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Crimson Desert feels like it was designed in a lab by someone who wanted to combine elements of all their favorite big budget action RPGs into the ultimate video game. It’s got the open-world adventuring of The Witcher 3, the slow horseback conversations of Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-ended puzzle solving of Tears of the Kingdom, and the do-whatever-you-want dynamic world of something like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto 5. And while it tries to smash all these things I love into one package, it ends up being a jack of all trades but a master of none. The adventuring and combat fall far short of the best open-world RPGs, the dialogue, characters, and story are laughably bad, the puzzles are unintuitive and janky, and the reactivity of the world around you is underwhelming. Even still, the fact that Crimson Desert’s massive adventure attempts all this is impressive nonetheless. With such a large game and review code arriving so close to launch (not to mention substantial bugs that delayed my progress), I still have a little bit more to go before I roll credits and finalize this review – but there have been high highs and low lows across the 110+ hours I’ve already played, as well as many moments where I was stunned by the sheer magnitude of the uneven world developer Pearl Abyss has created.
In its best moments, Crimson Desert has you wandering around arm wrestling, fishing, gambling, completing side quests, and just getting lost in an absolutely gorgeous open world where it feels like anything is possible. One moment I was playing a mini settlement builder, managing resources and sending my allies out to earn loot and resources on my behalf, and the next I was hunting wild animals and grilling them into a pile of meat to prepare for a big battle. But there were an equal number of occasions where I was absolutely dumbfounded by annoying choices, like how combat encounters almost always involve dozens of enemies and go on way too long, or how your paltry inventory space constantly fills up and forces you to part with items you’ve worked hard for. (That space was more than doubled during the review period due to an overwhelming amount of feedback and still doesn’t feel great.) Many of these issues get far worse the longer you play, as later on the size of enemy groups goes to ridiculous, Dynasty Warriors-levels, and a complete lack of storage chests to keep your hard-won loot in means you have to get rid of cool, unique gear when collecting fun items feels like a major part of the draw here. That’s right – if you can’t fit it on your person, there’s no way to keep it at all. Insanity!
The world itself is definitely one of the most impressive aspects of Crimson Desert, as you can see people walking around town and actually living out their day in real time. For example, if you send a caravan of followers to go build something, you can drop by during work hours to see them toiling away before heading back to bunk at night. In another instance, you might see a bounty posted for a known pickpocket, then find them one day practicing their trade in a completely different town, and can then choose to bring them to justice or let it slide. Traveling around the massive regions, hunting for loot, solving puzzles, and liberating areas can make for some seriously good times, especially if you’re like me and try to do things it feels like you aren’t supposed to do, like wandering far off the beaten path before you’ve even explored the starting area. It’s a kind of freedom that only games this absurdly large can pull off, and makes for some really memorable moments.
While the world you’ll explore is full of fun stuff to do, the stories you’ll find in it are consistently bad. From the moment you’re introduced to the first of its three playable characters – Kliff, a viking-coded warrior who is on a low stakes revenge quest against another group of barbarians – there’s very little to become invested in, and it only gets worse from there. The story is aimless, the characters are forgettable across the board, the dialogue is often pretty hard to listen to, and there’s an entire multi-chapter arc in the main questline that’s centered on a character who dies offscreen before the story even begins – they continually try to make you care about this person through multiple funeral scenes separated by hours and hours of game time. It’s odd because, with long sequences of talking to your companions and a lot of time spent watching cutscenes as part of the main story, it does seem like they expected people to care about this stuff, but almost none of it is really worth paying attention to and much of it is actively cringe worthy. That said, there are also a lot of cutscenes full of cool, anime-style fights – those are pretty sick.
This world is full of fun stuff to do, but the stories within it are consistently bad.
