Hands-on: Calling Crimson Desert overwhelming is an understatement

Hands-on: Calling Crimson Desert overwhelming is an understatement

At this year’s Gamescom, I had the opportunity to try the latest build of Crimson Desert, a new action-adventure game from the Pearl Abyss team. Honestly, I went into it with no expectations.

I had seen snippets of gameplay, and it appeared to be Breath of the Wild-like, featuring a large-scale world with varying degrees of combat difficulty. But nothing could prepare me for the overwhelming amount of information that I would be greeted with in the opening couple of minutes of my hour-long session.

I want to start by saying that this game can be overwhelming due to the numerous mechanics for combat, traversal, puzzle solving, and more that you need to learn, and also because of its massive scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R59mT0IFKeI

For the first 15 minutes, I spent my time in a tutorial learning all the different combat styles available to me, and I was lost before I even caught my first glimpse at the world. There are so many different control schemes and options for fighting alone that I couldn’t help but mash the same button when it actually came to real combat, as I had already forgotten all the different combo styles and abilities available to me.

I almost felt like there was too much that I needed to remember in such a short time. But I do feel like being able to learn and grasp all these new things slowly would be much easier, a luxury we’ll all have at release. Also, it’s hard not to compare it to Breath of the Wild when, after the tutorial, it makes you glide from a high place to look at the massive world around you.

When it finally came to try out the game’s story mission, I was tasked with repelling an enemy at various forts and was quickly thrust into combat with 20 different soldiers around me, all fighting me at the same time. It was here that I realised I could easily be overwhelmed by my enemies, and unlike other games where enemies will attack you 1 at a time, giving you a chance to parry, they all attack me at the same time, leading to my swift death. It’s a welcome difficulty spike because it represents how real battles would go. Still, it goes to show how easily you can be destroyed for rushing through a level and not planning meticulously beforehand.

I also have to state the obvious. This world is pretty gorgeous in detail. I was only shown a small part of the larger world, but you can clearly see areas in the distance that you could travel to and explore should you wish to do so. Especially when you consider all the traversal options available to you, like having a horse that you can summon at any given time, and also the gliding mechanic —among other things— that gives you a sense of freedom that I couldn’t properly explore in this demo.

Still, the overwhelming aspect of it leaves me a little worried when it comes to the sheer amount of things you can do. I’m afraid that it might put off a vast majority of players who don’t want to learn all these different button combinations and mechanics and would rather have a simplistic experience where they can explore at their leisure. For now, though, I’m cautiously awaiting hearing more details about this title before its eventual release, and I’m hopeful that these worries will quickly be forgotten about when I play the official version of the game in the future.


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