I’m having a grand old time with Crimson Desert, but one critique I can fully put my weight behind is that the story is, like, whatever—it’s not offensively bad, and so often the vibes of individual segments are great and entertaining, but it’s just about as disjointed and chaotic as the mechanics are.
And while said mechanics are often charming in their absurd, sprawling nonsense, it’s hard to say the same thing for the narrative. Turns out, according to Alec Newman, who voice acted protagonist Kliff, the writing was just as scattershot.
That’s per a recent episode of the Skill Up podcast, where Newman explains that he’s been doing recording for Kliff “on and off” for five entire years: “In fact, for the first year and a half or so, it was just a demo as far as I knew—and I only found that out, when (nearly two years into recording) they said ‘we’re gonna start recording in earnest, now’, and I’m like ‘what the hell do you mean, I’ve been doing this for ages!’
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Newman explains that “writing is key—games, telly, movies, certainly in theatre, songs, whatever—if the writing is there, you can really run with it. With this project it was interesting, because I don’t wanna say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel, and then various characters, and he’s from this faction, and he’s from that faction…
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“I kept just saying ‘yes, but what is happening!?'” He adds that he “just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could, and I have to be honest I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer with a certain type of game. I’m glad I fought for that stuff.”
One “bridge point” Newman explains as being particularly important was when he realised that, “it’s very very hard to play 150 hours with someone who doesn’t give anything away, ever … the whole Greymanes thing, after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate.”
“This idea of family and trying to bring something back together … I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like ‘oh yeah, we really want this—we really want Kliff to care about his comrades’, and I said ‘well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue’.”
While he felt like he and the team did work to bring out those moments into the story, he adds “I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could’ve been.”
That’s something reflected by our own Mollie Taylor in her Crimson Desert review, where she says that the game’s “narrative pacing makes me feel like I was suffering from pockets of amnesia … There’s no clear timeline of events, and I’m never sure of any character’s motivations, even my own.”
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