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Crimson Desert’s world is also hindered at almost every turn by jankiness and puzzling design choices. Some of the biggest misses are the boss fights, which abruptly take you out of the fairly casual action game combat that surrounds them and drops you into straight up soulslike fights against multi-phase enemies that feel extremely out of sync with the rest of the adventure. In one of the earliest examples, you carve your way through scores of bandits with ease, before concluding with a super long, three-phase boss fight that includes some segments where you’re just mercilessly swarmed by the bad guy while you have to dash around destroying totems. The only reasonable way to get through it is to have a ton of healing items on hand to eat by the fistful as you whittle down the enemy’s health bar. I love soulslikes and consider myself a tryhard who enjoys mastering perfect parry mechanics, and even with my background I found the vast majority of these boss fights to be unfun, poorly balanced, and downright annoying. It’s kind of wild how out of place they feel, and they are common enough to regularly hurt the pacing.
Combat in general is uneven to begin with, as Crimson Desert simply never knows when to end a fight. Most begin with a dozen or more enemies surrounding you, and then dozens more showing up as you take down the first wave, dragging things out for minutes on end. This is fine when you’re taking on some major quest, but when you’re just trying to cross a bridge and are expected to stop and fight 20 samey guards first, it really eats up your time. Even worse are the war scenarios that arrive in the middle and later stages of the adventure, where you’re asked to do ridiculous things like plant a flag in the ground while surrounded by dozens and dozens of enemies, completely unable to defend yourself while you slowly move a giant banner across the battlefield. It’s especially annoying that, although you can level up your weapons and armor to make all this combat easier, your power level almost never scales to the level that your enemies do, and you’re constantly outnumbered by loads of dudes who can take you out with a few lucky shots. As you can imagine, starting an already-too-long fight over again feels especially bad.
Beyond combat, there’s loads of stuff Crimson Desert tries that just doesn’t work at all, from extremely ill-advised stealth sections (which are exactly as bad as you’re imagining) to puzzles that often feel like you’re brute forcing your way through them rather than coming up with a creative solution. In one section, I had to climb to a higher area to solve a puzzle, but couldn’t reach that high due to stamina limitations. After searching for the “correct” way to climb up to the next floor, I ended up just cheesing my way up by finding a ledge that let me take a breather in a way that seemed very much unintentional. When I got to the top and solved the puzzle, it felt like I’d done something wrong, but that’s apparently just what you’re supposed to do to get through that section. In trying so many things, this RPG often feels like it's bitten off more than it can chew, resulting in pockets of gameplay like this that feel very underdeveloped.
As you complete quests, earn loot, and level up, you’ll gain access to some pretty neat abilities that change up the way you play. One branch of each playable character’s skill tree is dedicated to flying or gliding around to improve your mobility, while another unlocks new combat tricks, like the ability to bash enemies with your shield or dropkick foes and send them flying about 50 feet. Many of these unlockables are really interesting, like one that lets you grapple yourself across long distances and scale sheer walls in the blink of an eye. The other half of them are things I never really had any interest in buying, like basically all of the archery skills, which didn’t feel good no matter how much I invested in them. There are also a huge number of combat abilities that seem like they’re almost clones of one another, which would require me to memorize a whole new button combination to use them that I’d surely never remember.
PC performance is consistently impressive, but it's very far from bug-free.
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Part of this has to do with the control mapping, which is completely insane by default, and requires you to remember various multi-step button combinations to access abilities you’ll have to use all the time. It took me hours to remember that clicking the left thumbstick makes you crouch, holding down the left thumbstick brings out one of your special gadgets you’ll use all the time, and sprinting is, in fact, not on the left thumbstick at all, but instead asks you to tap the A button repeatedly to run, which seems crazy to me. (What is this, Grand Theft Auto?) There are a whole bunch of little mapping things like this that took me at least a dozen hours to get used to, and which I still occasionally fumble since so many abilities make use of the same buttons and require multiple inputs in a specific order to do the things you want.
One thing that never stops being incredibly impressive, however, is how good Crimson Desert looks and performs. I played exclusively on my high-end PC (we weren’t sent console codes ahead of launch), so I expect it to look glorious there, but it’s run quite nicely across all of the setups our team has tested as well, even lower-end ones. For an open world game of this scale, it’s simply wild how consistently it holds frames and looks beautiful doing it. That said, it tends to be another one of those games that looks better from afar. Environments and the massive number of enemies on screen are stunning to behold, but then you’ll get into a cutscene to talk to someone and their face will be a bit janky, with lip syncing that’s way off. Still, even when this RPG’s frustrating design choices made me want to rage quit, it was hard to stay mad for long when I got back to running around the massive map and just taking in the wildly good looking views.
