I’m trying to put all my thoughts about the time I spent with the medieval fantasy RPG Crimson Desert at Summer Game Fest into words. Kotaku Managing Editor Carolyn Petit likes to tell us that we should feel bold enough in our criticism of video games to say something is “bad” without couching it in wishy-washy “this just isn’t for me” disclaimers. These days, making sweeping declarations about something’s quality can feel like a daunting task, as the internet has lost any ability to put opinions into context. If I say something is bad, that must be me making a declarative statement that readers are required by law to agree with. Thus, we get the typical internet defensiveness that follows, and the most annoying person you know starts to nitpick everything you say as being too definitive and not acknowledging that plenty of other people might feel differently.
Sometimes I still get self-conscious about making definitive statements about whether or not something is “bad” or if it’s just “not for me,” especially in a preview situation where I’m playing an unfinished game. Carolyn is on vacation right now, so I feel that I must honor her and say flatly that Crimson Desert was one of the most frustrating demo experiences I’ve ever had in over a decade of doing this job.
One of the hardest things developers have to do in these preview settings is find a concise slice of a game for writers and content creators to experience that gives them a good enough sense of what that game is trying to accomplish, while also giving the player enough guidance to navigate their way through. The only charitable grace I can give Crimson Desert is that a lot of my problems might be alleviated in a final playthrough that affords me more time with its systems and enemy behaviors. But therein lies the problem with the video game industry’s current preview cycle structure. I could give Crimson Desert the benefit of the doubt, considering I’ve had poor experiences in previews with games that I wound up enjoying far more when I played the final product.
Is it fair to call something bad when I’ve only played it for 30 minutes? One would argue yes, as those are the terms of the unwritten agreement between developers and critics when previews are arranged – show me what you’ve got, and I’ll give my opinion on it. Now, would I keep playing Crimson Desert if this were my first impression of it, freshly downloaded onto my PS5 back home? Absolutely not, because the issues I had with it are the type of thing that would have made me drop it in five minutes. Lastly, am I cognizant that there is a subset of the internet that will take every negative criticism I write here as an albatross around the game’s neck, which it will never be able to relieve itself from, and that might inform why I’m hesitant to cast a dark shadow over it before it’s even out? Obviously yes.
Like I said, I’ve been doing this a while, and if I’ve learned anything over the third of my time on this planet writing about video games on the internet, it’s knowing that having a stray thought, a knee-jerk reaction, or even publishing the most well-thought-out argument in the history of the written word often opens you up to willful misinterpretation and accusations of some kind of agenda in which you are rooting for a game to fail.
But despite the game not yet having a chance to speak for itself, it’s not unfair for me to tell the world that Crimson Desert nearly pushed me to the level of Gamer Crash Out that you see in cautionary television caricatures. Developers put their games in these showcases fully knowing they may get a wide range of reactions. But the level of frustration I felt playing Crimson Desert probably goes beyond what anyone involved expected. I could feel my annoyance creeping into other parts of my mind as my thoughts bounced between every other frustration I was feeling in Los Angeles that day. It all coalesced as I fumbled with the game’s unintuitive controls, being pestered by a massive crowd of enemies who never seemed to lose aggro, no matter how far I rode my horse to get away from them while trying to reach my quest objective. All of this exasperation followed me as I tried to reach a boss fight that displayed the game’s combat potential, which was immediately hampered by one of the most frustratingly obtuse video game interaction systems I’ve ever dealt with.
Question: How many button prompts should it take to pick up an object, in your opinion? One or so, right? Crimson Desert has a system in which you pick up heavier objects by magically lifting them, then holding them on your shoulder before you place (or swing) them. To do this, you press down both analog sticks, aim a reticle at the object in question, repeatedly tap a button to lift it in the air, then, when you’ve done this enough, you can finally hoist your target over your shoulder and do with it what you will. At first, I did this with a fallen flag that needed to be raised once more, and it felt awkward and convoluted under the most mundane circumstances. The next time I encountered this mechanic was during the aforementioned boss fight, in which my foe would knock down pillars in the arena where we were fighting. After smacking him around a bit, I would magically lift these structures off the ground, then bonk him on the head to erase a chunk of his health bar. If I take too long to get this hunk of stone in the air, homeboy gets off the ground and starts fighting again. Do you know how much of a needless struggle it is to beat someone with a pillar when you have to go through an absurd amount of button presses to do something that’s much simpler in most games?
Getting to this climactic fight was also a pain in the ass because as I was riding past enemies in a warzone trying to reach my objective. Entire platoons of foes would break off from other fights to chase me across a battlefield like I owed them money or fucked their dads. Crimson Desert’s hero is a remarkably sturdy dude, which means he can take plenty of hits if one of these men who may or may not have had their fathers fucked ever caught up to me. If half a dozen of them did, they would hackey sack me around a field.
Crimson Desert feels weighty in that your character moves as if he’s running with an oversized backpack on. That clunkiness intensifies as you get knocked around by enemies, making it difficult to reorient yourself and get back in the fight after a good toss around. All I had to defend myself with was the sword in my sheath and bow on my back, and using them in ways that could fight off multiple enemies at once was just as obtuse as picking up an object off the ground. One of the attacks you have in your arsenal is shooting arrows on the ground to direct an artillery strike to take down, but it’s hard to pull an arrow back on a string and shoot it at a target when I’m busy getting tossed like a Frisbee on a crowded college campus (and not in the fun way!). Some of my sword swings can strike multiple enemies at once, but they, like most actions in Crimson Desert, require more complex inputs than your average action game, making them a pain to execute when I’m surrounded.
When I started the demo, the developer warned me the game’s systems were “complex,” and in the time I was able to spend with them, “cumbersome” felt like a more apt descriptor. Usually, when a game is complicated or challenging, I can see the vision for why. But playing Crimson Desert just felt like I was trying to hold melting putty in my hands as it slipped through my fingers. Yeah, maybe that’s harsh for a game that’s not out yet, and that I played in a disorienting context most people will never experience, but by the time I was done, the only thing keeping steam from coming out of my ears was the headset I wore at the demo station.
