Crimson Desert's patch offensive improves much, but it can’t fix the game’s real problem |
It's been a month since Crimson Desert launched, and what an excruciating month it's been — for me, who has played this game for over a hundred hours, but also for the developers at Pearl Abyss, who've released about a dozen patches and hotfixes of varying shapes and sizes. As I moved deeper and deeper into the new-and-improved Pywel following my first impressions of Crimson Desert, I very much hoped it would cure my initial disappointment in the game, and to some extent, it did.
Many issues made my life hell in pre-release Crimson Desert: severely limited inventory space, no private storage, no menu shortcuts, and a painful lack of abyss nexus teleport waypoints at central locations such as the major towns and the Howling Hill camp, to name a few. All of these have now been addressed in recent mini-updates. The equally aggravating need to continuously tap the sprint button, the precise aiming requirement for lumbering, and the automatic use of valuable keys upon walking into a locked door can bother me no more. A few decades from now, I will tell young gamers that they don't know the meaning of "suffering" until they travel back in time to play Crimson Desert before its first few patches.
My favorite improvement arrived in patch 1.01.00, hidden at the bottom of a long list of content updates: Criminal behavior now only decreases your contribution level if the crime is witnessed by an NPC. I love a bit of realism and logic in my evil doings; it makes the felonies more immersive. A close second would be the addition of refinement token quest rewards, which reduce grinding time, followed by the tweaked archery contest difficulty (no more need to shoot faster than your shadow) and the starting point of the Witches' questline, which was moved to the early game. Remember the castle walls adorned with unsettling pictures of AI-generated........