The Ringer-Verse - ‘Crimson Desert’ Is Like Everything Else and Nothing Else | Button Mash

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

It’s real … but is it spectacular? Ben, Matt James, and Steve Ahlman gather to discuss one of the most ambitious, most anticipated, and most enigmatic games of the year, open-world action-adventure epic ‘Crimson Desert.’ They begin by breaking down why the game remained mysterious until its release, whether it lives up to the huge hype, how it incorporates some of the best aspects of other open-world classics, and some of its perplexing problems, along with their disagreements about the game, their shared wonder at its visuals and scale, and their sense of its significance. Then they predict the game’s Metacritic rating, share their own personal scores, and pass along some non-spoilery tips and tricks to ease the early hours. Email us at [e-mail]! Intro (0:00)First reactions to ‘Crimson Desert’ (2:00)Predictions and tips (1:21:24)Outro (1:27:35) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Matt James and Steve AhlmanProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone, it's Amy Polar, and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice. Just be yourself, and the guests will come. Don't be the celebrity that this is their, like, six things they're doing. I love two crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two? Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So, join me for Good Hang.

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Then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those WeatherTech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need WeatherTech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. Hello and welcome into the Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor for the Ringer and Crimson King of Button Mash.

There are three playable characters in Crimson Desert, and there are three playable podcasters on this episode of Button Mash. Let me introduce the other two. You know their names, joining me bright and early on the West Coast because we've got an embargo to beat. ringer deputy art lead Matt Grayman James Good morning Matt Good morning Ben Happy to be here

Happy to talk Crimson Desert I know you are I know you're a major morning person So this just suits you perfectly That's right I called you gray main James I've never seen you Without your cap on

So I can't actually tell You got any gray in that mean The beard is getting a little A little gray Yeah okay Which you know that's most of what you can see of Cliff Depending on what you're wearing It's true

Touch of gray. Kind of suits you anyway. Also joining us, blonde is the day he was born. Ringer's senior audio producer and Midnight Boy, Steve Abyss Artifact, Alman.

This is actually the Yasified DLSS-Five version of me, so not a gray hair to be seen. I could tell. Well, fellas, the gaming gods have been good. We have had our hands full, Resident Evil Requiem, Slade Aspire 2,

Pokemon, Pocopia, all released in the span of one week not to mention Marathon. If you're an RPG player, you've already gotten esoteric ebb and Monster Hunter Stories 3 this month. So the well has not been dry. We have not been in a Crimson Content Desert,

but every game is going to have to make way for the new behemoth on the block. The open world action adventure RPG, in quotes, called Crimson Desert. After almost a decade in development, after all the hype, it's here or about to be. It's out on Thursday for PlayStation Xbox, Windows, and Mac. We've been waiting a while.

Can you believe that the day has come? The Crimson Day has dawned. A red-letter day, you might say? You might. Yeah, this is one of the last vestiges of a, is this game real discourse for me that I've ever had? Not since Wu Kong have I been like this skeptical about a game. Yes, yes.

And we can't call this the biggest game of the year in terms of anticipation, not with GTA6 still on the schedule, plus the other huge hits from the past few weeks I just mentioned. But it might be accurate to call it the biggest in terms of content. And maybe in terms of anticipation, too, if we exclude sequels and games based on high profile IP, known quantities, essentially. Is that fair? Because leading up to release, the buzz has been loud, as has the skepticism. And we're about to tell. you whether one or the other was warranted or possibly both. But I don't know that there's another game that has prompted this much intrigue, just looking ahead to what's coming the rest of the year. And it's funny because I feel like a lot of people, this hasn't been on their radar at all. Meanwhile, there's been a large community of people who have been losing their mind and anticipation. So it's an interesting hype cycle for this game. Yeah. It's not quite Grand Theft Auto 6, but.

