At certain moments while playing Crimson Desert, I find myself thinking: the folks at Pearl Abyss must have spent a lot of time with Red Dead Redemption 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
But then, not even a moment later, I wonder: have they actually ever played a game?
My first few hours with Crimson Desert have been a rollercoaster of emotions. I’m often impressed by its ambition and the flashes of quality it shows, but even more often I’m left staring at the screen, shaking my head, questioning how certain design decisions were made. Even more so, wondering how on earth no one in a Pearl Abyss meeting room raised their hand and said: shouldn’t we maybe make this a bit more user-friendly?
Here are a few… let’s call them original decisions that stood out to me during the opening hours.
Learning in Progress
“Learning in progress” is a notification you’ll see a lot in Crimson Desert. This “in progress” message takes a few seconds to load before your character has supposedly learned the new information.
In some situations, the mechanic makes sense. You can observe special enemy moves, and your character “learns” the new skill. The same goes for something as simple as using a shovel. Apparently, protagonist Kliff isn’t the brightest tool in the shed and, at thirty-something (?), still needs a demonstration on how a shovel works.
But where “learning in progress” really falls apart is how it’s used everywhere. Even when browsing items in a random store, if you haven’t encountered an item before, the description doesn’t appear instantly. Instead, you’re forced to wait a few seconds for the “learning in progress” prompt to finish before the description shows up.
It adds nothing. All it does is waste time in a game that’s already going to be massive.
*update: supposedly the time needed to ‘learn’ has been reduced in a recent patch.
So Many Unnecessary Animations
Speaking of things that add absolutely nothing: the sheer number of animations that could have easily been skipped.
Take cooking, for example. Your character can prepare meals, which triggers a short animation showing the dish being made, followed by a reveal of the final result. If you’re going to include something like this, at least make sure it looks as good as it does in Monster Hunter (is that even possible?). Instead, after a few seconds, I’m staring at something that looks like plastic. You can feed my portion to the dog.
Every time you unlock a new skill using an Abyss Artifact (a progression system I actually do like, since you collect them through exploration), you’re treated to a little scene where Kliff pulls out the cube and crushes it in his hand.
It’s all completely unnecessary. Yes, you can skip these short scenes (unlike the long cutscenes, for some bizarre reason), but that’s not really the point. It breaks the flow, and from a developer perspective, it just doesn’t make sense. Why spend resources on this when there are plenty of areas that could have used actual improvements?
Unskippable Cutscenes
That brief mention in the previous paragraph doesn’t even begin to capture how baffling this decision is. The sheer absurdity of it deserves its own section.
Longer, story-related cutscenes can only be fast-forwarded, not fully skipped. And anyone who has ever played a game knows this is a hard no. You’re taking away a basic choice that should always belong to the player. The only reason I can think of for forcing this is that the developers are afraid players might miss their “brilliant” story.
But that’s not a good reason. Especially not when your story isn’t anything special to begin with.
There’s also nothing more frustrating than losing a fight and being forced to sit through the same scene again because of a poorly placed checkpoint. And what about a second playthrough? Anyone planning that will just have to hope this gets patched by then.
No ‘Buy and Equip Now?’
As a developer, it’s perfectly fine to challenge players. Through combat, puzzles, or exploration, that’s all part of the experience. But there’s one place where you should make things as easy as possible: the user experience. That’s where Pearl Abyss seems to miss the mark.
Almost every game I’ve ever played that lets you buy new equipment from a shop immediately asks: “Equip now?” after purchasing a weapon or piece of armor. That’s how it should be. These small touches, combined with similar design decisions, are what create a smooth and enjoyable player experience.
But these are exactly the kinds of things Crimson Desert is missing. And together, they result in an experience that feels sloppy, inconsistent, and at times just plain annoying.
Let Me Read My Damn Letter
Sometimes you receive a letter via a bird, or an NPC walks up and hands you one. Naturally, every player wants to read it immediately to see what’s expected of them next. There’s really no other logical thought process. And definitely not this one: “Oh, a letter. I’ll just open my messy inventory later and spend way too long searching for the thing I just received.”
