10 Reasons Crimson Desert Could Change what Players Expect from Now On

2 hours ago 2

Published Apr 1, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT

Adam is a lifelong gamer who enjoys RPGs, action adventure games and a healthy helping of VR to boot. He has written for countless sites in the gaming medium, and you can find him playing the newest souls-like or JRPG.

Open-world games have undergone several makeovers throughout the years, but none have seemed to be as drastically overhauled as what Crimson Desert has done.

It's taken the idea of an open world game to heights that haven't been reached previously, and in the process, has started some interesting conversations on what an open world game should actually look like. It's both enormous in scale and packed with content to support such a size, and while it's not without its faults, it has set a new standard of sorts when it comes to the genre.

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When things blow up, you want to see bits go flying.

The tides have now changed, and going forward, players may expect some hard-to-deliver features in open-world games from now on.

10 Base Progression

See the Improvements

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The camp in Crimson Desert is among the best in gaming. What starts out as just a few tents will grow as you do more and more camp quests into its own little town of sorts. So many games have a home base, but so few actually do anything interesting with it.

Let's take Red Dead Redemption 2, for instance. It's a great game for sure, but its home base, while it shifts throughout the game, never feels like it's getting all that much different. Crimson Desert constantly rewards your adventures to expand the camp with things like cooking ability, weapon smithing, character customization, pets, livestock, and so much more.

It's a game within itself, building up the camp, and someone who put hours into improving it will have a far more functional camp than the person who brushed off those as meaningless side quests. The way Crimson Desert implements this is brilliant, and it's going to be a must in open-world games going forward that their home bases aren't just static throughout the game, but locations that can grow and change based upon what you do.

9 That Big Fight Feel

Strength in Numbers

It's no secret that Crimson Desert has a ton of enemies to fight, but where they do this best is during the castle siege missions and some side quests as well. So many open-world games claim to be setting up these massive battles, and then when push comes to shove, it's a bunch of small skirmishes here and there, and the most impressive stuff takes place during a cutscene.

Examples of this are games like Final Fantasy 16, The Witcher 3, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. All have these scenes where some massive battle is going on, but it's sadly in the background, and you're just fighting small pockets of enemies during those fights. Crimson Desert puts its money where its mouth is. If there is a massive battle going on, you're in it, you see it, you feel the scale, you feel the chaos of a legitimate war.

From now on, if you're telling players they're in a war, you better darn well prove it. No more God of War: Ragnarok, where the biggest battle of the game ends in the blink of an eye.

8 It's Okay if there is Nothing to Find

Sometimes Things are Just There

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This one will be divisive, but hear me out. Games of the past like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and others consistently give you something unique to find when you come upon a new town or settlement. While that is awesome, it feels a little bit immersion-breaking to me.

In Crimson Desert, there are a ton of side quests to perform, but most of the time, it's by legitimate employers; you're working for your coin for these big, powerful factions. It makes sense. What doesn't make sense is when I happen upon this random town and some woman says "My husband is on fire, can you put him out?" Obviously that quest sounds amazing, but you get the idea; it just doesn't feel natural.

There have been several times in this game where I found a town or a settlement and people are just living. Heck, I found a circus in Demensis, and it was just that. A circus I could watch people hanging out at and playing games and performances. There was no quest. I found a pretty unique shield, but other than that? It was just there, and there was something beautiful about that. Open world games from now on should let their worlds live on their own a little bit, as not everything has to serve my adventure.

7 Cool Gadgets with Multiple Uses

Don't Limit Your Vision

I think one of the best parts of Crimson Desert is how the unique magic abilities are used both in puzzle solving and combat. The only game in the genre that really does this are the newer Legend of Zelda games. Too often, open-world games will give you a tool to use that is just a tool and nothing else. In Crimson Desert, a tool is a weapon, and it's up to you how to implement it.

It makes sense, as most of the time in these games, the tools seem just as dangerous (if not more so) than the weapons themselves, so no wonder Crimson Desert decided to implement them in that way. Axiom Force is a great example, as plenty of games give you a grappling hook to use, but very few actually let you use it during combat. I think players will demand this type of gameplay flexibility going forward in the open world genre.

6 The Mounted

Variety in Your Ride

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While it's been a mainstay of the MMO world for a long time now, open world games generally don't give you the best variety when it comes to your ride. Think of classics in the genre like The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2. You've got a horse and...a horse. Sometimes it's a few kinds of horses, but generally, horseback is the move. Not anymore. Crimson Desert says to heck with convention and gives you a horse, a bear, a wolf, a dragon, a mech, and more. I'm not even sure if all the mounts have been found yet or not.