Not quite, no, although it's been in development for almost this long, I've been really looking forward to this podcast, not that I don't look forward to every episode of But Match, but this one is special because we're kind of in the dark here. Because on Buttmash, even when we have advanced access to a game, we usually don't really rush to publish a podcast the second the embargo lifts. If that's a good while before the release date, you like to take our time, as much time as we can with a game,

so that we can form our informed opinions and then tell you what we think when you can play it too. And I'd actually love to hear from our listeners whether they like that or not. Do you want the earliest possible snap judgments? Do you want spoilery deep dives later on or something in between, which is more the way we do it? Email us at ringerverse gaming at email.com. But in this case, it barely makes a difference because the Crimson Desert embargo is 6 p.m. Eastern the day or evening before release. which in theory is precisely when this podcast will be posted. So combine the mostly mind-flowing footage that has surfaced of this game,

the teases about the scope of it, a map that's more than twice the size of Skyrims, with, as you alluded to Steve, all the reasons to reserve judgment. The late embargo, which is not always the best sign. What are they hiding? The fact that this game is developed and published by Pearl Abyss, a Korean company known for the massively multiplayer online RPG Black Desert Online, which is popular, has a solid player base, but I would say is slightly lower profile in the West, at least, and also that's their DNA.

That makes this their first single player offline game. Add the fact that it uses a proprietary engine called Blackspace, a choice that sometimes slows down development and leads to lots of bugs and instability. the fact that Pearl Abyss has been quite cagey about showing the game running on non-PS5 Pro consoles and distributed only PC codes to reviewers. That's the way we played it. Put all of that together,

and you have sort of a perfect storm of high hopes and serious doubts. Just like, would it be only a pretty face? Would it also have a pleasing personality? How would it play? How would it run? Like you said, Steve, rarely have I begun a game with as wide a range of plausible potential outcomes, ranging from masterpiece cinema to disaster.

And it was just an absolute enigma, the likes of which we don't often get these days. And now we know it's real, but is it spectacular? Well, that's what we are here to discuss. And look, think of this as our reviews in progress, right? Because we might be in progress with this game for months. the reviewer briefing that I attended before they sent the codes out,

they were just like, look, do your best. Play as much as you can. You are probably not going to finish this thing. Wow, before the release, which is not the typical messaging, but I appreciate the honesty. And so, as usual, we're going to steer clear of story spoilers.

We'll talk about the mechanics and things that have appeared in previews, but specific plot twists, not all of which we have seen anyway. We will not divulge here. And we're going to, at the end of this episode, guess the Metacritic rating. We're going to take advantage of the timing of this podcast recording because we don't know. We don't know what anyone else thinks.

We don't even really know what each other thinks. So we're about to find out. So we're going to guess what the consensus response to this game will be. And we're also going to give our own ratings. So maybe before we dive a little deeper, we can just give our high-level reviews slash impressions so far. And I should say that we have what combined much more than a hundred hours in this game, much of which is Matt. Most of that belongs to Matt. Matt may be close to that on his own, but I am at 96 hours. Okay. Lord, I don't know how you find the time, as we've established,

you have a secret time turner or something, but you've played a time of this game, and yet you even probably have sort of scratched the surface. And I am less than a halfway. through. Yes. And I played a bunch of it too. Put it all together. It's a ton of time. And yet there's a lot that we haven't seen here. So Matt, since you have seen the most, tell us what you make of Crimson Desert. I think this is going to be a very interesting review period. Yeah. I'm going to just briefly think, explain what I expect to see review wise and then tell you where I give your score yet. I won't.

