Crimson Desert’s Patches Can’t Fix Its Biggest Issue

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Crimson Desert has suffered one thing of a rocky launch. Its huge open world, filled with alternative and versatile ingenious techniques, is spectacular, however its awkward controls, punishing problem spikes, and baffling strategy to stock administration burst the bubble of immense hype that had been constructed over years, resulting in “mixed” Steam reviews and an equally mixed critical reception. But there’s additionally no denying developer Pearl Abyss’ dedication to creating issues proper. Its response to participant suggestions has been extraordinary, delivering a number of the most extensive initial patch work that we’ve seen this era inside days of launch. It’s unclear if the event crew has needed to break their backs to do that, however their work has already paid dividends: consumer opinions on Steam have shifted into “very positive” territory, and the corporate’s inventory worth – which plummeted within the wake of uneven critic scores – has begun to bounce back.

All this in below every week. It’s the kind of factor that implies that Pearl Abyss didn’t simply chuck Crimson Desert into the world unfinished with the intent of utilizing gamers as beta testers for some form of stealth early entry launch – no one scrambles this difficult until it’s an emergency. Assuming that’s true, it could additionally imply that Pearl Abyss didn’t see the obvious points in Crimson Desert’s design – be {that a} results of poor inside testing, naive designers, or just not seeing the wooden for the bushes. Now it has an army of testers three million strong, many points will be recognized and stuck. But can all the pieces be mounted? Are these preliminary, profitable patches the groundwork for a comeback story akin to Cyberpunk 2077? I’m not so positive, as a result of Crimson Desert suffers from a lot deeper points that solely in depth genetic modification, not bandages, can repair.

Making a Difference

That’s to not say patches can’t do any heavy lifting. Crimson Desert’s latest patch notes are an extended checklist of small adjustments that make a major distinction – in actual fact, they’ve already confirmed genuinely transformative. The addition of extra quick journey factors has meaningfully altered the way you discover the world. Previously, the land of Pywel felt caught between two visions; areas needed to be travelled to manually in real-time, which urged an strategy just like Dragon’s Dogma or Grand Theft Auto – video games through which the journey is a key a part of the expertise, and any form of “teleportation” is achieved via in-world strategies like hailing a taxi. But there was additionally a scattering of oddly positioned quick journey factors, which pointed to one thing extra like Elden Ring, through which warping between found areas is a part of the world’s elementary material. The newly added quick journey factors – notably those in your base camp and Hernand’s castle-crowned metropolis – convey the play house extra consistent with typical open world conference, permitting you to skip mundane journeys to and from repeatedly visited areas.

That new base camp quick journey level hyperlinks to the following small-but-big change: a storage field. It’s considerably unbelievable {that a} sport so reliant on grinding crafting supplies didn’t have one within the first place, however there’s now a chest at your camp that you may dump all of your surplus ore, timber, and butchered animals into, relatively than continually carrying them in your particular person. Your private stock fills up extremely rapidly, even after you’ve considerably expanded it, so with the ability to warp again to camp, drop stuff off, after which get again to your journey with out a ton of strolling concerned is a major improve to your “quality of life.”

That storage box also helps with bosses – while the worst offenders have been nerfed, bosses still represent natural difficulty spikes and must be prepared for. Improved inventory management means it’s easier to keep up with the demands of the crafting system. It’s not a burden to grab that ore you just saw because you no longer have to spend five minutes working out what’s worth sacrificing from your unfit-for-purpose backpack. Combine that with the fact that you now don’t need to cook up a thousand bowls of soup to get through Kearush the Slayer and the need to put everything on hold to grind ahead of a boss is reduced.

The total result of all these small tweaks is that Crimson Desert now has more momentum. You get into the good stuff faster. And with a substantial change like that delivered in just a few days, it’s understandable if the idea of Crimson Desert seeing something of a Cyberpunk-style reappraisal within a matter of weeks has crossed your mind. If you already like Crimson Desert’s unique, friction-heavy approach and have been pushing through its flaws, I think there’s a genuine possibility that it could be a contender for your game of the year by the summer if it isn’t already. But if you’re more like me, who is intrigued by Crimson Desert but has struggled to connect with it, then I think the outlook is gloomier. Because there are things patches can’t fix. Things like writing, story, structure, and quest design.

