I Played More Crimson Desert and I’m Still Blown Away

Back at Summer Game Fest in June, I played some Crimson Desert and my mind was blown with just how dense its systems were. At PAX West, I had the chance to play a near identical demo on a new build but with a different focus and learned so much more. 

Check out my previous preview linked above for information on the combat, as that is the same as what I experienced here. Suffice to say, it is complicated, dense, interconnected, and surprising. 

For The Sake of Immersion 

Interestingly, I was told they had four different people demoing the game at Summer Game Fest, each of them focusing on different aspects of the game to see how various previews would be written. Plus, they knew they would see some of us again at PAX West and other events, so they wanted to show us what wasn’t shown before. 

So where I had been hyper focused on combat before, I now got to see a lot more of the little details in the world and focus on immersion in Crimson Desert. Like with the combat, how you interact with the world was given the same attention to detail. 

The best way I can convey that is by just giving you a bunch of examples of what I saw and was shown. 

First, one thing the team wanted to boast about was that they have the largest mocap studio in Asia, and they put it to use on every animation in the game. From the idle stuff in the background to the insane wrestling moves in combat, everything started in the mocap studio.

That has led to a lot of deliberate movements that really sell what you see on screen. Two soldiers reacting excitedly to seeing your character, Kliff, a famous mercenary, comes across as genuine and real. Kneeling down to repair a wheel on a cart, kicking it on just looks right. 

This is one of those things that sounds so boring to write out and talk about, but it’s one of those subtle things that you don’t notice but can have a big effect. There’s a big difference between clicking a button and suddenly the cart is repaired to seeing it put back together. In the latter, it feels like a real world and not a video game. 

That is the world the Crimson Desert team has put a lot of work into making. We spent a decent amount of time talking about that immersion and the small, seemingly insignificant details that all add up to sell the world to players. 

Things like voices muffling and echoing when wearing a helmet that covers a character's face. That the skybox rotates during the day to change as the time of day changes. 

In one funny example, I was told that in another demo someone wanted to see if they could pick up the chickens that are running around. You sure can, and they learned the white chickens were picked up and held by their feet while you the lucky brown chickens are cradled in Kliff's arms. Something not even the demoer knew you could do. 

You Can Change the World Around You

The most interesting thing I saw was in how ways you interact with the world logically affect the properties of certain things. For example, I caught a large wooden gate on fire and while it was still catching fire, I tried to smash through it with a big hit. The gate was too strong and withstood the attack.

It was explained to me that inanimate objects have a sort of damage threshold that needs to be hit first before any damage can be done to them, sort of like in Dungeons & Dragons. 

After some time, the gate burned up completely and looked very different, all black and charred. I then tried to smash through the gate again with a big attack, and this time I broke on through.

The fire had not just changed what the gate looked like visually, it had weakened the material just like what would happen in real life.

It’s that sort of logical detail that is littered throughout Crimson Desert that I think it will delight people for a long time. A lot of moments of “I can’t believe the game can do that” will happen. 

There’s so much granular detail that has been given a ton of attention and so many systems that all work together in a logical and intuitive way that the possibilities to do cool stuff are everywhere. 

Being surprised by what is there is a big part of what they are going for with Crimson Desert. I saw that born out in this demo and my previous hands-on, as not only am I surprised at what the game could do so were the developers showing it off.

Part of keeping that surprise a big part of the game comes down to player choice. You have a ton of options in combat, how to move around the world, and just how to interact with all of the objects in it. I haven't seen much on the story or player choices that come into play there, but I can't wait to hear more.