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Crimson Desert is a monster of a game. A labyrinth of cool ideas communicated in frustratingly obtuse ways. It can be an absolute whale of a time, a game hiding tons of neat little mysteries and moments of wonderful discovery. It can also be a complete pain in the ass to play.
I yap forever about the things I love and hate about the game in my Crimson Desert review, but I didn’t get the chance to get into the weeds about my pettiest of beefs with this game. The seemingly small stuff that has really added up into bigger frustrations over my 80 hours of playtime. So here I am now, to tell you all the little things that drove me insane and stuff I sincerely hope Pearl Abyss deals with in future patches.
Jumping instead of picking up an item
If I had a dollar for every time I accidentally jumped over or next to an object instead of picking it up in this game, I’d probably have enough to buy your whole family copies of Crimson Desert. It’s a game that suffers from incredible button bloat (just one of the many things that makes me remember this is a former MMO from an MMO developer) and that ends up rearing its ugly head in many ways.
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The biggest way, though, is jumping next to stuff instead of interacting with it. On controller it’s Square to jump, but then holding Square to greet an NPC, mount your horse, or pick something up. It’s also frustratingly finicky to do those things at times, leaving me catching airtime next to an apple like an absolute buffoon.
No fast travelling while sprinting or mounted
This may be my biggest, pettiest beef with Crimson Desert. Pearl Abyss loves to pepper pizzazz in all the wrong places, like forcing you to watch Kliff walk through some messed up cube matrix every single time you want to fast travel somewhere.
That unnecessary cutscene comes at the cost of having to be in very particular situations to actually teleport. You can’t trot on your mount, so you have to get off it. For whatever insane reason, the game also doesn’t like you sprinting when you try to fast travel either. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve opened the map mid-jog, tried to teleport, read the message “Cannot teleport in this state,” closed the map, stopped running, and then done the whole bloody thing over again.
The worst thing? If you’re fast travelling from the Abyss to land or vice versa, the game just tosses you into a classic fade-to-black loading screen instead. You know, like a normal videogame? Why can you not do that all the time?
Not being able to hide my helmet
I have been wearing a stupid crow head for the last few dozen hours in this goddamn game. I look ridiculous. I am forever a helmet hater in videogames. I love seeing my character’s face—their expressions, their appearance. It’s part of the package for me, and I feel like I lose so much when I can no longer see that.
And Crimson Desert is freakin’ full of ridiculous headgear. The Visione has to be the stupidest helmet I’ve ever witnessed. A giant, gaudy gold dome with two little antennae and tiny black holes for eyes. It looks like a parody of a helmet, not some weird fantasy technology. The game lets you hide accessories, but not headgear. An incredibly frustrating oversight.
No skippable cutscenes
Crimson Desert’s story is not the most riveting. Most of its cutscenes boil down to nonsensical conversations with one person, walking somewhere, and then a pre-fight cutscene. Maybe even a bonus cutscene when a boss inevitably has a second or even a third phase.
And you can’t skip a single bloody one. You can fast-forward them, which comically speeds up all of the theatrical animations that remind me of my GCSE Drama days while the music whizzes into high-pitched nonsense. If you’re anything like me and retrying boss fights a few times between grinding skill points and armour levels, it means you’re forced to watch the same cutscenes time and time again. Just let me skip them, please.
Requiring a mask to commit petty theft
Sometimes I just want to commit burglary with my whole chest. No anonymous stealing. Just me, and an illicitly obtained coin pouch. Sorry y’all, no can do in Crimson Desert. It’s a game that treats bad deeds in a rather strange manner. It throws all of these ways that you can be Greymane, do crime—livestock and wagons to steal and sell to fences, strongboxes to break into, and many an item to pilfer.
But to steal things you’re forced to wear a mask. Don’t have it on? The option to steal is greyed out. Even when nobody’s around to witness you doing the crime! It’s such a bizarre way to handle it, one which feels wholly unnecessary.
A total lack of storage
You need so many items in Crimson Desert. Materials for upgrades, potion crafting, cooking meals, the works. Yet Pearl Abyss has completely failed to give you any way to offload items that you might not want on your person at the moment, but know you’ll need later down the line. Everything has to be contained to your inventory, which means you’ll be in there a whole bunch shuffling stuff around and discarding things.
It doesn’t help that inventory management straight up sucks, meaning you’ll also be shuffling and discarding for far longer than you should reasonably have to be. This is, at least, one thing Pearl Abyss says will be coming in a later patch. But I can still be mad about it right now.
Dialogue taking a million years
Watching a cutscene in this game feels like witnessing two actors who were only handed their scripts the very moment I encountered them. Dialogue takes forever to happen in this game. An NPC will say a line and then… silence. For two or three seconds, sometimes. And all I can do is stand around and wait for it to be over. No skippable cutscenes, remember? Sometimes I can’t even fast forward! It’s so strangely stilted, and makes already unpalatable quests feel like even more of a slog to suffer through.
Nobody really… having anything to say
Outside of quests, you can’t actually talk to anybody. You can greet people, who all have the same canned one-liners. Some of them are kind enough to tell you about, like, hedgehogs or something. And then bam, you know about hedgehogs now. They’re little more than extras who serve as props, because the game would be weird if there wasn’t a single other person around.
But even when characters do say something, they’re not really saying anything at all. They’re just talking. At something, or someone. Not saying anything meaningful, or dialogue that drives the plot along. There’s no life to them, and that really sucks.
I do like the guards that call me a freak when I bump into ’em, though.
No pet goats
I can pet dogs. I can pet cats. I can befriend them enough that they’ll become my companions and follow me around. I can pick up goats, walk around with them as their happy little heads flop around over my shoulders. But I can’t keep them as a pet, and that is perhaps Crimson Desert’s biggest crime of all.
(Okay, not really. But seriously, let me keep a pet goat like a dog. It’s a fantasy game! I’d never do it in real life, promise.)
