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I've been playing this new rising star among games, called Crimson Desert, and while flawed, it's a impressive open world, of scale and magnitude I have not seen since Read Dead Redemption 2. I'm having a blast and wanted to share why. This is not a review, though. While I have been playing it for over 80 hours now, I still haven't really left the first region, out of five, so I have seen maybe 20-30% of the game.
I was tempted to start from things I don't like, but I really wanted to highlight the biggest strenghts of this game (which are many), so I'll go with that.
The Scale
This is probably the largest open world game I have ever played, the sheer size of it simply enormous. The number of diferent biomes (including completely different, technologically advanced regions I have yet to see) is astonishing. While with this world size, there are large swaths of world that are unhabited, but it's far from being empty. Very far from it.
Exploration
It's probably the most enjoyable game when it comes to exploration I have played since RDR2. The amount of places you can visit, number of secrets to be found, puzzles to be solved is unlike anything I have ever seen. There are spots you can just never thought you could enter (many require to use certain skills you would never thought of using), and when you do enter them, you could expect literally everything out there, including devs to troll you with a goose chase. There are few ways to travel. On foot, for those who want to explore slowly, looking under every rock, on mount (there are many mounts to be tamed in Crimson Desert, including some legendary animal, like wolves or bears and devs keep adding more with updates) or gliding (or basically flying using certain skills and having high Spirit and Stamina), for those who want to cover large distances fast. There is even a whole different world layer above the main continent, called The Abyss, which is more mystical and magical. The number of different items and gear to be found is impressive, and founding a new cool loking armor is a joy.
World immersion
While it's not as good as RDR2 or Cyperpunk 2077 when it comes to immersion, world does feel alive, people does have their own activities and it's fun to hang out in cities and villages. It's not the level of CDPR, Rockstar or Warhorse games, though. The biggest flaw are NPCs, but I'll get to that when I write about flaws.
Puzzle and secrets
While I'm usually not know for having the large dose of patience when it comes to solving puzzles, this is done immensly well in Crimson Desert and I'm actually thrilled each time I need to solve one. You have to think outside the box and literally every utility skill you have can be handy to solve them.
Visuals
A bit of a mixed bag. While the world, surroundings, locations look absolutely gorgeous (especially when devs fixed awful lighting that plagued the game in early builds), NPCS, execept maybe main protagonists doesn't look that good. It alomost look like Pearl Abyss' proprietary engine is not great for character models. But overall, the game looks stunning.
Combat
Another mixed bag. While cutting through thrash mobs (in hundreds in some locations) is fun, especially with many skills developed, boss fights are (so far) not that great. It's all about spamming health potions (in this game it's simply food). They lack a certain tactical elements, especially fans of soulslike games appreciate. I'm not soulslike games fan, but even for me, those fights could be better.
Controls
It's probably the game's aspect that is the most difficult to judge, because it has been improved drastically since release. The main difficulty is the sheer amount of skills, which require a large number of key/button combinations. I play on controller and it's sometimes hard to reach certain key combos and even remember them all. But I grew more and more accustomed to it and now it feels fluid.
Now, time to come to game's biggest flaw, and it's a massive one. It's big enough for me to not rate the game more than 9/10.
Story and narrative
It's bad, and bad is a massive understatement. I'm not sure if I have seen more lazy writing and worldbuilding. I'm 80h into a game and I have literally no clue what it's really about and what the hell is this world about. There is literally zero story and world exposition, there is no intro that would build the atmosphere, nothing, just some breadcrumbs. I knew it will be bad before I bought the game, so I set my mind to the right track before plunding into this world, but even with this mindset I was negatively surprised. And protagonist? This is without any doubt the dullest, the worst written and directed protagonist I have ever played with. I don't want to criticize voice actor, because he said he was very unhappy with how his character were written and directed, but this is cringe-level bad. It's the sole reason I cannot put this next to giant open world games like Read Dead Redeption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 or Ghost of Tsushima, as a whole package, as a game. But it's probably the best open world I have ever experience, in many cases surpassing even my beloved RDR2.
I wish devs didn't conciously dropped the ball on story and narrative in favor of perfecting gameplay. I would love to wait a year or to more for the release if this would mean having much better story and world building.
