Craig Fish

Crimson Desert is suffering from something we see all the time when players don’t have a clear understanding of what a game is trying to be, a lack of aligned expectations from the audience. As I read through so many of its reviews, I keep hearing it get knocked for things like having a bad story, taking too long to get good, and just many other things. But the people who keep pushing to understand the game end up having a really good experience and realize that the intended focus of the game, exploration, combat, puzzles, open world, are all excellent. Now to be clear, even within that paradigm, I’m sure you can find people who bash those mechanics too, but my point is that the game is being docked points for expectations of being something that it isn’t. Picture a world where the Souls genre didn’t exist. Now picture that in that world, Elden Ring launches. You’d have reviewers complaining that there are hard bosses right from the start, forcing you to start over countless times. You’d have people saying the story makes no sense. You’d have people frustrated that unlocking new areas is maddening because the game doesn’t give you enough direction. You’d have people complaining about the lack of checkpoints. Essentially, you’d have a game that broke their expectations for what an open world action RPG should be, something closer to The Witcher. And those reviewers would have dragged down the overall Metacritic score because they wanted something from the game that they didn’t get. But that’s not what happened with Elden Ring. Elden Ring had trust. Elden Ring had a deep fanbase of its style of game already ready to review it. Elden Ring had reviewers who understood the type of game they were getting into, even if they had never played a Souls game before. Take the point that one of the repeated criticisms of Crimson Desert is, “it takes almost 10 hours to get good,” and that alone made people drop off. “I’m sorry, if it takes a game 10 hours to get good, that’s not a good game.” I think there’s a valid argument there somewhere, but it’s also extremely reductive because if the ask is to give the game time and it then provides over 100 hours of a fantastic experience, the onboarding becomes a trade off for that payoff. JRPG fans understand this well, being hand tied for hours before the game really opens up. And of course, Death Stranding is a perfect example of this too. I’ve seen so many people drop off because they felt the game was too slow and there was no hook in the early hours. All of this is to say that expectations seem to be the real killer when they don’t align with what a game actually is. It’s a natural phenomenon though. We, as people, look for patterns in our everyday lives to help us make decisions. We tend to buy the same brands because the last thing we bought from them worked. I had someone argue with me not long ago that the game needs to have a good story because it’s an RPG. Just a modicum of research would have told you that this is not an RPG. But that’s the problem with expectations. Also, fk K-Med 🖕

Read through a bunch of Crimson Desert reviews and here is the summary: