpetual state of "ain't happening", I have been itching for an open-world fantasy game to disappear into. My normal gaming group is still fully locked into ARC Raiders, so I didn't really want to dive headfirst into another MMO solo. Crimson Desert kept popping up all over gaming news and social media, and after watching some gameplay videos it looked like it might scratch that open-world RPG itch even if it wasn't multiplayer.
So I bought it.
And after several hours with the game I completely understand why the reception has been all over the place.
People praising the visuals? Correct.
People praising the open world? Also correct.
People saying the story is nonsense? Extremely correct.
People complaining the controls feel like they were designed by aliens trying to approximate human behavior? Also very correct.
Crimson Desert is a fascinating mess.
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| I can't resist chopping down trees |
The game starts by immediately throwing you into a world that feels massive and alive, but also weirdly unfinished in places. Villages feel populated. NPCs wander around doing their own thing. There are tons of side activities like fishing, gathering, crafting, exploration, climbing, and random little interactions that make the world feel more like an MMO than a traditional single-player RPG.
Honestly, the game reminds me a lot of No Man's Sky in that way. Not because the gameplay is similar, but because the appeal comes from simply existing in the world and seeing what is over the next hill. The community feels hungry for games like this right now. Huge open worlds where exploration matters again instead of everything being reduced to fast travel markers and checklist objectives.
The thing Crimson Desert absolutely nails is giving you a world that feels worth wandering around in. There are villages to visit that aren't just combat hubs. Random caves. Weird little environmental puzzles. Mountain paths that clearly exist because someone on the development team wanted players to climb them.
And climbing in this game is actually pretty good.
Grappling, vaulting, and climbing all feel smooth enough that traversal becomes fun on its own. There is even this bizarre but amazing mechanic where holding Ctrl lets you precisely target jumps with your cursor. Instead of awkwardly lining up jumps manually, you can literally aim where you want to go and leap directly there.
I genuinely love this system.
Which is funny because almost every other control decision in the game feels completely insane.
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| Another amazing view |
The control problems start almost immediately. Early on you walk into a camp where every NPC interaction works normally: walk up and press the interact key. Simple enough. Except the main quest NPC has an invisible wall around him, so you can't actually walk up to him. Instead, you have to notice some tiny prompt in the corner telling you to press Ctrl plus another key to interact with him from a distance.
Why?
Why does this exist?
This bizarre inconsistency continues through the entire game. Sometimes you interact normally. Sometimes you need Ctrl. Sometimes you need to equip a random tool first. Sometimes you need to hold Ctrl while holding the tool while also aiming at the correct object while standing in the exact correct position under a full moon while Mercury is in retrograde. You will literally spend time on YouTube looking up solutions only to discover the answer was “equip the broom and hold Ctrl.”!!!
Combat controls are equally chaotic.
Some attacks require left click. Others require holding both mouse buttons simultaneously. Blocking is on Ctrl instead of right mouse button like basically every game made in the last twenty years. Outside of combat, Ctrl does completely different things, so there have been multiple moments where I got ambushed while accidentally pulling out my lantern instead of blocking.
And as far as I can tell, some of these controls can't even properly be remapped.
Even sprinting is weird. Instead of holding Shift to sprint, you repeatedly tap the key to maintain speed both on foot and on horseback. Maybe some people enjoy finger cardio while traveling across the map, but I immediately installed a mod to fix that nonsense. (Note: this was patched and changed after I wrote this post up so now it is hold to sprint as it should have been all along).
Which is another funny thing about Crimson Desert: this game made me a complete hypocrite.
I complained endlessly about Marathon's UI design, yet somehow here I am tolerating a UI that is significantly worse because the game underneath it is weirdly compelling. Normally a game loses me within five minutes if the controls feel bad. Crimson Desert somehow survives that test through sheer force of ambition.
Because underneath all the jank is a genuinely incredible open world.
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| An overview of a location from the map |
Progression is messy and unclear, but there is always something interesting nearby. The game doesn't focus exclusively on combat encounters the way many modern open-world games do. Sometimes you are just wandering through a village. Fishing. Gathering materials. Exploring ruins. Climbing mountains because they exist.
Then the game interrupts your fun with another cutscene.
And that might honestly be my biggest complaint of all.
This fantastic open-world sandbox keeps getting interrupted by a story I could not possibly care less about.
The story isn't just weak; it actively gets in the way of the game's best qualities. Early on I got stuck outside a castle because guards wouldn't let me enter without the proper clothes. The game technically gives you the required outfit through the main questline, but it was so poorly communicated that I ended up Googling the solution because I thought I had missed something.
That sort of thing happens constantly.
The game feels like it assumes you somehow already know how its systems work.
And yet despite all of this, somewhere around the Mathias fight, the game suddenly clicked for me.
I stopped trying to make Crimson Desert behave like a polished AAA RPG and started accepting it for the bizarre, over-complicated, awkward thing it actually is. Once I embraced the chaos, I started appreciating the game far more.
Because there really is something special here.
Not polished.
Not elegant.
Definitely not user friendly.
But special.
Crimson Desert feels like a giant ambitious RPG from an earlier era of gaming before every game was focus tested into safe mediocrity. It is overloaded with systems, mechanics, weird ideas, experimental controls, and questionable design decisions. Some of those ideas absolutely do not work.
But some of them really, really do.
And honestly, I think players are starving for games that swing this hard again even if they miss sometimes.
Crimson Desert is frustrating.
It is clunky.
It wastes your time.
It desperately needs quality-of-life improvements.
The UI is a disaster.
The controls are absurd.
The story constantly gets in the way.
And I cannot stop playing it.
This is easily the worst best game I've played in a long while.
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| The starting town that you spend a lot, and I mean a lot, of time in |
Note: this post was edited with the help of AI (ChatGPT). The thoughts are my own. The grammatical correctness and em dashes (—) are the AI.
