Giving Crimson Desert Another Shot

Some of you might remember the thoughts on Crimson Desert I posted here when the game was released. They weren't kind. I bounced off the game pretty damn hard, and for some legit reasons.

However, over the previous months I will sometimes watch a youtube video that shows something about the game that interests me. There is something about this game that does intrigue me.

Pearl Abyss, the game's developer, has been very busy since the game's launch, and they've released a ton of patches. The game is up to version 1.17 or something now. These patches have addressed quality of life issues, bugs, added content, and all kinds of things.

So I thought I'd give the game another go.

Briefly, here were my main concerns:

1. Ran like crap on base PS5. The lack of environmental lighting is, IMO, a huge mistake. All the lighting in the game is from direct source. The environment doesn't have any baked in lighting effects (meaning if there isn't a source of light like a candel, the sun, a torch, stars, etc., then there is just no light). This caused a ton of soupy, inky shadows, and bugs on the lower end systems where things mostly looked and ran very poorly.

2. Controlling the main character was a slog. He moved slow, was unresponsive (probably due to the bad framerate), and it just wasn't fun to move around the world.

3. The opening hours are a totally nonsensical series of chores.

4. The lack of large dungeons and extensive cave systems to explore. When I play fantasy games, I like a good overworld and underworld.

Here's how I feel after 1.17.

1. It runs much, much better on base PS5. On balanced mode, with a few settings tweaked, I have a consistent framerate that is totally playable, and it looks much better. The lighting seems fixed, gone are the buggy, soupy, inky shadowy textures that plagued the environments. They've turned down the wind effects so the vegetation isn't constantly moving at hyper-speed causing blurry messes of textures.

2. The controls and movement feel less sluggish, more snappy, and it's generally just more fun to move around now. Sprinting and flying takes less stamina so you can do that more. The double-jump skill actually triggers properly now. In the few hours I played yesterday, I actually had fun navigating the environments, which is something that didn't happen at all in the dozens of hours I played previously. This is a huge one for me.

3. The opening hours are still nonsensical, but because of point 2 they are faster and better to get through. I hear that PA is working on retooling a lot of the story and characters in a big content update coming soon, so picking up the game in a few months might actually be the best bet.

4. As far as I know, they haven't addressed this at all, but I hear rumors they will be adding things like this in DLC.

5. They've also added a ton of options in the menus for tweaking things. Lot's of accessibility options. I think at some point they also added an easy mode, which is what I've chosen to play on, as it makes the combat more fun for me.
   
   I'm still not in love with the game, but I can see myself playing more, and after I was done playing last night, I actually wanted to play again, and not feeling forced to because I dropped $70 on it. Again, there are things about this game that I find intriguing, and I'm looking forward to discovering some of the points of interest on the huge map. I still haven't made it to one of the first major bosses that originally ran like a slide show on the first PS5, so when I get there again that could be the end point for me if it's not fixed now. We will have to see. But if you're like me and bounced off the game for some of the technical reasons, you might want to give it another shot.