I know exactly who Kliff, the protagonist of Crimson Desert, is. During my romp through the vast expanse of Pywel, he was a distant tower enthusiast with a side interest in lonely locomotives. Aside from those things, he’s rather bland. Though, the actor who played him has now outlined that throughout the game’s regularly shifting development – which included a name change for its main character – he pushed Pearl Abyss to make the character more than just a stoic line-grumbler.
Speaking on the Friends Per Second podcast, Kliff portrayer Alec Newman recalled that he petitioned Pearl Abyss to add more emotive detail and depth to the character’s tale and interactions at various points. “With this project, it was interesting because they kind of, I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel,” the actor recalled of the five year recording process for the game. “Various characters and he’s from this faction and he’s from that faction. And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
“When when Kliff stopped being MacDuff, which was a considerable amount of time in to the recording of this – he was Macduff originally – once they settled on on Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and
character as much as I could,” Newman continued. So, that’s confirmation that the bloke from Crimson Desert was originally named after the antagonist of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. I knew he had a Scottish accent, but Pearl Abyss certainly were going all out to embrace the vibes north of the border in red pudding’s early days. How long will it be until we find out they cut a haggis-making minigame?
Anyway, my bemusement at my tower enthusiast being the thane of Fife aside, Newman added that he had to try and convince the developers that in order to add more emotional weight to Kliff’s tale, it’d help to have the character open up a bit more often:
After a while, there’s only so far you can go with him kind of being not flat, but you know, kind of stoic. Now, as a Scotsman myself, I know what that means, but it’s very, very hard to play 150 hours with somebody who doesn’t give anything away ever. So what’s been rewarding is that as people have played through over 100 hours, they’ve found bits of Kliff that do speak of something sort of more emotional sometimes. The whole Greymanes thing – after about two and a half years, [Pearl Abyss] decided they really wanted that to resonate. This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. I think that’s the main story strand of the game or the only story strand of the game when you begin it, I believe, not having played it. So that was the bridge point. I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to to care about his comrades’. And I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue’. So we brought it in gradually and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out, but I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.
Newman’s last comment mirrors the criticism Crimson Desert’s story’s faced since release, with even Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young admitting that it’s an element of the game the studio “could have done a better job with”.
As is, Pearl Abyss have been busy re-modeling various other aspects of red pudding via their early patches, as well as slipping out some AI artwork they’ve claimed wasn’t supposed to be left in.
