Five and a half years after its 2020 Game Awards reveal, Crimson Desert has remained something of a mystery. Developer Pearl Abyss has promised a growing collection of mechanics and playstyles so bafflingly dense that it’s still hard to picture how exactly it’s all meant to fit together. Thanks to a freshly announced release date, however, we now at least know when we’ll see the full picture—and launch day is just two months away.
In a Steam news post, Pearl Abyss has confirmed that Crimson Desert has gone gold: The game’s primary development is, for all intents and purposes, complete and distribution-ready—aside from whatever tweaks might arrive in a day one patch. The announcement also brought us a release date: Crimson Desert will launch on March 19.
- Swing a sword
- Swing a spear
- Swing an axe
- Shoot a bow
- Do kung fu
- Grapple and throw enemies with pro wrestling techniques
- Perform combat geomancy
- Summon an artillery barrage
- Execute stealth kills
- Eat toast
- Solve Breath of the Wild shrine-esque puzzles
- Mine for ore
- Cook a steak
- Glide through the air using a cloak of writhing, animate shadow tendrils
- Triple jump with a combination of lightning and nature magics
- Enter a mysterious cubespace portal to traverse dimensions
- Skydive
- Swing Spider-Man-style with a wristmounted energy cord
- Initiate goblin regime change
- Perform fire rescue
- Ride a horse
- Ride a bear
- Ride a dragon
- Pilot a dwarven combat mech armed with heatseeking cluster missiles
- And more!
In other words, Crimson Desert seems like a prime example of the rarely seen Witcher-Dragon’s-Dogma-Red-Dead-Shadow-of-Mordor-Zelda-Assassin’s-Creed-Spider-Man-like. As for whether or not it can fit all those pieces together in any coherent form, we’ll have to wait until March to find out.
