Nothing has made it more obvious that Crimson Desert is a singleplayer game created by an MMO developer than its patch cadence and rapid evolution. The game has changed so much in little under a month, as Pearl Abyss has pumped out an absurd number of updates.
Quality-of-life changes, bug fixes, implementing new features—stuff that I would expect to arrive weeks or months post-launch have instead been patched into the game within mere days. I complained in my Crimson Desert review about a lack of storage, and four days after releasing? Boom. Private storage chest. Players complained about the chest’s location, and it only took a few more days after that for it to move somewhere else.
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All of these rapid changes have me wondering what the developer’s vision for this game was in the first place. Did Pearl Abyss want it to be an unforgiving souls-adjacent experience before it neutered the difficulty, and then more recently introduced difficulty sliders? Was its original decision to offer no storage options a deliberate one, guided by some ethos or overarching plan for how intentionally obtuse or frictious it should be? Or was it simply a wild oversight, driven by the assumption that expanding inventory through a myriad of side quests would simply be enough?
I do think that these post-launch patches continue to be indicative of how allegedly chaotic Crimson Desert’s development was. Starting out as an MMO before pivoting to a singleplayer game, and alleged ex-Pearl Abyss developers coming out after the game’s launch to speak about a culture where leadership was resistant to ideas different to their own, with the game devolving into “a hodgepodge of features crammed together.”
These changes could very well be a result of said leadership being proved wrong, their archaic outlook on videogames debunked by the people who are now spending hundreds of hours playing Crimson Desert. Or it could instead be a lack of conviction, a willingness to discard any design philosophy in favour of pulling and pushing the game into something more people want to buy.
Especially when you consider that reviews in the first few hours following Crimson Desert’s launch were not very favourable, as folks bounced off how absurdly abrasive the entire thing was from the get-go—a sentiment that has since turned around in the days and numerous patches following.
I also have to wonder just how much strain this is putting on the developers tasked with pumping out all of these updates. The turnaround on some of these patches has been wicked fast—like a more recent one introducing re-blockading of previously claimed forts in order to tackle an enemy density problem that was rearing its ugly head for some endgame players. Like I said before, these are changes that usually take weeks or months for a developer to implement. I just hope Pearl Abyss isn’t working its staff too hard right now.
Despite having a (mostly) good time with Crimson Desert, the one thing I have struggled with is nailing down exactly what this game’s identity is. That’s something I feel is becoming even muddier as Pearl Abyss continues to refashion it into something with greater mass appeal. That doesn’t make it any less fun—I’m still having a lovely time dipping my toe in shorter sessions here and there—but it does make it a little more generic.
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