It’s wild to look at Crimson Desert—a game I reviewed not even three weeks ago—and see it as an entirely different beast to the one that was released in March. Even as I was in the midst of my 75-hour review playthrough, Pearl Abyss was continuing to nip and tuck away at the thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a singleplayer game shift and change in such a short period of time.
That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, mind. Much of the unnecessary friction I had issues with in my review have been fixed. Fast travel points are more convenient and numerous. There’s actual private storage now, so I don’t have to carry around every unique piece of armour and weaponry in my inventory. You no longer have to worry about accidentally automatically breaking into locked doors with your stash of keys. Do I wish Pearl Abyss was a little less… flimsy in its whole design philosophy? Sure. But hey, the game’s a lot less annoying now.
One thing that had been mildly bothering me since the beginning, though, was flying. A giant black, hooded cape that Kliff can don in mid-air to descend through the skies. It should have been the perfect vessel to explore Pywel’s sprawling map.
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Instead, it was a bit naff.
It consumed far too much stamina, for one. That led to me playing a game of cat-and-mouse with both my stamina and Kliff’s health. Fly a tiny bit, start dropping to my death to regenerate my endurance. Unsheathe the wings once more, float around for a second or two. Rinse and repeat until I touch the ground, my final destination not all that far from where I first started.
Nothing about it felt satisfying in the way donning a strange charcoal-coloured cloak and flying around mid-air absolutely should. An uncharacteristically unenchanting experience even further weighed down by how clunky the entire thing felt. Leaping into the air to initiate flight seemed to bring about an incredible resistive force, draining a quarter of my stamina bar while Kliff dabbled in some airborne dilly-dallying, powerless to whatever magical wind drag was holding him back.
Grand flights warped and contorted into clunky gap-closers and an easy way to chuck myself off the side of a mountain without taking any fall damage.
It’s completely reinvigorated my desire to journey around Pywel on foot.
I’m doing all of this moaning in hindsight, thank goodness, because upon booting the game up after its most recent patch, something had changed. Kliff zipped into the air at a moment’s notice, snappily soaring across the gap I had expected to instead float my way over with all the grace of an overweight sodden cat leaping between two broken fence panels.
It feels incredible. It feels exactly how it should have at launch—quick and responsive while still maintaining a sense of weight. It no longer sucks the absolute life out of my stamina bar either. It’s finally a tool for exploration, one that opens the door for so much more freedom, and it’s completely reinvigorated my desire to journey around Pywel on foot.
Getting between two points of interest is wonderfully smooth. Sure I might have to cat-and-mouse a little still—or quickly chug a stamina potion—but I’m finally able to traverse grand distances the way I would expect to from a literal flight ability. I have never felt so giddy about being able to go from one patch of land to another.
All of this is ultimately part of Pearl Abyss’ ongoing effort to tighten up how Crimson Desert feels, and it’s working wonderfully. Even things like a massively reduced loading cutscene that made me dread any time I had to zip between fast travel points have encouraged me to explore and venture out in ways I was increasingly drawing back from as I racked up the hours in this game.
And it shows that Pearl Abyss was capable of making a game this snappy and responsive all along. When it comes to friction born of clunkiness—feeling like playing a videogame stuck in quicksand or knee-deep in a quagmire—I am more than happy for the developer to discard whatever ethos it was designing this thing around. I’ll be taking to the skies far more now, and Crimson Desert is going to be a much more enjoyable game for it.
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