When the students of tomorrow inevitably study the collapse of the AAA games industry as we know it today, I feel like there's a handful of titles they will particularly focus on. Red Dead Redemption 2 for its pointless bloat, major sports series for their refusal to innovate and, tucked somewhere near the end, Crimson Desert.
An open-world action-RPG-adventure set in a sprawling fantasy landscape, where you play as [a number of very boring characters], Crimson Desert is a video game trying to be everything we love about classics like The Witcher 3 and Breath Of The Wild. You, a big world, a horse and a sense of adventure. And if you are someone who greenlights video games based on their bullet-point features, and who thinks weirdos on Reddit comparing map sizes and the quantity of NPC dialogue in a game are a large and viable market, this is certainly a game just like those!
It's big. Very big. And it's beautiful, in a technical sense, in that there's a lot of things in this game and they get drawn at very far-off distances. And there is certainly a lot to do; you can talk to almost anyone, explore almost everywhere, and there are more sidequests and odd jobs lying around than you might ever hope to complete.
It's a shame that almost none of that seems to mean anything. Crimson Desert is an empty husk of a game. It gives you so much to do without ever providing a compelling reason for it, and it lets you talk to a world full of characters with nothing interesting to say, in a world where I couldn't care less what is happening or what has happened to it. In trying to copy the outline of better games it has entirely missed the actual reason we loved them: their heart, their spirit, their inventiveness.
My brief time with the game--I only played for a few hours before realising I had way better things to do with my time--was spent waiting for the fun to start, for the story to get a hook into me, for anyone to say something funny or memorable. Instead the entire time was spent doing– and this is no surprise given the developer's history with the MMO Black Desert Online--what felt like someone else's shopping list; walk here, talk to someone, walk here, fight someone, listen to some utterly lifeless conversations.
Like, Crimson Desert works just like The Witcher 3, it has the same shape, but ask anyone what they loved about the latter and they'll give you a very long list of things--fantastic writing, memorable characters with excellent voice acting, interesting designs, funny missions--that made the work worth it, that provided the impetus to nudge your way through a list of chores. Crimson Desert only gives you the list and the chores.
Apparently this game took seven years to make? And cost over $130 million? All so we could play something that had the skin but not the juice, and which for all that work still shipped riddled with AI-generated images? What a waste!
Luke Plunkett
