Yes, I know. I KNOW. Crimson Desert is sat on my PS5 right now and I have not touched it. Before anyone starts, just hear me out.
Because I genuinely want to play it. That is the thing. This is not me being negative about the game. I have watched the trailers more times than I am willing to admit. The combat looks like someone bottled chaos and sold it for fifty quid. Kliff barely speaks and yet somehow has more presence than most protagonists who will not shut up. The world is enormous and gorgeous and everyone I know who has put proper time into it comes back raving. My mate will not stop going on about it. My timeline is full of clips. Every time I open YouTube it is just Crimson Desert footage and I am sat here nodding along thinking yes, yes that looks absolutely brilliant and then closing the app and going back to whatever I was playing before.
And I think that is actually the right call. For now at least.
Here is my worry. Pearl Abyss have been patching this game at an almost frantic pace since launch. Version 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.04, hotfixes in between, the thing has barely had a moment to breathe. And look, fair play to them for moving that quickly, genuinely. But when a studio is pushing out that many updates in the first five weeks you have to ask yourself what the game was like before all of those patches landed. The inventory at launch was apparently so limited that someone described it as potentially the worst in the history of video games. Difficulty settings did not exist until 1.04 which only just dropped. Movement controls got an overhaul. Storage got a complete rethink. New skills have been added. They put tumbleweeds in the desert. Tumbleweeds! They went back in and added ambient tumbleweeds because presumably the desert did not feel quite right without them.
That is not a studio doing minor polish. That is a studio finishing the game after it came out.
And I keep thinking about Cyberpunk 2077. Not in a disaster sense because Crimson Desert is nowhere near that situation, the reviews are good, the vision is clearly all there. But in the sense that everyone remembers what Cyberpunk became rather than what it launched as. The people who waited a year got a fundamentally different and better experience. The people who played day one got something brilliant but rough around the edges, missing features, with systems that did not quite sing the way they eventually would. I do not want to play the rough version of Crimson Desert. I want to play the version where everything Pearl Abyss intended is actually in there and working properly.
The frustrating part is that the vision is obviously complete. This is not a game that is missing its soul. Everything I have seen suggests the world is incredible, the story is genuinely surprising, the combat is some of the best in the genre. It just needs a bit more time in the oven before it is the fully realised thing it is clearly trying to be.
And yes I am aware that I am essentially giving myself FOMO to avoid FOMO which is a very specific kind of silly. Everyone is playing it right now. The conversation is happening right now. By the time I get around to it in a few months the internet will have moved on and I will be the one sending messages to friends saying oh my god the bit where and they will all just reply with yeah mate we finished that in March. I know. I have done this before with other games. It is not ideal.
But I think the alternative is worse. Jumping in now, getting hooked, and then hitting something that is clearly still being worked on. A quest that does not track properly. A system that gets overhauled two weeks after I have already learned the old version. Sitting there knowing that the game I am playing is actively being changed under my feet. That drives me absolutely mad. I would rather wait and play the thing properly than spend the whole time feeling like I am playing an early access version of the actual experience.
So that is where I am. Crimson Desert on my PS5, installed, ready, and untouched. Watching the patch notes drop every couple of weeks. Waiting for the updates to slow down and for Pearl Abyss to sit back and say right, that is the game we wanted to make.
Then I will play it. And I suspect it is going to be absolutely incredible.