Story Slog

The reason why Cyberpunk 2077 (and other games that launched in a rough state and went on to see big improvements, like No Man’s Sky and Owlcat’s Pathfinder and Warhammer 40k RPGs) were able to turn things around was that their problems could be tackled by building upon already good design fundamentals. From day one, Cyberpunk 2077 had fantastic writing and brilliant quests – its initial issues were predominantly rooted in tech and performance, and the later 2.0 overhaul was focused on RPG progression and character skills rather than the game’s campaign bedrock. Crimson Desert, on the other hand, has pretty poor quest design and campaign structure, only worsened by paper-thin characters and writing that’s either dull or barely coherent.

In that sense, Crimson Desert is more akin to Starfield, which is incidentally getting its own major update in a matter of days. Bethesda boss Todd Howard has already warned not to expect a “2.0” improve that can convert skeptics into believers, and that’s at the very least partly as a result of reality it could require a substantial change to each the marketing campaign and sport construction to satisfy these expectations. Bethesda is as an alternative centered on high quality of life enhancements and further story content material, relatively than overhauling the sequence of uninteresting missions that make up its unique marketing campaign, exhibiting simply how uncommon a turnaround of this type is in terms of single-player video games. Fixing that form of situation isn’t a case of patches or updates – it calls for a Final Fantasy 14-grade redesign, a factor that certainly won’t ever occur.

But why is Crimson Desert’s strategy to story and questing such an issue? The sport’s most ardent followers’ typical rebuttal to this situation is to not declare that these elements are literally good, however that it doesn’t matter that they’re dangerous. Games like Elden Ring and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild additionally lack compelling tales, they are saying, and but they weren’t criticised for it. Regardless of whether or not you agree with that (and for the document, I don’t), it’s not a lot concerning the high quality of the story, however the best way it’s built-in into the sport.

In Elden Ring and the trendy Zelda video games, story is the framing system that contextualizes your journey via their worlds. Become Elden Lord and uncover the secrets and techniques of the Shattering. Rescue Zelda and defeat Ganon. Beyond that, they’ve restricted influence on the best way you play – in Elden Ring, you’re solely barely following a plot line. But in Crimson Desert, story quests are the elemental spine of what you do. It is your guiding path via the sport, your major goal to finish. Cutscenes, conversations, and plot-driven quests are all frequent, obligatory elements of the expertise, akin to a sport like Red Dead Redemption.

These quests drive ahead your progress and dictate what you are able to do whenever you stray from the overwhelmed path. If you discover the world of your individual volition, quite a lot of the fantastic areas you uncover are nothing more than set dressing until you actually reach the quests that make use of them. And whereas there may be a lot of very cool issues you are able to do impartial of the principle quest, it by no means actually quantities to a real sandbox expertise like Valheim, the place the complete level is to dwell a life inside this digital world. Everything you do finally folds again into the principle quest – even if you happen to benefit from the grind of upgrading your weapons and equipment, it’s primarily all in help of defeating the marketing campaign’s hardest challenges.

All this implies the marketing campaign is much from elective, and thus the standard of its elements shouldn’t be a lot a thorn in Crimson Desert’s aspect, however a broadsword lodged in its backbone. You should endure actually horrible writing, contextless aims, repetitive quests, and rote plot factors hour after hour after hour. As of writing, you may nonetheless solely fast-forward via cutscenes relatively than skip them fully, however even when that’s patched, it doesn’t push the worst a part of the expertise to the periphery. You nonetheless have to interact with all of it to progress your journey via the world – exploration alone shouldn’t be sufficient.

No quantity of conventional patching goes to make Kliff’s journey attention-grabbing. And no conventional replace can wrench the marketing campaign out of Crimson Desert. Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, these points aren’t rooted in efficiency or glitches, however the core, artistic decisions set in stone years prior. As such, addressing them would require ripping out and changing nice chunks of the sport’s skeleton, relatively than patching up with a sequence of minor surgical procedures. And so whatever the many enhancements Pearl Abyss is certain to make via in depth fixes, it could possibly’t restore the elemental construction that has seen many gamers {and professional} critics pen conflicted and even detrimental opinions. Because to unlock Crimson Desert’s extra completed sides, you merely should dedicate hours to mediocrity.