Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a really shonky Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom? Is it a dork ass enormity of an open world action-RPG? Is it a sort of janky Assassin’s Creedlike where you explode stuff a lot? Is it something with slippery combat that’ll break your heart? Is it a game where you’ve got to press 15 million buttons just to pick up a thing?
All of these are the sorts of questions folks have asked as they’ve grappled to understand exactly what Crimson is ahead of its release this month. According to developers Pearl Abyss’ main marketing man, that’s a consequence of the shonky enormity of exploding slippage being announced way too early.
“In a sense, we’re kind of victims of ourselves,” Pearl Abyss marketing director Will Powers told the Ian Games Network when asked about the process of introducing the game to prospective players. “We announced the game too early, and, honestly, that’s just inarguable [to dispute]. Things happened that way for multiple reasons; the game changed, and we built an engine, and not just for this game, but an additional engine altogether.
“So it’s not just strictly development time for a singular title. But if we had to do it again, I don’t think anyone would say we should announce the game six-and-a-half years in advance. That’s just not a thing that happens often. But as a result of this situation, what happened is it created this air of mystique around it where people didn’t really know what the game was, and that’s become fun from my perspective.”
As a result of all that time passing between reveal and release, Powers currently describes Crimson Desert as not what it “was originally intended to be”, but “an amalgamation of what it is morphed into, benefiting from where it came from”. In short, a terrifying Frankenstein of single player bits and bits originally designed for an MMO more like Pearl Abyss’ previous game Black Desert Online.
From what I’ve seen and heard of Crimson Desert so far, my biggest question is whether that weird amalgamation of bits and elements that might remind folks of various other adventure games or RPGs will have the depth to keep players around once the initial waves of stuff to do have crashed over them. I have a feeling I might bounce off it after a few hours like I did with the similarly expansive Dragon’s Dogma 2, but I’m very much open to being proven wrong and having it sink its tendrils into me to suck away hours of my life.