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But just because its performance and graphics are awesome doesn’t mean Crimson Desert is free from bugs and technical issues, and the ones you sometimes get with RPGs of this size are exactly as bad as I feared here. I ran into all sorts of problems, from hard crashes to companions I was supposed to follow getting stuck in the environment until I reloaded. The worst bug came late in the main story, when a vital quest step didn’t register as I completed it, locking me out of progression entirely unless I reloaded a save file from seven hours earlier. I was able to proceed by copying a coworker’s save file (who was at roughly the same part of the story as me) and soldiering on that way instead – if I hadn’t, I would have likely thrown in the towel right then and there. Getting set back so far by a bug like that is devastating, and I know I wasn’t the only person to hit this one, though Pearl Abyss says it's managed to fix that particular issue ahead of launch. The team is doing its best to address bugs as they arise, but in a game this big, it’s hard to imagine it’ll be able to squash them all anytime soon.
I’ve played over 110 hours of Crimson Desert and already feel like I’ve seen just about all there is to see, but until I complete the main story and explore whatever secrets the endgame holds, I’m not ready to stamp a final score onto this ambitious yet flawed RPG quite yet. So far the highs have been very high, and the lows have been very low, which has made for an amusing adventure that’s also difficult to recommend outright. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story wraps up (though I’m not expecting much from it at this point) and what the post-game experience looks like. I should be ready with a final review in the coming days.
《深红沙漠》感觉就像是在实验室里设计的,有人希望将他们最喜爱的大型动作角色扮演游戏的元素组合成终极视频游戏。《巫师3》开启了《巫师3》的开放世界冒险,即《荒野大镖客:救赎2》的慢节奏对话,即《王国之泪》的开放式解谜,以及天际或侠盗猎车手5等无所不愿的动态世界。虽然它试图将所有我喜欢的东西都浓缩成一个包,但最终却成了所有行业的千金白银,却却成为无名之辈。冒险与战斗远未达到最佳开放世界角色扮演游戏的范畴,对话、人物和故事都显得糟糕,谜题缺乏直觉和动感,而你周围世界的反应却令人惊叹。尽管如此,尽管如此,深沉的《深空沙漠》的冒险尝试依然令人印象深刻。这款游戏如此庞大,且评论代码即将发布(更不用说导致进度延迟的重大漏洞),我仍需再多一些,然后才能完成评分并完成此评测——但在我已经投入的110多小时里,出现了高点和低谷,以及许多时刻,我对世界开发者Pearl Abys所创造的极不均衡程度感到震惊。
在最美好的时刻,深沉的沙漠让你在手臂摔跤、钓鱼、赌博、完成副业之旅中四处游荡,而仿佛身处一个绝对美丽的开放世界,仿佛一切皆有可能。有一刻,我在扮演一个小型定居点建设者,管理资源,并派盟友来为我赚取战利品和资源。而接下来,我则在猎杀野生动物,把它们装成一堆肉,为一场大仗做准备。但同样多的场合,我对烦人的选择感到极度震惊,比如战斗遭遇几乎总是涉及数十个敌人,甚至持续太久,或者你狭小的库存空间如何不断填满,迫使你放弃那些你辛苦工作过的物品。(由于大量反馈,审查期间该空间已翻了一倍多,但感觉仍然不太理想。)这些问题越长,你玩得越久,随着后来敌群规模的出现,故事变得荒谬至极,王朝战士级别,以及完全缺乏储物箱来维持你来之不易的战利品,意味着在收集有趣物品时,你必须摆脱酷炫而独特的装备,仿佛是这里吸引人的重要部分。没错——如果你无法将它固定在人身上,完全无法保持它。疯狂!
