Crimson Desert: First Impressions

Crimson Desert, so far, is a game that has a lot of potential if it can only get out of its own way to see it there.

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I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends for several years now. I'd known them well before this, and we have all gotten to know each other's likes and dislikes in that time. Most, if not all, of us play video games as well as our chosen TTRPG. While we all vary slightly in the types of games we like, most of us usually stay with your normal first-person shooters or role-playing games. When a couple of them in my group made the suggestion that I should try out Crimson Desert (despite what I was initially reading online), I went ahead and believed that this was probably a safe bet. After playing it for about 8 hours, I'm not so sure.

I'm going to try to go back and forth here from things I like and things I don't like or find frustrating. I don't want to bash this game and say that it is total garbage or that it isn't worth playing. I haven't played enough of it yet to really make that determination, at least for myself, yet.

Let's start this off on the right foot; Crimson Desert looks great. The world so far is vibrant, bright, and colorful in ways that a lot of games tend to stray from. Towns seem alive with people constantly doing their own thing, and while it may not seem "lived in" as much as it could, it does a good job of appearing like a living, breathing world. Foliage looks great as the breeze moves through both trees, grass, and flowers. The NPCs, enemies, and the character all animate well enough. Sure, there are some weird collision issues, but that comes with the territory of open-world games. While I was playing and got to a cliffside somewhere, I found myself slowly panning the camera around, just checking out the vast expanse of the map that I could see. It's a pretty game, to be sure.

Walking around the first couple of opening towns, people are chatting both with the player and with each other. Conversations that have true information for the player to gain quest info from appear as white or orange dots on the mini-map, letting you know that something is being said that should be made note of. Like most RPGs, there are "quest-givers" that will straight up tell you a thing to do or make that request, and there are folks just telling stories that, when overheard, the player can then choose to make that a quest as well. Nothing groundbreaking or new, but nice to have nonetheless.

Once quests are picked up, either through the story or ambient dialog in the city, those go into "faction" quests inside the journal. Navigating to this journal and finding these quests is frustrating. The menu system in Crimson Desert feels unnecessarily convoluted for the sake of being different. This goes for a lot of the controls as well. Buttons are tied to multiple actions depending on what the situation calls for. For example, the jump button or the act of jumping. In a neutral, no weapon in hand, scenario, you hold L1, aim your jump, then press the square button to jump in that direction. However, if the player is holding a weapon, say after they had just been in a fight, then this same combo will make the player jump statically in place, or if the movement joystick is pointed in a direction, the player will make an extremely short hop, and less of a jump. This creates scenarios where the player might be hopping around and failing to do a platforming section simply because they don't realize they have a weapon drawn.

The rest of the menu system, including how to get INTO the menu system, is weirdly complicated. If you press the "start button" (I honestly don't know what the actual button is called b/c I am old school and that's all it will ever be to me.) The menu, I believe, drops you back into whatever section of the menu you happened to be in last. If you HOLD the button, you can select between different sections of the menu to go to immediately. While this isn't a real problem, it does create a slight stutter in getting into the menu initially. It doesn't serve much of a purpose either because you can just as easily R1/R2, L1/L2 to get to whichever portion of the menu you want anyway. Again, it just seems like something that is the game getting in its own way. At least on PlayStation, the touchpad section of the controller is used exclusively for adjusting the camera position. Tapping it will cycle between drawn back third person, two much closer 3rd person cameras, and a 1st person view. In my opinion, it just seems like a waste of one of the more traditional buttons for the menu.

Once you are on a quest, there seems to be no shortage initially of things to do. Be that the main quest, which I think is just find your clan, or side quests that vary from the traditional "kill the bandits" and fetch quests, bounties, and such, to some other quests like helping a woman clean her chimney (not a euphemism) and finding some lost sheep.

Crimson Desert feels slightly different from most open-world games where you are told there is a gigantic world-ending badguy out there that could attack at any moment, while you go off and literally herd sheep. Possibly to its detriment, there seems to be no real impending doom you are meant to thwart. I honestly don't know what the story is, or is going to be. After the initial opening, the player is dumped into a world and let loose to go seemingly anywhere and do anything with no real direction. I can't decide if that is a bad thing or not.

Much to the same point, at least initially, the "skill tree" doesn't seem to serve a real purpose. At least as far as a traditional skill tree goes. Normally, the player would have to work their way across multiple sections of the skill tree to get to nodes that are more powerful and unlock new powers. In Crimson Desert, it seems like once you have the ability to upgrade, via "Abyss Artifacts" you get by leveling up or finding in the world, you can just kinda... do whatever. Also, when those skills are leveled up, you are taken out of the menu and shown the player in the world holding the artifact, and it kinda "melds" into their hand. Each and every time you level up. It's just a weird thing that I should be able to turn off because I don't need to see that animation after the 3rd or 4th level I do in a row.

Personally, I would say that the good parts of Crimson Desert are exceeding the, not necessarily bad, but irritating parts of the game. I'm going to stick with it and see how much further I can go before the scales of judgment tip the other way. I really and truly am trying to enjoy the game, but it's not making it easy.