Pearl Abyss has published the longest gameplay video preview yet for its upcoming title Crimson Desert. If you’ve been following the game, you know it has had a rather lengthy development.
Originally announced at G-Star 2019 alongside PLAN 8 and DokeV, it was scheduled to launch in Winter 2021, but Pearl Abyss decided to delay indefinitely. Crimson Desert re-emerged with a brief gameplay trailer released for Gamescom 2023, which proved it was alive and well.
The recent Gamescom 2024 was even more important, as that was the first time the game was actually playable. I got to try it myself while there, although it was a brief session focused entirely on boss fights. The demo allowed players to select between various bosses and fight them right away without much context or narrative involved. The fights were rather tough; thankfully, the demo included the ability to resurrect the player character after defeat, so we didn’t have to start every boss fight from scratch, which would have been a problem given the limited time. The combat system is heavily combo-based and already pretty fun, mostly because every attack felt satisfyingly weighty and crunchy.
However, I wasn’t equally impressed with the visuals. It’s not that they are bad, but they do seem to inherit what I always believed was a glaring flaw from Black Desert Online – a certain roughness that kind of ruined the otherwise great graphics. Crimson Desert is based on the same engine as BDO and similarly looks like it has little to no anti-aliasing. I sincerely hope Pearl Abyss finds some way to fix this ahead of the launch.
Which is still nowhere in sight, mind you. Despite the Gamescom 2024 demo and this fresh extended gameplay video preview, Crimson Desert still has no release window, and that’s not the only unknown. I asked Pearl Abyss whether it would feature multiplayer support as originally planned, and they told me it hadn’t been decided yet, which means the full feature set still has to be finalized. Recent rumors mentioned two potential launch windows: early 2025 and Q2 2025. I would put my money on the latter, particularly on the final part of the quarter, toward May or June, as the most likely candidates.