这个世界本身无疑是深奥的深奥沙漠之一,你可以看到人们在城里四处走动,却能真正地度过他们的日常生活。例如,如果你派一群粉丝去建造某物,你可以在工作时间看到他们辛勤劳作,然后在夜间返回铺位。在另一个情况下,你可能会看到一张为知名扒手发布的赏金,然后发现他们有朝一日在一个完全不同的城镇从事贸易,然后可以选择将他们绳之以法,或任其拖延。在大范围区域旅行、寻找战利品、解谜和解放区域,可能会带来一些非常美好的时光,尤其是当你和我一样,试图做一些你本不该做的事,比如在探索起点之前,就在远离小路附近游荡。这种自由只有如此庞大的游戏才能成功,并带来一些令人难忘的时刻。
你将要探索的世界充满了有趣的事情,但你在其中发现的故事却始终很糟糕。从你认识到它三个可玩角色中的第一个——克里夫,一位以维京为条目的的战士,正朝着对另一群野蛮人进行低风险的复仇之旅——那里几乎没有什么可投入的,而且情况只会因此变得更糟。故事漫无目的,人物们彻底遗忘,对话常常难以倾听,主任务线中存在着一个多章节的焦点,主角在故事开始前就在银幕上死去——他们不断通过多个葬礼场景,让你在游戏时间数小时后分开,来让你更加关心这个人。这很奇怪,因为由于与同伴交谈时长,并且大量时间在主讲过程中观看过场动画,他们似乎期望人们关心这些事情,但其中几乎都不值得关注,其中很多都令人感到无比渴望。话虽如此,还有很多充满酷炫动漫风格的闹剧的片段——这些动作相当糟糕。
这个世界充满了有趣的事情,但其中的故事却始终很糟糕。
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深情沙漠的世界几乎在每一个转折点都受到着动感和令人困惑的设计选择的阻碍。一些最大的失误是主力战斗,它突然让你摆脱了围绕它们的相当随意的动作游戏战斗,让你陷入与多阶段敌人的直立式战斗中,这些敌人感觉与接下来的冒险截然不同。在最早的一个例子中,你轻松地通过数十个土匪,最后结束了一场长达三阶段的激烈对决,其中包括一些片段,你只能被坏人无情地包围,而你却不得不四处乱跑破坏图腾。唯一合理的方法就是手头有大量疗愈物品,趁你小火吞服敌人的健康吧时,吃光。我喜欢灵魂,也认为自己是个喜欢掌握完美酱料机制的顽强者。即使有我的背景,我发现这些老板中绝大多数都觉得不有趣、平衡不均衡,而且完全令人讨厌。它们感觉有点离谱,而且常常常去伤害起脚。
一开始战斗并不均衡,因为克里姆森沙漠根本不知道何时该结束一场战斗。大多数从你周围十几个或更多的敌人开始,然后当你拖下第一波时,又有几十个出现,拖着东西不停地拖着几分钟。当你进行一些重大任务时,这没问题,但当你试图穿过一座桥,并期望先停下来与20名同样的警卫作战时,这确实会消耗你的时间。更糟糕的是,战争场景在冒险的中后期阶段出现,你被要求在战场上随意插上一面旗帜,周围环绕着数十个敌人,却在战场上缓慢移动一面巨大的旗帜时,完全无法自卫。尤其令人恼火的是,尽管你可以升级武器和护甲以使所有这些战斗变得更加轻松,但你的力量水平几乎从未达到敌人的水平,而且你身上总是被一大堆能用几记幸运镜头带你出门的家伙所占据。可以想象,重新开始一场已经太久的对决感觉尤为糟糕。
除了战斗之外,还有很多《深红沙漠》所尝试的东西根本行不通,从极其不明智的隐身部分(这些部分和你想象中的一样糟糕),到常常让人觉得你正在强行通过它们,而不是想出一个创造性的解决方案。在一个部分,我不得不爬到更高的区域才能解开谜题,但由于耐力限制,无法达到那么高的水平。在寻找“正确”的爬到下一层楼的方法后,我最终只是先切地寻找一个让我喘息的桥,显得非常无意。当我走到顶峰并解开谜题时,感觉好像做错了事,但显然这正是你为了完成这一部分而应该做的。尝试了太多东西,这款角色扮演游戏常常让人觉得被咬得比它能咬得一纸尽光,导致这类游戏玩法显得非常不发达。
