The Biggest Mistake That ‘Crimson Desert’ Made

I have already become somewhat infamous for how much I like Crimson Desert, giving the game one of its highest review scores, an outlier from the critical consensus. But I have watched its scores slowly creep up over time into “Mostly Positive” from “Mixed” on Steam as players have now put more than two hours into what is going to be a 80-200 hour experience, depending on how much you want to extract from it.

I do think that Crimson Desert made one big mistake from the start, and unfortunately, it’s at the core of the game. Kliff should have been a created character. And he should have been the Dragonborn.

As it stands, Crimson Desert made Kliff, a viking-esque clan leader, into a very generic lead, helping everyone who needs help, pushing bad guys out of good guys’ territory and solving uh, sky puzzles. He is a blank slate but not in a way that works for other games. Then, he’s combined with the somewhat baffling concept of occasionally controlling two completely different characters, but not in a GTA way, rather making them barely important at all and not worth investing in.

Those characters should not exist and Kliff should have been whoever you wanted him to be. It is a baffling decision that Pearl Abyss made one of the most-lauded character creators in gaming for Black Desert Online and did not use that here in any capacity. A custom character would have at least given players more connection to him (or her!).

Past that, positioning Kliff as an unchangeable, central lead tries to emulate something like The Witcher, without 10% of the writing and characterization. That is not bad if you change the character to be something else, namely someone like the Dragonborn of Skyrim, your own character who moves the story along but allowing the focus to be more on the lore and most importantly, the sandbox, than figuring out if the Dragonborn is actually an interesting character themselves (they are not).

Pearl Abyss made the wrong choice here. These three characters should have been blended into one with more combat options available to the central character (greataxes, guns). And it should have been one that players can customize. They can be central to the story, but in a way that doesn’t draw criticism of the lead being bland. Focusing on the world sandbox, where Crimson Desert shines brilliantly, would be the main draw and the narrative, or what it lacks, would not be as prominent.

Unlike many other aspects of Crimson Desert that need work, this is not something that can be patched. They can change the frustrating initial quests or the awkward controls, they cannot rewire the entire central core of the game by transforming Kliff into something else entirely. Which is a shame, as this part could have worked much better than it does.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.