Crimson Desert – A Game that Wasted my Time

Two caveats before we get into my feelings on Crimson Desert.

1.      My experience was greatly hampered by how this game runs on the base PS5. In short, it doesn’t, and I don’t think it should have even been released for the base PS5. It looks terrible, can barely hit 40 FPS sometimes, the lighting and shadows are completely broken, and everything feels like it’s in slow motion.

2.      I’ve ONLY played the game for about 10 hours, and from what I’ve heard from people having a blast with it, it gets great after 10, 20 or 30 hours depending on who is having the blast.

Time Wasting Annoyances – This Game has a lot of CONTENT

More than anything, Crimson Desert reminds me of a free2play game with a premium price. On paper, I have nothing against f2p games, because they’re free, and some of them can be good and interesting. The most recent f2p success this reminds me of is Where Winds Meet. These kinds of games pile layers and layers of systems, tasks, chores, items, currencies and “content,” because they are meant to keep players coming back to log in every day, and they’re hoping that, at some point, enough people spend a little IRL money to keep the game financially viable. These games are designed to be a little annoying but allow you to pay to alleviate some of that annoyance.

Crimson Desert contains all of those annoyances but without a way to pay to make them go away, and it costs $70. This game has more systems and layers than ten other games combined, and everything you do in the game takes a ton of time and feels designed to take as much time as possible. I’ve never encountered a game that wastes my time more than this one does.

One example is gathering wood. You will need to gather a lot of wood to upgrade your gear. To gather wood, you go to a tree, manually select your axe from the cumbersome menu, hold the focus button to target the tree, and then select the right kind of swing to hit the tree to fell it. Once it’s knocked down, that’s only part of the process. You then have to target the tree again and select a different kind of chopping action to break the tree into three smaller pieces. Then you do that again for each of the smaller pieces to break those into the pieces you can collect. Then you have to manually pick up each of the individual pieces. But you better hope that the pieces don’t roll down a hill and disappear or hope that the tree doesn’t just got stuck in the air making retrieval impossible.

And this is only one of the many things you need to collect to progress in the game. Every action in the game has this level of complexity. It feels like the game’s mechanisms were designed by someone who has never played a video game.

The Lack of Story is a Plus for me…but

As many of you know, I don’t really care about story in a game. I don’t like long drawn out pre-written narratives in tabletop games, and I don’t like long cut-scenes and drawn-out stories in video games. I like to make my own stories. For me, the story is what happens as I travel from point A to point B. I’ve been playing video games since Pong was new, and I can’t tell you in detail the story of a single game I’ve ever played beyond go here, get the thing, kill the guy, take the thing over there, etc.

When I read that Crimson Desert was light on the story, this made me excited. It’s one of the reasons I like the Souls games so much. I always skip cut-scenes and I just don’t care.

However, Crimson Desert is a game that is super light on the story, BUT YOU CAN’T SKIP THE CUT-SCENES! And they are so boring, with terrible writing and animations.

Typically, in games without a lot of story, I can create my own avatar, and this is usually my preference in these kinds of games. But in Crimson Desert you are forced to play a single main character called Kliff McDuff. Yes, that is his name. Kliff McDuff might be the dumbest character I’ve ever played in a game.

Here is the set up.

Kliff dies and is resurrected. He never once questions what happened to him. After he’s brought back to life he travels to a city, where the main quest (yes, the main quest!) is to arm wrestle at the tavern. After the arm-wrestling mini game, you get a coin. Then the game tells you to give the coin to a beggar. The beggar is some kind of spirit who tells Kliff he passed a test. The beggar vanishes. Kliff doesn’t think anything of it. Then the game tells you to go into the sewars to rescue a tied-up woman. Kliff does that, passing another test, and the woman disappears. Kliff never once questions what’s going on. Then the game tells you to go to a mansion and unlock a door which leads to a portal to another world. Kliff does this for…reasons? Once through the portal Kliff solves a puzzle, then learns to turn into a bird-thing so he can jump off the sky island and float back to the starting village, and, once again, never questions any of it.

Kliff also doesn’t know what anything is. When you go to a merchant, you have to hover over most items and wait 10-20 seconds for him to learn what the items are. And we’re not talking about a bunch of weird exotic items. We’re talking about things like water, eggs, flour, etc.