No, Pearl Abyss. Just hand us the letter and show it to us right away. If we don’t want to read it for whatever reason, we’ll make that choice ourselves by pressing circle to close it.
Although maybe that’s too simple. Maybe you’d prefer we close it by holding R1 and R2 at the same time, then pressing triangle. Because why make things easy when you can make them complicated?
Oh, and by the way, you have to hold L1 for as long as you’re reading the letter. At this rate, I’ll end up with a muscular index finger by the time I’m done with this game.
What Are These Button Combos?
I’m getting a bit older, and I’m already noticing that remembering things that aren’t exactly top priority in my life is getting harder (sorry Pearl Abyss, Crimson Desert doesn’t quite make that list).
Remembering complex attack combos isn’t always easy for me anymore. Back in the day, I could memorize cheat codes with fifteen different inputs. Now, even a three-button combo can feel like a stretch. I just came off Nioh 3, and even there I struggled at times.
At least in Nioh 3, the button combos followed some kind of logic. In Crimson Desert, it sometimes feels like the combat system was designed by a developer with three hands.
“…it sometimes feels like the combat system was designed by a developer with three hands.”
Take Blinding Flash, for example, the move where you catch light with your sword. You have to press L1 and R1 at exactly the right moment. Hit one of them just a fraction too early, and in the best case you block. In the worst case, you swing your sword and just hope there’s no unlucky bystander nearby.
Once you do get it right, you can release L1 and keep the light active with R1. But if you want to direct that light somewhere else, you take over again with L1. Still with me?
Some combos require pressing R1 and R2 or L1 and L2 simultaneously. That’s a combination I rarely come across, and honestly, for good reason, it feels incredibly unnatural. And the worst part? These are just a few examples. It only gets more complicated the more skills you unlock.
Abyss Artifacts Need to Be Activated Through the Inventory
It really feels like the developers want you to spend a lot of time in your inventory. As I mentioned earlier, you unlock skills by collecting Abyss Artifacts. Some of these are sealed, and each sealed cube comes with a specific challenge, like defeating three enemies without taking damage, opening 30 locked doors, or taking down three enemies with your shield.
This naïve player assumed that once you completed such a challenge, the Abyss Artifact would automatically unlock and be ready to invest as a skill point. That was not the case.
By pure coincidence, I stumbled across one of these sealed cubes in my inventory hours later. So after completing the challenge, I still had to manually unseal the cube from within the inventory, instead of the game simply making it available right away without the extra step.
It just feels like the developer isn’t thinking along with the player here. And in some cases, that’s perfectly fine, too many games overdo it with handholding. But Crimson Desert swings too far in the opposite direction.
Oh, I Have a House?
In Chapter 3, you gain access to your own camp. You can’t miss it, the main quest takes you there and even includes a few quests to explain how it works. That’s perfectly fine.
But it wasn’t until Chapter 4 that I discovered, just outside the camp, you also have your own house. A house you can fully customize and decorate however you like. Another one of those features I could easily sink hours into, as I’m currently doing the same with Pokopia.
You’d expect something like this to be clearly explained. But once again, that’s not the case. I stumbled upon it completely by accident while opening the map. And maybe I could have found it much earlier, if I wasn’t slightly afraid to open the map in the first place, considering the game has already crashed on me about six times while doing exactly that.
But hey, who needs a map when it’s supposedly twice the size of Skyrim and even bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2?
The strange thing is: despite all these bizarre design choices, I’m not put off. I still feel the urge to explore the world, uncover its secrets, and take on its boss battles. Very few games get away with this kind of user-unfriendly design, but so far I’m willing to give Crimson Desert the benefit of the doubt.
That said, I could have easily added many more than just these seven bizarre choices. But unlike Pearl Abyss, I believe in quality over quantity.
Have you come across things that made you raise an eyebrow? Feel free to add to the list in the comments!
