222 hours. That's how long it took me to truly complete this game and by "complete" I mean the main story and all the side content I managed to find by myself without guides, exploring as much as I possibly could.


Before I get into why this game is so incredible and why I put so much time into it, I want to address its issues, because there are a few even if they are just minor flaws. Firstly, the controls- I really don't think are nearly as bad as people make them out to be. 95% of the time I have absolutely no problems with them, but occasionally you will try to get on your horse but no, not from this angle, or try to pick up an item but no, you just jumped on it because it didn't register your input properly. Input priority is something these developers clearly have not heard of, if there's an item right in front of me and I'm not in combat, the game should be able to figure out that by pressing "X" I do in fact want to pick it up and not jump around the room like a lunatic. Is it minor? Yes. Does it still get annoying if it happens every 30 minutes? Also yes.

The story is also something that a lot of people have criticized and while I totally understand how you could be disappointed if you expected a TW3 or RDR2 level story, I simply never had those expectations and I think Crimson Desert made it quite obvious from the beginning that it is not a story focused game. I would argue it's roughly on Skyrim's level while also having less lore as it's not a pre-established franchise; not horrible, but very clearly not the main focus, though the voice acting and motion capture manage to somewhat mask the mostly uninteresting dialogues.

The biggest flaw however is something I haven't seen a lot of people talk about and it's not even a flaw strictly speaking, it's more like unused potential; both Damiane and Oongka should not exist as playable characters. Now that might be somewhat of a hot take but let me explain. The way that they are currently implemented as an alternative to Kliff- the protagonist who you are forced to play as for every single main quest and various other activities (granted they now gave Damiane and Oongka the tools to at least complete puzzles by themselves) is simply poor game design. Depending on your playstyle you'll unlock Damiane at about 10-30 hours into the game, at which point you will most likely have just gotten used to playing as Kliff and are focusing on upgrading his gear and weapons and unlocking skills for him so most players might try her once or twice, realize you can't play as her during the main quests and just stick to Kliff at first, thinking maybe she'll become viable later.

Put in a few dozen more hours and you will unlock Oongka, another playable character who gets introduced so late that I genuinely wondered what the developers were thinking here; I put every single skill point and upgrade material into Kliff, I just reached a point where I truly feel like I'm (at least semi-) high level and then the game really expects me to switch to a new, bare bones, un-upgraded character who I have no experience with whatsoever, when there is also another character that was introduced way earlier I also haven't really had the opportunity to use yet because, oh right I forgot to mention, she simply disappears for a whole chapter or two and you can't use her.

Why? How and why was this idea accepted, developed and implemented into the final release of the game? The two missions in the main story where you actually have to play as Damiane and Oongka work quite well, similar to the Ciri missions in The Witcher 3, but they should have stayed just that: main story only characters. It's nice that they have their own moveset, weapons and even skills, but I can't help but feel like they should've scrapped the idea of having 3 characters and simply given Kliff their arsenal as well. Not because Kliff doesn't have enough variety already, quite the opposite, but I don't see the point in having rapiers, guns, hand-cannons, war hammers and axes with their own unique movesets, when the game itself actively discourages you from actually using them by locking them behind two characters that are simply inferior to the protagonist in every way. Despite all my complaining, the reason why I called it unused potential and not a flaw is that it doesn't directly affect my enjoyment of the game so it's really not as big of a deal as it might seem.


Now the good and trust me there is a lot:
The combat, exploration, atmosphere, world design, customization, graphics and progression is all absolute top-tier, genuinely some of the best I have seen in gaming ever and I am not saying this lightly.


The combat first and foremost is simply incredible. You start off with a simple sword and shield, some very basic combat moves, light and heavy attacks, shield bashes etc. that sort of stuff and at first it might seem like there isn't all that much build variety. If you keep progressing however, the game keeps throwing more and more weapons, skills, weapon upgrades (abyss gears), mounts and even magic imbuements at you, that towards the end you will feel like an end game boss yourself. A heavy tank, two-hander build that's focused on dealing massive single hit damage, to an agile dual wielding / ranged assassin, a fully melee wrestling / MMA fighter and everything in-between, it's all there while feeling extremely impactful and fun. The amount of ways in which you can approach a simple bandit encounter is ridiculous, not to mention the insane number of bosses (75 fully unique ones and significantly more variants) that all have their own movesets and abilities, that make sure you will never get bored of the combat, even if you stick to one single build throughout your entire playthrough.

To be fair, some of the them are significantly better than others and I think the overall boss quality is not quite on the same level as something like Elden Ring for example, but generally speaking I did enjoy most boss fights. Unlike in a game such as Dragons Dogma however, most abilities will also work against most enemies, which is a bit of a shame as I would have liked to see the game incentivize the use of certain abilities more to switch things up a bit and make you think. Aside from that, the only issue I really have with the combat is the difficulty which goes from genuinely challenging in the early-game, to laughably easy in the end-game but with the new difficulty update that might not be an issue anymore.

The world of Pywell itself is also simply incredible. It's easily the largest non-procedurally generated open world with such a high level of detail I have ever seen. From small towns and villages, to large cities, farms, countrysides, desolate mountains, dense forests, deserts, beaches, quite literally any setting you could possibly think of is in this game, all of which come with a truly impressive level of attention to detail and things to discover, whether it's caves, quests, bosses you name it really.

Aside from all the obvious and in-your-face stuff however, the world of Crimson Desert is also one of the most immersive and interactive ones I have seen, comparable to that of RDR2. You can talk to everyone, pet, pick up or hunt basically any animal, chop down trees etc. etc. but even the minor details that most people wont even notice such as being able to cut down tall grass with your sword, NPCs covering their faces if you hold a lantern near their faces, unmatched water physics that realistically moves around obstacles, both static and not, leaves flying around in forests that are actually physics-based and so much more it would take a whole paragraph to list everything.

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