After ten hours of this nonsense, I still have no idea what Kliff is supposed to be doing, or why, or how, or what, or anything. During the first ten hours with the game, here are the things I did as Kliff McDuff. I rescued a sheep. I found some cows. I cleaned a chimney. I rescued a lost cat. I helped a farmer. I killed a hundred of the exact same red bandits. Did some fishing. Chopped down some trees. Mined some ore. And none of these were optional. These are the things I had to do to progress the game.

What a grand adventure!

Crimson Desert replaces motivation and plot with chores and tasks to such a degree that I was begging for some kind of story!

This game broke me!

“The Game Doesn’t Hold Your Hand!”

One of the main selling points for the game, and one of the things that the blast-havers rave about is how the game doesn’t hold your hand. This is utter nonsense. The game holds your hand at every single step, until it doesn’t when it should.

In the story example given above, notice how I said the game tells you what to do and where to go. This is how the quests work in Crimson Desert. The quests just appear on your screen. You don’t find them organically, at least not the main quests. The game is constantly telling you exactly what to do and where to do it.

Until it doesn’t.

And here is another timewaster. The game has a ton of puzzles, and some can be tricky. However, the game never tells you if you have the item or skill needed to even attempt the puzzle. So you as the player may know what you need to do, but Kliff McDuff doesn’t, or he doesn’t possess the thing he needs to solve the puzzle, but you as the player won’t know that.  The one area where the game should give you information, it doesn’t.

Exploration and Am I Supposed to be Moving in Slow Motion?

Exploration in these kinds of games can be fun if your character’s movement is snappy and responsive. But it’s not in Crimson Desert. Kliff moves like he’s swimming in syrup. The walking animation is the slowest I’ve seen since Red Dead Redemption 2. He can’t turn on a dime but has to make wide angle turns like a giant boat. There is a ton of lag with button prompts, if they register at all (this is probable a case of the game being borked on the PS5). I can only get the double-jump to trigger about 40% of the time. To pick stuff up takes a combination of two or three buttons. To turn on your lamp it takes one main menu and two sub menus.

Kliff also has a ton of momentum. You’ll let up on the controls, and he’ll continue to take a step or two. This makes some of the precision movement needed to trigger pressure plates in some of the puzzles frustrating beyond belief.

Controlling Kliff McDuff is almost never fun, and almost always frustrating.

Repeatedly the systems are designed to waste as much time as possible, down to how slow Kliff McDuff moves. Even his horse is slow, unless you continuously mash on the X button.

For the life of me I can’t imagine anyone playtesting this and having a good time. But apparently a lot of players are having a blast with it.

I don’t get it.

I was so tired of the menial tasks and bandit killing that I decided to just head out in a random direction hoping to find something fun to do and see. That’s my favorite thing to do in games like this. The map in Crimson Desert is MASSIVE, and I figured I’d eventually run into an interesting dungeon, ruin, temple or cave system to explore, or maybe some enemies other than red-clad bandits to kill.

So I started exploring. Almost an hour later I found nothing of interest. Not a single dungeon. No complex cave systems. No ruins. No temples. Nothing but empty wasteland and about a dozen forts occupied by the same red-clad bandits. The game is lousy with red-clad bandits.

Open world exploration is absolutely my favorite thing about modern video games, and yet Crimson Desert also decided to waste my time with that as well.

Congratulations Crimson Desert! You made me long for a story and hate exploring. Well played! Masterful!

It Gets Good after 10, 20, or 30 Hours!

Over and over again, I keep reading and hearing about how this game just gets better with each passing hour. I had the opposite experience. The more I played it, the less I liked it. To me, it feels like the ultimate modern game for gamers who like “content.” If you like stuff to do, this is the game for you! Typically, I like stuff to do in games, but the stuff needs to be fun, and I simply could not find the fun here.

This is probable a really good game to play while listening to a podcast, or a second screen game to play while your partner is watching a show.

I also don’t like games that require me to play for a number of hours before the fun starts. Games I love are games that I love from the moment I start playing.

I hate games that waste my time, and Crimson Desert feels specifically designed to waste as much of my time as possible. This is one of the reasons why I don’t play f2p games. They are designed to keep you logging in, day after day. However, these games are FREE! And if you like them, you can shell out $50 or something to bypass the annoyances baked into their layered systems. With Crimson Desert I shelled out $70 for a premium experience, and all I found was one annoyance after another.