Crimson Desert Has Pretty Rocks, But After 12 Hours Playing It, I Don’t Want To Go On

I don’t like Crimson Desert. At times, I think I actually hate it. After spending about a dozen hours with the newly released open-world RPG, I’m both impressed by its nearly photorealistic world and extremely uninterested in slogging through the content that resides inside it. But damn, it has some nice-looking rocks.

To be clear: This isn’t a full review or a comprehensive assessment of the game. I’m not pretending to have seen it all in those 12 hours. What I have played and seen hasn’t grabbed me, and I’m a person who loves to explore open worlds, even if I never have enough time to play all the games that feature them. Instead, this is me telling you where I’m at after playing Crimson Desert for a dozen hours on PS5 Pro.

Crimson Desert is (I think) a game about some noble warriors who are nearly wiped out by an evil tribe of bearskin-wearing maniacs who are trying to conquer the realm. After an action-packed intro and some odd moments hanging out with weird god-like beings who use nano-like tech/magic, you get dropped into the world to try to bring your warrior clan back together while also exploring a massive open world stuffed with more mechanics and ideas than a dozen AAA RPGs.

I say “I think” because the writing in Crimson Desert is messy and rarely very interesting, and cutscenes meander or focus on random details like a character’s injury for far longer than seems reasonable. As I met back up with my gang of noble heroes, I quickly found them all insufferable, bland, or in some cases both!

But who cares about any of that? The vast majority of people buying or thinking about playing Crimson Desert aren’t here for the narrative or the cutscenes. Even developer Pearl Abyss knows that, as you can fast-forward every cutscene like a teenager skipping around a movie for the action scenes. What you likely want to know is if Crimson Desert is an open-world sandbox worth investing 100+ hours into for the next few weeks. For me, the answer to that question is a simple “Nah.”

I have enjoyed very little of what’s on offer in this sandbox. Each new mechanic, like a helmet that can read past memories or the ability to manipulate objects using a magic grappling hook, is just another tool in a massive toolbox that I have to clunkily pull out over and over.

Over time, muscle memory has helped me shave seconds off of how long navigating the menus and inventory to do this takes, but I never forgot I was playing a game. I was always annoyingly conscious of the controller in my hand, never getting truly lost in the fantasy world of Pywel. In other words, because of how cumbersome interacting with the game is, I was always aware that I was playing it, rather than simply experiencing it. This was the case even when swinging swords and axes against baddies.

Fighting and flying

Combat in Crimson Desert is both overly complicated, with so many different combos and options, and also incredibly repetitive. Kliff, one of the playable characters in Crimson Desert, can block, dodge, parry, and deliver fast and heavy strikes. Mixing these together during combat is tricky, as Crimson Desert loves to toss a dozen enemies at you constantly, leading to moments in which you’ll get smacked around like a pinball.

Eventually, I figured out that all the fancy combos and tricks were a waste of time. Instead, I just held R1, and Kliff bounced from target to target, attacking non-stop until one person was dead, then hopping over to another enemy. It looked silly. It felt bad. But most of the time, it worked. For some reason, while doing this silly dance, enemies rarely attacked me, with the main exception being archers with bows that, like Kilff’s bow, might as well be firing Nerf darts for as little damage as they do. So I could mostly ignore them and hold R1 while Kilff killed 50 to 100 enemies (yes, some camps demand you clear out that many targets) automatically. Meanwhile, I checked my phone.

There’s so much more to Crimson Desert beyond the combat and bad writing, but none of it really has much depth, and much of it is buried beneath annoying controls and poorly designed menus. Fishing sucks. Using Kliff’s magic powers is a chore. Managing the inventory is a pain. One of the parts of Crimson Desert I liked, the ability to glide anywhere at any point, gets worse when the game lets you upgrade to add a double jump, and it uses the same button as gliding and 10 other mechanics. Now I’m never sure if I’ll jump once, twice, glide, start picking up an item, or perform some other action mapped to the same button.

Pretty rocks

So if you want fun combat, well-written dialogue, a cohesive game world that is rewarding and satisfying to explore, or a map that doesn’t crash your game when you open it, Crimson Desert isn’t for you. But if you are interested in gorgeous rocks and pretty rivers, well, right this way.

©Pearl Abyss / Kotaku

Crimson Desert has some of the best-looking rocks, cliffs, trees, rivers, and mountains I’ve seen in an open-world game. Looking at so many cliffs and valleys spread across a vast area in the middle of the day was genuinely stunning on a PS5 Pro plugged into a big, dumb 4K TV. Details are sharp and clean. Lighting is incredible, and when viewed in first-person, it can pass at a glance as a screenshot of a real place.

I often found myself not fast-traveling to places or even using my horse. Instead, I’d wander through the world of Crimson Desert and take it all in. It’s hard to believe how big this open world is while it contains so much detail. Trees react to attacks. Fires can be spotted miles away at night. Animals big and small crawl around every inch of it. I want to explore this world in VR. I want to live here. And hey, you can own a house in Crimson Desert, because of course you can, and that just makes me jealous. Why does boring stick-in-the-mud dummy Kliff and his lack of any personality get to live in a small, cozy cabin in this beautiful place, yet I’m stuck working a job and living in a suburb? I, too, yearn for pretty rocks and trees.

But pretty rocks aren’t enough for me. I need more than just a photorealistic world. And sadly, 12 hours in, that’s the best Crimson Desert has to offer me.

For those willing to put up with the game’s frustrating boss fights, wonky controls, and stiff movement that feels laggy at all times, there’s a lot of game here to play. I 100-percent guarantee you that there are going to be people who spend 200+ hours in this game, mastering its controls and experiencing something they’ll describe as incredible. I’ll believe them. For me, though, nothing is clicking here. I’m not sure how much more time I want to spend in this beautiful but forgettable open-world RPG, regardless of how pretty the rocks and trees might be.

Or maybe 10 updates from now, this will be a totally different game, and I’ll love it. At the very least, hopefully all the AI slop will be removed soon.