After spending an hour with Crimson Desert, I don't know what it wants to be, but the current form has problems

You know this story - years of announcements, promises of revolution, teasers that build an image of an almost perfect game in your head, and the closer to the release, the clouds hanging over the production grow darker with each day. Crimson Desert by Pearl Abyss has long been one of the most anticipated titles by RPG enthusiasts. The Korean studio, known for the visually stunning Black Desert Online, promised something more this time: a deep, narrative single-player action RPG set in a brutal, realistic world. The hour-long demo at gamescom 2025 was supposed to be the ultimate proof that years of production had yielded a result in the form of a real contender for a global hit.

However, I left the show with one dominant thought - this was a disaster. Not a technical disaster, because the game worked stably, but an identity disaster. For nearly sixty minutes, Crimson Desert threw everything it had at me - MMO mechanics, a combat system straight out of a hack'n'slash, ambitions to be a cinematic RPG, and quests so generic that I felt like I was playing a free MMORPG from 2010 again. This is a chaotic collection of ideas from three different genres, stitched together with thick threads and devoid of any coherent vision. After an hour with the controller in my hand, I don't know what Crimson Desert wants to be, but I definitely know that it's not good in its current form.

Identity crisis

The biggest, fundamental problem with the version of Crimson Desert I played is that the game itself doesn't know who it's aimed at. On the one hand, it tries to attract us with cinematic it looks - there are dynamic camera shots, attempts to build a living world, dialogues that are supposed to push forward the supposedly epic plot. This is a facade of an RPG game, where story and immersion are supposed to be in the first place. It wants to be The Witcher, it wants to be the new Dragon Age - a game in which we will delve into the world, learn its secrets and make significant decisions.

The problem is that this facade crumbles after five minutes, when the game gives us the first quest. "Raise the banner. Now take it to there. Now come back." This is not mission design worthy of a narrative RPG, but the quintessence of the worst, most generic quests from MMO games - mindless fillers, whose only purpose is to force the player to run from point A to point B. The world, which just a moment ago tried to pretend to be alive and reactive, suddenly turns out to be made out of a cardboard, where the only interaction is moving objects. There is no context here, no motivation, no sense that our actions have any meaning. This is the MMO legacy that Pearl Abyss, the developers of Black Desert Online, apparently could not or did not want to get rid of.

And when we finally reconcile with the thought that it might just be an MMO in single player mode, the game takes another turn, this time towards pure hack'n'slash. The combat, which I will tell more about in a moment, has nothing of the tactical depth of an RPG. It is a festival of special effects, spamming skills, and cutting down hundreds of opponents who exist solely to die spectacularly. Suddenly, the game forgets about its alleged plot and world, and becomes focused on mindless destruction.

As a result, after an hour of interacting with Crimson Desert, I felt like I was in a meeting with three different developers, each of whom was making a different game, and not communicating with the others. Nothing here matches. Ambitious narrative aspirations are torpedoed by simple MMO quests, which in turn have no connection to the chaotic, dexterity-based combat. This is a game that, in an attempt to please everyone, is not able to satisfy anyone.

Combat paradox

If there is one element in the Crimson Desert demo that deserves any praise, it is the superficial feeling of combat. I have to give credit where credit is due - the animations are smooth, the attacks have the appropriate weight, and the sound design makes every sword or axe strike sound satisfying. You can feel every hit. This is the kind of polish you can expect from a studio with experience in action games. Different types of weapons indeed require different fighting styles, and their basic attacks provide a pleasant experience.

Unfortunately, that's where the praise ends. Under this shiny, flashy surface hides a combat system that is as shallow as the side quests. The combat is unresponsive in a technical sense - the character reacts to commands with a delay, but this can still be justified by the build I was given. However, the problem also lies in its design philosophy. This is not an RPG combat that would require the player to think, position, or exploit the enemy's weaknesses. This is pure, mindless hack'n'slash, where the only effective tactic is spamming the strongest available special attacks.

Opponents are as dumb as a rock. They don't have any advanced behavior patterns, they don't flank, they don't cooperate with each other. They are simply running towards us to get hit. Their only function is to be sponges for damage, punching bags for our festival of special effects. Only the boss fight required a different approach from me, although in the end it turned out to be a skirmish focused on using a pillar-lifting mechanic.

This discord - between satisfying feeling and lack of any depth - is a perfect reflection of the identity crisis of the entire game. It gives us tools that look and sound great, but it doesn't give us any reason to use them in a thoughtful way.

Style over substance

Moreover, the design chaos of Crimson Desert best illustrates the developers' approach to gameplay mechanics. The game is overloaded with them to the point of absurdity. Right at the beginning of the demo, without any sensible introduction, my character had access to dozens of powerful special abilities and complicated attack combinations. I had the impression that I was playing as an endgame character, not someone who was just starting their adventure. Instead of excitement and a sense of power, I only felt overwhelmed and disoriented. There was no learning curve here, no satisfaction from discovering new abilities. The game just dumped a whole toolbox in front of me and told me to play, clumsily and drowsily explaining along the way what the tools are for. Here again, you can blame the demo build and the desire to illustrate what the gameplay will finally look like, but even that should be done relatively sensibly and gracefully, not by overwhelming the player.

The worst example of this project mess was the fight with the boss ending the demo. It turned out that the key to defeating him is to use a special, non-intuitive mechanic of lifting and throwing stone pillars. The problem? The game in no way communicated that I could do this. There is no highlighting, no hint on the screen, no fragment that would teach this interaction. The player is punished not for lack of skills, but for not being able to read the developer's mind. Instead of feeling triumphant after understanding the strategy, I only felt frustration that I had wasted time fighting in a normal way, because the game had hidden the key rules from me.

This approach - more means better - is felt throughout the entire demo. There is too much of everything, and nothing is connected. The game tries to be cinematic and build a living world, but it does so in a clumsy and superficial way. Independent characters perform some simple, looped animations, but the world beyond the scripts does not react to our presence. The locations, although visually detailed, turned out to be linear corridors densely packed with enemies, effectively killing any desire for exploration. This is a world that wants to be admired from afar, but falls apart at the first attempt to engage and interact with it.

Summary

The Crimson Desert show was an unpleasant experience. This game has cost gigantic amounts of money and years of work, but at this stage it seems to be a project without a soul and direction. It's a shell - beautiful on the outside, but empty inside. Every element of it seems to come from a different game, a different genre, a different design philosophy.

Can this still be fixed? Perhaps. But this would require not only polishing individual systems, but a fundamental decision - what is this game really supposed to be? Is it supposed to be a story-based RPG? In that case, I need newly written quests and a world that is more than just an arena. Is it supposed to be a hack'n'slash? In that case, it needs to deepen the combat system and give players real challenge, not just punching bags.

In its current form, Crimson Desert is a warning. A warning about the lack of a coherent vision and the attempt to create a game that everyone will like. I'm not optimistic after what I saw at gamescom. This is one of those games that will be showcased in trailers as technological wonders for years, but the final product may turn out to be one of the biggest disappointments of this generation. I sincerely hope that I am wrong. But the demo didn't give me any basis to think otherwise.

Crimson Desert

March 19, 2026

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• Overview

• action RPG
• Pearl Abyss
• gamescom 2025