After whiffing its release date by 5 years, Crimson Desert is putting out oodles of preview stuff as ‘We never want to be accused of hiding anything, because we have a lot of ground to make up’

According to our Harvey’s Crimson Desert preview, Pearl Abyss’ upcoming action-sorta-RPG is quite good indeed. It’s also late. It should have been here, let me check, five years ago?

Yep. Crimson Desert was first revealed at 2020’s Game Awards with a proposed release year of 2021. After, ah, whiffing that slightly, it’s now due out two weeks from today. In a chat with IGN, the studio copped to the fact that, yeah, it might have pulled the cover off this thing a little too early.

“In a sense, we’re kind of victims of ourselves,” said studio head of PR and marketing Will Powers. “We announced the game too early, and, honestly, that’s just inarguable.” Indeed, consult the ancient tomes of business administration and you won’t find many gurus suggesting you do what Pearl Abyss did: “I don’t think anyone would say we should announce the game six-and-a-half years in advance.”

Powers does point out that it’s not like the studio’s spent the last half-decade tightening up the graphics on level three. “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.” That’s a lot of work! The kind that takes more time than you have between a Game Awards reveal and your original release date.

Crimson Desert's player character glaring at a crowned goblin as they duel.

(Image credit: Pearl Abyss)

The long wait has had its upsides, too. For years, people have idly wondered just what the heck this game is gonna be (in fact, we have a whole bit of our website dedicated to answering that question), and Powers thinks that was probably good marketing, when it all shakes out. “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,” he says.

The early stumble is why Pearl Abyss is so keen on showing off oodles of the game now—it has several years of speculation to put to bed. “So now we just let people play the game for hours and do hours of interviews as well,” says Powers. “We never want to be accused of hiding anything, because we have a lot of ground to make up. We initially revealed this as something else, so we needed to do more than a game traditionally would to course-correct for our own actions from five and six years ago.”

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