It's going to be the norm in open world games from now on, as Crimson Desert has provided so much variety in the mounts, not only in the look, but the speed and the handling all change depending on what you're riding. It's just endlessly immersive, and so darn cool. It's something that is going to be on the wish list for open world players from now on.

5 Show Us How You Work

Watch the Mission Unfold

There are a few open-world games that use a system where your comrades go and complete missions for you for generally some kind of reward. Metal Gear Solid V comes to mind, as does Dragon Age: Inquisition, and in Crimson Desert, there is a similar system. However, there is one big change here. If you travel to the locations that you're sending your allies on missions to, you can actually find them doing the mission they've been set out on.

That means you can find them building houses, helping locals, or whatever the mission entails. It's a wild amount of detail that brings both your companions and the world itself to life in a way other games don't really do. This is a somewhat niche trope, but I've noticed more games using it of late, and if you're following in Crimson Desert's footsteps, you better be ready to show your work because the new king of the castle said so.

4 Fly You Fools

Take to the Skies

Whether it makes sense in the game or not, flying is just fun as heck to do in video games, and thanks to a recent patch for Crimson Desert, it's more viable than it was at launch by a long shot. You can now effortlessly soar throughout the beautiful plains and forests of the game, and it's one of the more thrilling ways to explore the world. This is going to be a problem for future open world games, especially if they have a modicum of sci-fi in their bones.

"How come we can't fly?" is going to be a question hot on the Reddit posts in the years following the release of Crimson Desert simply because the flying is just so darn fun in this game. Crimson Desert managed to make an everything bagel of an open world game, and consequently, its success will now require the kitchen sink approach as well. Get ready to fly, people. We're going to be seeing it a whole lot more coming soon.

3 Great Combat

10 for Fighting

There is a pretty rough expectation for open-world games when it comes to combat these days. While there are outliers such as Ghost of Tsushima or say, Rise of the Ronin, generally, the open world RPGs don't have the best combat. Take it from a die-hard Witcher 3 fan; I can only really play that game with mods these days because of how outdated the combat feels. That's where Crimson Desert changes the game. The combat here is simply fantastic. It's a power fantasy on a Musou game scale while still feeling weighty, and having incredible move variety as well.

You can effortlessly drop kick an enemy, use a grappling hook to yank them towards you, spike them into the turf, follow that up with an elbow drop, and then pick them up and hurl them off a cliff. That's an average combo in this game. We've become too used to limited combos, a stamina meter potentially limiting the fun, and other strange combat choices that make fighting less than ideal. Here? I relish every opportunity to fight.

The skill tree isn't full of random percentage boosts, it's full of completely new techniques, giving you a real sense of progression feeling that is missing in games of this sort. For comparison's sake, in The Witcher 3, you learn two new sword techniques in the entire game. Two. Here? You've got about five moves in the first hour, and from there, they only get more elaborate and interesting to unlock. Combat in open world games is now officially cool.

2 Show, Don't Tell

The Magic of Discovery

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I'll admit, I feel incredibly stupid while playing Crimson Desert. There are puzzles on top of puzzles where I just short circuit and eventually have to look up the solution online. However, the times when I manage to nail it on my own? Pure gaming bliss.

And it's not just puzzles that this game has you figuring out, but really, the wealth of its secrets are some of the most obscure and well-hidden things imaginable. It's a veritable goldmine for those who have a keen eye and explore as much as possible, and the best part about it is there is nary a map marker in sight.

You'll have a few question marks on the map pointing you to places of interest, but never really the items of interest. How you find those and what you ultimately unlock in that area is based on your knowledge alone. It's a huge contrast to the open world checklists that have become the norm over the past few years, and, much like Elden Ring before it, Crimson Desert has made us reconsider what an open world should and needs to be.

1 Sir, Did You Just Hit Me with a Tree?

Yup, Sure Did

While I do wish Crimson Desert embraced this aspect a bit further, the environmental interaction in this game is really impressive. The most hilarious one is obviously Kliff's ability to cut down a tree and then crush someone with it, but it doesn't stop there. You can chuck enemies into boxes, destroy archer towers with your basic weapons, and also do things like opening locked gates via your magic abilities. It's an awesome addition to the already great combat and makes combat even more varied.

This also serves mission structure, too, as you'll need to occasionally take down a camp of enemies, and in order to do that, you have to literally destroy the various structures set up around the area. This makes battles even more chaotic, and in the later missions, when absolute chaos is happening all around you, and structures are being blown to pieces left and right, you'll wish that every game from now on had the environmental destruction that Crimson Desert has in store.