But overall, it's the most exhilarating gaming (from a pure gameplay and exploration perspective) experience I have had in years.
I will definitely share more about the game when I'm more deep into a story and visit other regions.
I was tempted to start from things I don't like, but I really wanted to highlight the biggest strenghts of this game (which are many), so I'll go with that.
The Scale
This is probably the largest open world game I have ever played, the sheer size of it simply enormous. The number of diferent biomes (including completely different, technologically advanced regions I have yet to see) is astonishing. While with this world size, there are large swaths of world that are unhabited, but it's far from being empty. Very far from it.
Exploration
It's probably the most enjoyable game when it comes to exploration I have played since RDR2. The amount of places you can visit, number of secrets to be found, puzzles to be solved is unlike anything I have ever seen. There are spots you can just never thought you could enter (many require to use certain skills you would never thought of using), and when you do enter them, you could expect literally everything out there, including devs to troll you with a goose chase. There are few ways to travel. On foot, for those who want to explore slowly, looking under every rock, on mount (there are many mounts to be tamed in Crimson Desert, including some legendary animal, like wolves or bears and devs keep adding more with updates) or gliding (or basically flying using certain skills and having high Spirit and Stamina), for those who want to cover large distances fast. There is even a whole different world layer above the main continent, called The Abyss, which is more mystical and magical. The number of different items and gear to be found is impressive, and founding a new cool loking armor is a joy.
World immersion
While it's not as good as RDR2 or Cyperpunk 2077 when it comes to immersion, world does feel alive, people does have their own activities and it's fun to hang out in cities and villages. It's not the level of CDPR, Rockstar or Warhorse games, though. The biggest flaw are NPCs, but I'll get to that when I write about flaws.
Puzzle and secrets
While I'm usually not know for having the large dose of patience when it comes to solving puzzles, this is done immensly well in Crimson Desert and I'm actually thrilled each time I need to solve one. You have to think outside the box and literally every utility skill you have can be handy to solve them.
Visuals
A bit of a mixed bag. While the world, surroundings, locations look absolutely gorgeous (especially when devs fixed awful lighting that plagued the game in early builds), NPCS, execept maybe main protagonists doesn't look that good. It alomost look like Pearl Abyss' proprietary engine is not great for character models. But overall, the game looks stunning.
Combat
Another mixed bag. While cutting through thrash mobs (in hundreds in some locations) is fun, especially with many skills developed, boss fights are (so far) not that great. It's all about spamming health potions (in this game it's simply food). They lack a certain tactical elements, especially fans of soulslike games appreciate. I'm not soulslike games fan, but even for me, those fights could be better.
Controls
It's probably the game's aspect that is the most difficult to judge, because it has been improved drastically since release. The main difficulty is the sheer amount of skills, which require a large number of key/button combinations. I play on controller and it's sometimes hard to reach certain key combos and even remember them all. But I grew more and more accustomed to it and now it feels fluid.
Now, time to come to game's biggest flaw, and it's a massive one. It's big enough for me to not rate the game more than 9/10.
Story and narrative
It's bad, and bad is a massive understatement. I'm not sure if I have seen more lazy writing and worldbuilding. I'm 80h into a game and I have literally no clue what it's really about and what the hell is this world about. There is literally zero story and world exposition, there is no intro that would build the atmosphere, nothing, just some breadcrumbs. I knew it will be bad before I bought the game, so I set my mind to the right track before plunding into this world, but even with this mindset I was negatively surprised. And protagonist? This is without any doubt the dullest, the worst written and directed protagonist I have ever played with. I don't want to criticize voice actor, because he said he was very unhappy with how his character were written and directed, but this is cringe-level bad. It's the sole reason I cannot put this next to giant open world games like Read Dead Redeption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 or Ghost of Tsushima, as a whole package, as a game. But it's probably the best open world I have ever experience, in many cases surpassing even my beloved RDR2.
I wish devs didn't conciously dropped the ball on story and narrative in favor of perfecting gameplay. I would love to wait a year or to more for the release if this would mean having much better story and world building.
But overall, it's the most exhilarating gaming (from a pure gameplay and exploration perspective) experience I have had in years.
I will definitely share more about the game when I'm more deep into a story and visit other regions.