Crimson Desert: Review — The open world we didn't know we wanted

Greatness is in the small things

The dream of almost all enthusiasts, ever since Skyrim, or Rockstar Games and CD Projekt productions, is to stay as long as possible within these true universes, with the idea that there's still something to do, even after completing everything possible. Crimson Desert will satisfy your ambitions and will do so by "stealing" from almost all the titles I've mentioned, without reinventing almost anything, but wisely mixing the best formulas of each, adding a sprinkle of Assassin's Creed where it's needed and where it's right to do so, to the point of creating a new level of "immersion" that will be difficult to surpass (mmm no, come on, did someone say GTA 6?). If you loved The Witcher 3's sub-quests, here you'll find them at every single crossroads of every single road on an entire continent.

Requests, stories, missions, all well-acted, charming, perhaps a little crazy, but from which you can add a piece to a narrative that gives you something more of a reality to discover. Saving a kitten on a roof or helping a beggar might seem like small things, but behind these gestures lie secrets that I advise you not to ignore; it's not just about killing, fighting, or plundering, it's also about talking, listening, interacting, and each of these actions leads to an intriguing result, even if, as is obvious, it can't apply to everything.

But if helping a somewhat "crazy" couple clean a chimney brings a smile to your face and gives you elegant clothes, certainly helping a butcher cook fish teaches you what you can achieve by mixing ingredients and learning new recipes. And then, even if I'll talk about it later, it's so detailed from an aesthetic and graphic point of view and has such refinement in the choice of clothes, that it's almost impossible not to want to see all the eccentric inhabitants of Pywel up close.

Finally an MMO... single player!

That the video game landscape is full of MMOs and that Pearl Abyss cut its teeth with Black Desert Online is undeniable, but how many, like me, have dreamed of a living, open, and infinite world without the need for a persistent connection and being able to do everything they wanted even as a solitary experience in a single, large package? I imagine many, certainly this philosophy was at the base of this project, although many levels of rewriting have been done to achieve readability of the many (too many?) things that can be done. Firstly, the actions and commands alone are a bit cumbersome, with a series of keys to press just to jump or perform various actions.

If you then consider that you can immensely increase your range of blows and spells, you will understand that at a certain point, even in maximum simplicity, you will still have to mix your fingers to move best, but this is also a bit part of that MMO experience from which this title derives, although once you get the hang of it, it is still quite streamlined. On the aesthetic front, I confess that I was impressed, yes, but at the same time, especially in this historical moment, a technical compromise is chosen (rightly), instead of pushing to the maximum of what can be had on screen.

So if you are among those who maxed out Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC... well, don't expect this game to be ten times better, quite the opposite, but I confess that it didn't bother me and I didn't even want to find myself in something impossible to run on a graphics card (I have both RTX 3070 and RTX 4070 Super) and in both cases the result was fluid, very playable and visually appealing - consider that the RTX 2080 is among the recommended and not the minimum, and the particle manipulation is really high level.

A living world to truly get lost in

This is a particularly vibrant world, full of characters, each with their own story, but what will surprise you immediately, even in the most trivial requests you'll receive – yes, I carried a sheep halfway across the map so a child wouldn't cry – is the way even the most mundane mission is presented to the player, enriched by a narrative so realistic it feels like seeing real-life actors talking to you. In reality, many things aren't that interesting to do, but on the front of narrative depth, you really can't say anything bad.

As I said in the title, each of you will absorb something different from the experience, because it tries to satisfy all tastes: being merchants or transporting goods or hunting criminals – did someone say Red Dead Redemption 2? – you can fish or enjoy the scenery, you don't feel that danger that is about to arrive and wipe everything out in an instant, which imposes dynamics of urgency and continuous combat; you are just part of the world and you are perfectly embedded in that reality. This, by the way, is the true core of the game, an open world that borrows from all the other most successful ones at the moment and doesn't innovate entirely with something new, but takes what works best from each formula and inserts it into its reality, and it works very well.

The shadows of Pywel: what still needs improvement

For everything to work at its best, however, compromises must necessarily be made, or rather, perhaps they should have been there precisely because to achieve certain results it seems that many separate boxes were put together in a not perfectly successful way. Leaving aside a patchy Italian translation of the texts, with spelling errors and in some cases terrible - I wouldn't suggest it's AI-generated but I'll just tell you that I had to switch back to English to follow some quests as the text didn't explain what I had to do correctly - but in general, perhaps due to the quantity of texts and scenes, explanations are often sketched and unclear, in stark contrast to a general "storytelling" narrative style that cannot be "skipped", but only fast-forwarded because... that's how it is, if you're not interested in the story part, the developers indirectly suggest, "don't buy our game", and I understand and reward this last element, given the quality.

Another chaotic logic, however, is that of the controls. There are more key combinations than stars in the sky, moreover, at a certain point some things are even redundant, but you won't care because you still have to figure out how to combine commands to activate a certain thing in battle or as a quest solution, and frankly it's not very useful and a bit misleading. Combat offers highs and lows. There are many combinations of actions that offer advanced possibilities, although interaction with the enemy tends to be a bit repetitive and not always satisfying, even if in an advanced stage of the game and against some bosses there are quite a few satisfactions, a sign that a good leveling job will still need to be done to fix this.

Despite this, you will have to prepare for a rather sharp contrast: the standard enemies you encounter along the way you sweep away as if they were made of cardboard (I'm talking about entire armies), bosses need you to exploit the abilities you have learned, too bad that the commands often get stuck due to the fact that there are too many, or parries or abilities arrive late given that there is a rather marked input lag... in short, there is still a lot, a lot of work to be done.

Is Crimson Desert worth buying?

Ultimately, there was a lot of fear behind Crimson Desert, and I can assure you that... you have to buy it, period. Do you want an alternative-videogame life? It's here, and for many centuries to come. It invents almost nothing, but it brings many of the most successful things from other open worlds to a particularly successful level; if you are almost only interested in the narrative part, you can dive into it without even thinking twice.