当你完成任务、赚取战利品并提升水平时,你将获得一些相当巧妙的能力,从而改变你的游戏方式。每个可玩角色技能团队的一个分支致力于飞行或滑行,以提高你的机动性,而另一个则解锁新的战斗技巧,例如用盾牌攻击敌人或击倒敌人,并让他们飞行约50英尺。这些可解锁性中的许多都非常有趣,比如让你在远距离挣扎,并在眨眼间将陡峭的墙壁攀爬。另一半是我从未真正感兴趣过的东西,比如基本上所有射箭技能,无论我投入多少,这些技能都感觉不太好。还有大量战斗能力,似乎几乎是彼此克隆的,这需要我记住一个全新的按钮组合,才能使用我肯定永远记不住的按钮。
PC 性能持续令人印象深刻,但远未实现漏洞。
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部分内容与控制映射有关,默认情况下完全不正常,需要记住各种多步骤按钮组合,以便随时使用这些功能。我花了数小时才记得,点击左手的拇指棒会让你蜷缩起来,用左手手写手杖,让你一直使用一个特殊的小工具,而冲刺实际上根本不在左手的拇指上,而是要求你反复点击A按钮来跑动,这在我看来似乎很疯狂。这是什么,《侠盗猎车手》?有一大堆像这样的小地图,我花了至少十几个小时才习惯,而且由于许多能力都使用相同的按钮,需要按特定顺序进行多个输入,我偶尔也会摸索。
然而,有一件事从未停止过,那就是《深红沙漠》的出色表现和表现。我只在高端PC上玩过游戏(发布前我们没有收到主机代码),所以我预计它在那里会显得出色,但在我们团队测试过的所有配置中,它运行得相当不错,甚至更低端。对于如此规模的开放世界游戏来说,它始终能保持帧数,看起来美得美,简直太疯狂了。话虽如此,这往往是从远处看起来更出色的又一款游戏。环境以及屏幕上大量的敌人令人惊叹,但随后你会陷入一场与某人交谈的快门,而他们的表情则显得有些紧张,唇部同步也无异寻常。尽管如此,即使这款RPG设计选择令人沮丧,我依然忍不住忍不住想放弃,当我重新回到那张巨大的地图上,欣赏到那张非常漂亮的景色时,却很难长时间地保持愤怒。
蒂吉·特拉维斯最喜爱的角色扮演游戏
如果你想被运送到另一个世界,以下是我能想到的最佳出路目的地!
但仅仅因为它的性能和图形效果极佳,并不意味着《深红沙漠》没有漏洞和技术问题,而这类大型角色扮演游戏有时带来的缺陷和我在这里所担心的完全一样糟糕。我遇到了各种各样的问题,从艰难的撞车到同伴,我本该跟着被困在环境中,直到重新上架。最严重的漏洞出现在主报道的后期,当时我完成时,一个重要的任务步骤没有进行注册,导致我完全无法完成进度,除非我重新加载了七小时前的保存文件。我得以继续模仿同事的保存文件(他和我大致处于故事的同一部分),转而以这种方式参军——如果我没有,我很可能会在那时和那里随意扔毛巾。被这样的漏洞深深困扰,令人痛心,我知道自己并不是唯一能遇到这种情况的人,不过珀尔·艾比斯表示,在发布前,这个问题已经解决了。团队正在尽最大努力应对漏洞的出现,但在如此宏大的游戏中,很难想象它能在短期内彻底压垮它们。
我玩过110多个小时的《深红沙漠》,已经感觉仿佛看到了几乎所有值得看到的东西,但直到我完成主故事并探索终局所藏的秘密之前,我还没准备好在这个雄心勃勃但存在缺陷的角色扮演游戏中再添一记最终的评分。到目前为止,高点一直很高,低点也很低,这带来了一场有趣的冒险,也难以直接推荐。我期待看到故事的结局(尽管目前对此我并不抱太大期望),以及赛后体验的模样。我应该准备好在接下来的几天里进行最终审查。
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发表于 2026-3-19 13:54
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