One can’t help but see at least a couple of genres’ worth of influence when playing Crimson Desert. Moments and interactions will strongly evoke some of the coolest shit you’ve seen over the years in action-adventure games of many denominations. When I think of my six hours with Crimson Desert, I find myself constantly drawing comparisons to two other big-name, fantasy action titles: Dragon’s Dogma 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. To evoke quality names surely speaks to a certain calibre and ambition, no?
Our session starts with one of our playable characters, Kliff, observing a burial mound. A sombre scene that we don’t have the necessary context to sympathise with. Notably, though, the very Northern and Scottish-accented voice acting we’re immediately greeted with is delivered strongly. It even pulls off its swears successfully. Don’t expect acting on par with Square Enix’s recent efforts, but it is very decent nonetheless. Presentation is done very well here, and the standard of cinematics and high-quality in-engine cutscenes only continue throughout the preview. Cinematics and gameplay transition so seamlessly and smoothly that you’d best keep your fingers primed, lest a cutscene ends with you taking an avoidable hammer to the head.
After a quick sequence of bloody events, a war is immediately set off between Kliff’s pseudo-Viking faction of the Greymanes and the Black Bears, effectively barbarians. A crowded field of battle sets the scene for our combat tutorial. The game is not afraid of a little violence, with blood spatter aplenty. L1 blocks attacks, L2 loads up your bow or gun, whereas R1 and R2 deal light and heavy attacks, respectively. Holding both R1 and R2 together unleashes wider, more destructive attacks that can be imbued with a variety of elements. Finally, L1 and R1 together will trigger an attack that switches between your two chosen weapon sets. Mid attack flow, this weapon swap attack saw me use a spear to vault towards the enemy with a kick and then follow up with my sword attacks. Below the surface, you can further modify your attacks by combining the triggers with face buttons, holding pairs of face buttons, as well as all the positional tomfoolery you can pull off. Most impressively of all, attacks chain together effortlessly in a dance of player-made combos that felt reminiscent of Geralt’s pirouetting dance of swordplay in The Witcher 3. Aside from a boss fight I’ll mention later, the combat camera is smart enough to know who you’re attacking via an intuitive soft lock, with Kliff closing distances at a glide to deal his blows among a group of foes.
Duels like this one show off an impressively weighty, kinetic combat engine
This cinematic and fluid tutorial then proceeds to end with Kliff getting brutally murdered and left for dead in a lake.
With little context given, Kliff is then resurrected at the Corridor of the Void: a stone and marble structure in some skybound place. This is when the game tutorialises its platforming elements. Jumping between floating surfaces, freely scaling surfaces, nothing too wild. I can’t say I enjoyed platforming, especially in this preview, due to one key reason. The jumping input feels off. Kliff is not a particularly nimble fellow; he struggles with precise movement and turning on a dime, and is certainly a victim of gravity. It is not always clear if Kliff’s jumps would initiate from a button press or release, made more haphazard by having to interrupt Kliff’s weighty movement. However, aiming with L1 allows you to nominate a nearby jump destination, commencing the action by pressing Square. This allows for platforming minus the dexterity, where a jump command can be carried out with minimal player input.
Then, without much ado, Kliff is back on solid ground, waking up next to some fishermen. No questions are asked, and we pick ourselves up and off we go. It is at this moment that I’m struck by the scale of the immediate region around me. The serene environments feel alive with dynamic wildlife and NPCs. Running along a road, you’re bound to see rabbits, antelopes, and more scurrying by. I never saw them spawn or despawn; they seemed to belong. They react to the player, and I hope they will react to the predators and prey around them also.
The Duchy that occupied much of my first four hours is a rather serene backdrop for Kliff’s early peasant questing
The adventure starts properly once we reach the Duchy of Hernand. I forgot to mention, this is a medieval fantasy game, and the medieval elements are strong (and impressive). Upon trying to enter its gates, we’re turned away for looking like shit. Propper Henry of Skalitz treatment, for those who have played Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Pockets of civilisation (and their various strata) won’t accept you or willingly permit you access without an amicable faction alignment and/or attire. Virtually every NPC belongs to a faction, and your littlest interaction will influence your standing. My jaw dropped a little when I opened up the map, zoomed out, and switched to faction view. The map then becomes a myriad of colours and tiny bordered zones of influence. Again, I must use that desperate term. I hope to see some exciting gameplay moments play out as a result of faction interactions in the world. I hope it is more than a system that governs NPC hostility towards the player. Most NPCs are different flavours of generic, though, so don’t expect to be making lifelong friends with the folks going about their routines.
One thing I alluded to not loving earlier was the boss fight camera. One fight in the second half of the preview was against a robot that was destroying the tents and arenas of a carnival. This particular opponent is fought later in the game and is impervious to standard forms of damage. In a circular arena, the boss attacks the player with barrages of homing missiles, wind-up attacks, flames and more. Getting caught in a swing and a follow-up series of rockets can very easily spell the end of the fight. I spent much of my first three attempts rolling and dodging, avoiding blasts and looking for opportunities to target the enemy’s out-of-reach weak spots. There are a couple of ways to do this, but my go-to was slinging my grappling hook to a weak point, sending electricity up the line and eventually filling its stun meter. For whatever reason, I would then struggle to orient the camera to the bosses’ exposed vulnerabilities due to the odd lack of a lock-on during the fight. Making it more frustrating is Kliff’s propensity to manoeuvre a berth around your precise target rather than simply turn and focus. After a half dozen attempts, and the Pearl Abyss folks taking over to show me some advanced moves on the controller, my biggest bane of that fight remained simply orienting the camera. It was only an issue for this gigantic, one-versus-one boss fight. All other foes, I would have the option of both soft and hard locks and could successfully plot my attacks from there.
These fantasy cubes found in the world serve as Kliff’s skill points
Much like its predecessor, the massively multiplayer Black Desert, Crimson Desert has it all. At least on the surface. There were moments where system interactions didn’t quite work as expected, or at all. Some minor bugs, but nothing distracting. The sheer beauty and sublime scale of the world distracted me from the minor, rougher edges that players will surely encounter. But for now, if you’ve ever found yourself getting lost in the checklists, side adventures, and emergent moments across any of the big AAA open-world action adventures of the last decade (take your pick), then Crimson Desert is positioning itself as your next distraction.
Me, I’m a sucker for living in an immersive medieval world, and partial to a fantasy one at that. I know from my brief time atop the back of a dragon that there is plenty of world here to explore. If this fictional, virtual tourism hits good enough, I can easily see myself losing a cool 50 or 60 hours in this world.
Crimson Desert releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on March 20.
Previewed on PC at an event hosted by PLAION and Pearl Abyss.
