Joe Reveley

Early scenes from the Tokyo Dome ahead of Naoya Inoue vs Junto Nakatani, as a sold-out crowd of 55,000 fills up the arena. 📹 Ingo Wegerich

I finished Crimson Desert. I can honestly say that in my 30+ years of gaming I have never been more confused, happy and downright frustrated all at the same time than when playing Crimson Desert. Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. A game doesn’t sell five million copies unless it does something right and there are areas where this game truly shines. - Feels like a next gen experience - Has insane draw distances - Talented voice acting - Beautiful environments - Extremely high quality graphics - Wonderful exploration - Very impressive scale/enemy count - Great fight choreography/Action scenes - Endless systems and things to do - A solid combat system - 300+ hours of content - High quality soundtrack There is much to love about Crimson Desert. Unlike many, I was drawn into the game from hour one and was compelled to give it my complete attention so that I could properly address how wrong many of the critics were. Unfortunately, as my experience went on I only found myself agreeing more and more. The negatives: - The worst boss fights I’ve ever experienced - A truly awful story - Boring and forgettable characters - Puzzles that are not fun - Poorly designed missions - A lack of any direction for the entire product Crimson Desert does everything in its power to make sure that for every fun moment you have there is an equally frustrating one right around the corner to match it. Let me give you just one example that represents dozens of other annoying moments consistently sprinkled throughout the game. I was required to summon my dragon to destroy a shield around a base. I then went inside the base, destroyed energy depots, fought soldiers, climbed to the top and then engaged in a boss fight. It was only then that it was made clear to me that there was literally no way to defeat this boss unless I was carrying arrows or had a specific skill unlocked. I had neither. I then had to leave the boss fight and redo the entire dragon and base infiltration mission again after buying arrows. As soon as this mission was completed, the next mission began and also required the dragon. I go to summon my dragon to find out that it’s on a 45 minute timer and I have to wait to move forward. This entire headache happens ad nauseam throughout Crimson Desert as it throws one poorly designed idea or mission at you after another. It’s exhausting. I like many love Souls games, but am also fatigued by them and enjoy different styles of combat and bosses. I’ve solo’d plenty of Souls games hardest bosses. Crimson Desert has unquestionably the worst designed mechanics and general fun factor of bosses of any game I’ve ever played. It’s not difficulty either, just eat meat the entire battle and you’ll never die. As far as the story is concerned, I originally thought the criticism was a little much. It’s clear the writing is solid at each individual step of the experience, so how could it not be at least decent? Well, it turns out that if one chapter of your story has zero connective tissue to the next and is constantly loaded with uninspired dialog it ultimately results in bad writing, and let me tell you, it’s BAD. Nothing makes any sense and it almost always feels like different unrelated segments sewn together. I would love to go on for another 18 paragraphs, but for the first time ever I’m going to hit the twitter character limit, so I’ll just summarize with this: Crimson Desert has many high quality aspects that will impress. There’s a certain charm that draws you in even when you can see the cracks in the armor. That is what makes my final takeaway so depressing. There’s a complete lack of direction and vision that seeps into every aspect of the experience resulting in something quite forgettable. What I admire most is that it dared to be different, it doesn’t feel like other games, but that can’t save it from falling incredibly short of greatness. I would not recommend Crimson Desert.