It’s increasingly hard for me to not view Crimson Desert as a multiplayer game. There’s its MMO bones, of course, ensuring that every moment spent in Pywel feels inspired by MMO design trends, even as you play by yourself. But just as potent is the sense of community that’s sprouted up around the game—the kind that few singleplayer games typically enjoy.
Despite there being no multiplayer component in Crimson Desert, I have been relying on other players. There are all the Crimson Desert guides from my colleagues, Sean and Rory, of course, but also the army of players conducting madcap experiments or getting into wild adventures, directing me towards new diversions and hidden mechanics.
Fraser Brown
Last week I was recovering from jet lag and waiting for the next Crimson Desert patch. This week I will be spending my entire time hunting down rare birds and making absolutely no quest progress.
Every time I hop onto Reddit or search social media, I discover something new about this ludicrously massive (and more than a little obtuse) RPG. Just like Deathengine on the subreddit, I had no idea, for instance, that little stacks of stones denote an area in which I should be digging for buried treasure.
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After that discovery this afternoon, my fellow Greymanes helped me figure out why a character I needed wasn’t spawning, directed me to some great locations for bird watching (and capturing) and gave me some new outfit ideas. I particularly like HotDan’s wizard fit (complete with phoenix). It’s been an incredibly productive day so far!
Every big game spawns a community, but what sets Crimson Desert apart from the crowd is the richness of its surprises. This is a game that is so dense with mysteries that I expect we’ll be excavating it all year and still not come close to discovering everything. And we’re all doing it together: coming across all these eccentric design choices, hidden mechanics and impressive combat flexes as a group, and then excitedly sharing our discoveries.
Crimson Desert is a bizarre caper that we’ve all embarked upon.
Playing Elden Ring at launch, deep into a global health emergency that was keeping us all indoors most of the time, was a similar experience, but not an identical one. Elden Ring was a challenge we were all facing together; Crimson Desert is a bizarre caper that we’ve all embarked upon. The vibes are distinctly sillier.
Case in point: the player who force-palmed around “150 unwanted birds” so they could get their hands on a new pet, or AllTr0n’s discovery that, when Greymanes are dispatched on a mission, they literally fall from the sky. I love this absurd game, and the people uncovering all of its little oddities.
It’s an infectious enthusiasm, and I’m convinced it’s become critical to the game’s success. I genuinely adore Crimson Desert, but it’s a game that demands you put in the hours—and even then there’s no guarantee you’ll have a clue what the heck is going on. It’s the kind of game that can very easily become an obsession, but simultaneously it’s incredibly easy to bounce off. That sense that we’re all muddling through it as a cohort has made it much easier to push through its more annoying roadblocks—because I can see people having a wonderful time beyond them. And I want to join them as quickly as I can.
Crucially, Crimson Desert’s community is pretty dang wholesome—more than I would have expected from a game that initially seemed pretty divisive. And this isn’t just on the subreddit, where mods can ferret out toxicity and remove it, but more broadly too. Even when I see folk writing about how they aren’t vibing with it yet, the tone is strangely hopeful: people want to like Crimson Desert even if they aren’t quite there yet.
Where there’s criticism, it’s often couched in jokes or accompanied by playful memes, and it’s rare to see mud being flung at developer Pearl Abyss—in stark contrast to, say, Bethesda, which also makes beloved, ambitious but ultimately janky open-world adventures. Then again, it’s rare to see a developer reacting to what its community wants so quickly.
Crimson Desert’s been out for just over a month, and every week it’s felt like something game-changing has been added in a patch, from much-needed quality of life features (so many storage improvements!) to entirely new armour sets, mounts and pets. The pace of these improvements is almost unprecedented. And it’s kept the community incredibly busy.
If I played Crimson Desert in a vacuum, I still think I’d be pretty smitten. But I’d be missing out. This is a game that’s designed to be shared, and it’s at its very best when it’s a collaboration between solo adventurers—a bunch of lone wolves leaving little messages for each other. “Good hunting here” or “This farmer forgot to close the chicken coop”.
So I see you, my fellow Greymanes, and thanks for making my adventure slightly less baffling (and sometimes slightly more baffling).
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