Crimson Desert's patches can’t fix the game’s real problem

Can the next patch fix the void, please?

It's been a month since Crimson Desert launched, and what an excruciating month it's been — for me, who has played this game for over a hundred hours, but also for the developers at Pearl Abyss, who've released about a dozen patches and hotfixes of varying shapes and sizes. As I moved deeper and deeper into the new-and-improved Pywel following my first impressions of Crimson Desert, I very much hoped it would cure my initial disappointment in the game, and to some extent, it did.

Many issues made my life hell in pre-release Crimson Desert: severely limited inventory space, no private storage, no menu shortcuts, and a painful lack of abyss nexus teleport waypoints at central locations such as the major towns and the Howling Hill camp, to name a few. All of these have now been addressed in recent mini-updates. The equally aggravating need to continuously tap the sprint button, the precise aiming requirement for lumbering, and the automatic use of valuable keys upon walking into a locked door can bother me no more. A few decades from now, I will tell young gamers that they don't know the meaning of "suffering" until they travel back in time to play Crimson Desert before its first few patches.

My favorite improvement arrived in patch 1.01.00, hidden at the bottom of a long list of content updates: Criminal behavior now only decreases your contribution level if the crime is witnessed by an NPC. I love a bit of realism and logic in my evil doings; it makes the felonies more immersive. A close second would be the addition of refinement token quest rewards, which reduce grinding time, followed by the tweaked archery contest difficulty (no more need to shoot faster than your shadow) and the starting point of the Witches' questline, which was moved to the early game. Remember the castle walls adorned with unsettling pictures of AI-generated monstrosities with detached limbs and distorted faces? Pearl Abyss got rid of those, too.

And so, as I moved deeper into Pywel alongside Pearl Abyss's faster-than-light patching, I became hopeful that my Crimson Desert experience might improve. One of the things I did to test that (while writing a ton of guides in the process) was to complete nearly every faction quest in Hernand. Unfortunately, the most memorable was the escort quest at the Vellua Fishing Village… Looking over my shoulder to see my suicidal charge loitering 20 paces behind me for half a bloody mile, refusing to move, inspired a renewed and exceptionally intense hatred for escort quests in my heart. Yes, I did eventually hoist him on my horse — but only when he finally agreed to hop on.

But buggy quests aren't Crimson Desert's main issue — they can (and undoubtedly will be) patched, after all. The real issue is that I just called the escort mission the most memorable Hernand faction quest, which means the rest are dreadfully boring. None of them offered a good story, an unexpected event, or fun gameplay. It was just an endless string of chores along the lines of "go there, talk to that person, grab that item, and come back," occasionally interrupted by "find this camp and defeat a few dozen enemies of the same type you've defeated before." A few patch notes can't open a thrilling mystery, insert a game-changing choice, or create a meaningful connection with an NPC just like that.

This experience cemented my conviction that Crimson Desert's questing truly is a lost cause for me (please, don't tell me to pour in another 100 hours to get to the good part), but I did come to enjoy some of the puzzles, especially when the controls became more responsive. Some were a bit simple (grab a tile, put it in a socket, repeat), and others suffered from design issues (think of platform puzzles that can be skipped with the most basic jumping and climbing skills), but most would challenge my brain. However, after completing most environmental and abyss-based puzzles in Hernand, along with a few more based in Demeniss and Pailune, the challenges became very repetitive; once you've cleared a few abysses and turned a few stone statues, you might as well skip the rest, as they won't be any different.

I encounter similar issues with exploration; yes, traveling through Crimson Desert has become more enjoyable now that Pearl Abyss added summonable mounts (I love my White Bear, though I feel terrible about having had to orphan its cubs to obtain it) and flying consumes less stamina, but there's still no motivation to travel. Besides basic quests, repetitive puzzles, and collectible items, what can I hope to find? The world of Pywel is impressively massive, and the viewing distance reaches really far, but what do I see? The vague contours of cliffs and trees. Grainy rocks. Perhaps a generic fantasy town. Spotting Demeniss in the distance was exciting, for a moment, but when I finally got close enough to get decent textures, there were no quests, no events, no remarkable NPCs or activities; just the same shops I'd seen in Hernand.

Thanks to the updates, I actually visit the Howling Hill camp between my travels now, but only to dump items. A hundred hours in, and I'm still not sure what the camp's for; do I just keep bringing wood and stones until the end of time? Perhaps grab a fetch quest or two while I'm there? What about my house? As I can't decorate it or add anything useful, it must take its rightful place on the list of Crimson Desert features that are just there for the sake of having a bazillion features. I've found no more depth in faction gameplay; if I liberate an area, it just means it's free of minor enemies, that's all. Helping factions is a task on a checklist, never a story- or gameplay-changing event.

The one area where Crimson Desert truly improved for me on a larger scale was in boss fights. With their HP reduced, my character's stamina boosted, and food offering more health recovery, combat is less about cooking ridiculous amounts of grilled meat and more about fighting. Having gone back to an early save file to fight Reed Devil again, the switch from button-mashing against enemy groups to fighting a single, powerful opponent is less extreme. Don't get me wrong; I do love a good boss battle, but anyone can win against Crimson Desert's bosses as long as they bring enough HP-recovery items. The fun part lies in testing combat abilities and learning the best ways to defeat the bosses, rather than the struggle to survive. If I have to pinpoint a single highlight in Crimson Desert, it would be the moment I discovered I could use Nature's Grasp to insta-kill major enemies by whacking them in the face with a tree trunk. That is the sort of shenanigan I'd hoped to find sprinkled throughout Pywel, rather than limited to the occasional boss fight.

My hope that time and updates would make me love Crimson Desert has, at last, been shattered. Maybe I should try again in a few years, when the story has been rewritten, Damiane and Oongka have come to serve a purpose, and Pywel has received a makeover to add unique characteristics. It's clear that Pearl Abyss listened to player complaints as they rolled out their updates. I do appreciate the control improvements, the bug fixes, the quality-of-life improvements, and the cool mounts, but to me, they make one thing painfully clear: I would much rather play a game full of minor flaws and bugs than a game that is, on a fundamental level, the blandest hodgepodge of open-world fantasy elements to have been released in the last year or so.