Crimson Desert's Difficulty, Progression, and Post-Launch Goals

We break down all of the latest announcement and reveals for new features and game systems from Will Powers’ most recent interview.

Crimson Desert’s shift to single-player Open World

Many folks may not be too familiar with this, but Crimson Desert originally started as an MMORPG, similar to Pearl Abyss’ currently running Black Desert Online. However, that was 7 years ago, back in 2019 when the game was originally being shown.

Since then, the game has had a fully custom engine developed for it and transitioned to being a single-player Open World game. The Engine accounts for a hefty portion of the development time, so the game itself hasn’t been in development for the seven full years that the initial 2019 showing would imply.

The Developers have settled on the label as a Open World game, as while there are some RPG-like systems, such as skill trees, there’s a distinct lack of common RPG systems. No Character levels, Level-up Attributes to allocate, no Dialogue Choices within the main story; all things you’d expect from the RPG Genre.

Even the combat itself is said to draw influence from multiple genres, pulling heavily from the Hack and Slash genre. Described as the metered approaches of an Arcade Fighter, in this case, playing around and managing Stamina, mixed with the combo-oriented action of titles like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry.

All of the encounters are also at a fixed difficulty. This means if we run into a roadblock that our character can’t handle quite yet, we can do other things to progress and get stronger before returning. New gear, upgraded gear, more consumables; all of it plays a part in our character’s growth and ability.

With Open World often being considered a sub-genre, or a feature of a game, it will be interesting to see how far Crimson Desert ends up running with the idea that Open World is the genre. So far everything points to a focus on keeping as little, if any, content gated by progression.

Premium Price, No Microtransactions

While it may be uncommon for many titles to do so, there are titles hailing from certain AAA developers that are more than willing to charge a premium price AND toss MTX in as well. Crimson Desert is striving not to be another game on those lists.

Yes, you read that right. In the age of gaming where Microtransactions (MTX) seem to be king, regardless the size of the game or its initial cost, Crimson Desert is firmly staying away from that. We’re only paying the price of whichever Edition of Crimson Desert we opt for, nothing more.

Even at the current point in time, it’s not fully clear whether the game will implement Digital Rights Management Software (or DRM). If they opt out of common DRM solutions known to cause optimization issues, like Denovo, it’ll be a huge win for all players.

Speaking of Optimization, they’ve even been hesitant to release any information about expected performance, pending a final audit, as the weeks heading into launch have been focused on Optimization. Though based on existing gameplay examples, it seems to handle really well.

For us, forgoing MTX is a huge win, especially with the game originally starting as an MMO. With the fairly robust customization options available in the game, there certainly won’t be a high need or demand for more options.

A Dynamic World of Distractions

The World of Pywel is massive, but there is often so much to do that, depending on how long our play sessions are, it may require a bit of goal-setting to make use of our limited time. There are plenty of ways to progress our character, the world, and the story without always having to dedicate a long stretch of time to doing so.

With the freedom offered by being a single-player title, this opens up a whole host of ways to make the world truly dynamic. A Global Day and Night Cycle that will even impact the cutscenes. a Dynamic Weather System that creates weather patterns of each locale based on in-game environmental factors like Temperature, Altitude, and time of day. It is highly unlikely for any two visits to a locale to be the same.

As we explore this world, there are plenty of Points of Interest to come across. Whether we stumble into them, spot them on the horizon, or we get notified via the map that one is nearby, there are so many little things to explore and distract us from the Main Story.

These Points of Interest may often result in a new location we can Fast Travel to, making it easier to traverse Pywel. That’s also on top of the mobility option we have from Climbing, Flying, Gliding, Grappling, and other yet to be discovered means of getting around.

This also includes the Life Skills as well, as we may come across resources we want to collect, discover new crafting recipes, or even ways to make better use of certain resources. Many of these are interwoven in a way that they end up feeding into one another at one point or another.

Even most enemies are made to drop materials, rather than completed gear to encourage seeking out hidden gear or even crafting our own. All of our weapons are free from the curse of durability that also tends to come with many open world games, as a way to limit the strongest gear. This isn’t true for things like Life Skilling Tools or other single-use consumables and items, but removing durability a huge step for allowing us to have a stronger sense of progression.

Technical Aspects

There will not be a demo before launch, as it’s challenging for the developers to find a meaningful way to provide a limited, but fully representative slice of the game.

Even the Demos they’ve had at various expos, often limited the game to a small chapter of the story, failing to fully capture the depth of the game and its systems.

It was also said that the Autosave system is quite robust, and according to Will Powers’ own experience, it was extremely rare to lose huge chunks of progress from an accidental death or mistake. The game, of course, does still allow for manual saves if we want to go back to a specific point again.

Currently, the only known and shared Accessibility options are as follows: A Slider to scale the UI size up and down, Subtitles, and the ability to disable screen shake. It was also said that rebindable controls, particularly for gamepad was being looked into, but not guaranteed to be added.

Crimson Desert is said to require 135GB of disk space, largely due to wanting to have the open world be a seamless experience. So while the file size is large, it’s more a result of allowing everything to be loaded in faster and more consistently.

They made it a point to say that all Voice Acting is done by people. It wasn’t said that every NPC will be voiced, but the ones that are were done without the involvement of AI.

Given the discussion, there also seemed to be a heavy indication that this is true for pretty much all aspects of the game. This is good news, AI tends to be a sticking point for many folks, given that it tends to make most everything noticeably worse.

Post-Launch Expectations

Finally, there were two things they said were being looked into for future potential for things that may be discussed or looked into further post-launch; Mod Support and Multiplayer.

Given Pearl Abyss has really only operated their Live Service MMORPG, Black Desert, it stands to reason why Mod Support hasn’t been brought to the table.

There’s just a wide range of what mods do or can be used for, so it may be easier to just disallow them from the view of only having managed a Live Service title. There are also ways for games to embrace mods in a way that allows a community to come together and support the game, long beyond any developer support.

They’ve also mentioned Multiplayer and Co-op being a discussion, but whether or not they would implement it, or how, would for sure be a post-launch discussion.

It stands to reason, though, that with multiple playable characters, it could be made available after certain points in the story when those additional characters come into play. We’re sure there are other ways it could be implemented, but it comes down to what the developers want.