I won't. Not going to give the score, the number. But I wouldn't be surprised to see scores ranging from like 6.5 out of 10 to like five stars

out of five stars. Yes. I think that there are a number of things in Crimson Desert that are worthy of criticism. I think there are frustrations involved

in the game. And I also think that it is a generational exploration game that has got me so entangled in it. I haven't quite been this obsessed and wrapped up by a game world since probably Legend of Zelda Winwaker. came out. And that includes Eldon Ring, obviously. That was a while ago. So I think that we have a lot to talk about today. I think there are things about this that aren't for everyone, but I do feel like

for me, this game, even with its flaws, is going to be something that I am going to remember for the rest of my life. That's wild. I'm impressive, truly impressive. I have gotten the sense from our pre-release slacking that if Matt is closer to the 10 out of 10 end of the scale, then Steve might be closer to the aforementioned 6.5 hater that he is. Right. So Steve lay into it if you so desire.

All right. So it's definitely not fuck this game because it's not. It isn't. But it's kind of fuck this game a little bit. Because I am both wildly impressed at what this game is hoping to achieve. And simultaneously absolutely baffled and enraged at almost every decision that it chooses to make for me, the player. And I think in like most of its, you know, marketing and things that it wants to be on its face is entirely admirable. And in line with every game that Matt just mentioned,

it has the breadth and depth of, attempted depth and breadth of an Eldon Ring or a Breath of the Wild to entirely explore and immerse yourself in ways that are kind of unimaginable. And has the sort of like attention to detail in the things that the player character can do that attempts to be something like a regular character, Dead Dead 2, that even the banal minutia of interacting with the world is represented.

Like, I have quests where I've just taken a broom and cleaned the chimney. And I have never done that again willingly and chose you not to. If you stopped here before the butt that's coming, sounds like a great game. It sounds like a great game, but I think that at every turn for, you know, the first, I'm going to say, 10 hours that I played this, it is actively arguing against me. in anything resembling intuition or intuitive gameplay that makes this an enjoyable experience because I don't think anything in this game

in the first 10 hours is like ultimately rewarding you or enticing you to play it again and it is an active determination and will to keep going until you are where Matt is right now and I'm not saying that you're that you're being dishonest Matt But this is got, for me, this will be one of those games where if I somehow manage to put in 200 hours into it, I'm going to just have to say that it's great for the sake of my life that I can't say that I've wasted that amount of time on a bad game. It'd be pretty impressive if Matt had sunk 96 hours into this thing just to do a bit. And he's just like, whatever.

He can't. I'm committed to this podcast. You are. Yeah, the ratio of playing to recording time when it comes. to buttmash and when it comes to Crimson Desert specifically, slightly skewed. Although I could talk about Crimson Desert for nearly as long as it takes to play Crimson Desert. Don't worry, we won't. Arjuna would not be happy. Art is subjective. All experiences are valid. However, Steve is wrong.

Right. Of course. This is a good game. This is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious games I've ever played, which it sounds Like you would not disagree with. I would not disagree. It is one of the most ambitious games I have seen probably since like Death Stranding. Yeah. I kind of can't believe it's real, though when you consider that it started out as an MMO, as a prequel to Pearl Abyss's existing MMO almost a decade ago,

it starts to make more sense. It might be the best-looking game I have ever played, purely in terms of photorealism and lushness. This is if you have a... very good PC and are not playing it on any console, by the way. Even if you don't have a very good PC, because I don't. And we cannot speak to the console experience. And the fine folks at Digital Foundry are doing their deep dives on all the versions.

And based on what we've seen so far, it doesn't seem as if it's going to be a sort of cyberpunk level launch disaster. But your mileage may vary, right? And it's not going to look the same on a base PS5 or Xbox as it does. on a souped-up high-end PC. But I can testify, as someone who was quite concerned, that I would not be able to run this game at all, because I played this thing on a work-issued laptop.

And shout out to the work laptop. Dude, I got a Dell, and guess what? It's actually sort of sneaky powerful, and it played this game actually perfectly fine. I had to turn some settings down. I'll get into that. But it did not compromise my experience. but it absolutely has the potential to take over your life.

And I want to spend 200 hours in this world. Will I end up doing that? Doubtful because I have a family. I don't know how they would feel about that. But my heart desires to spend that much time. And with my gray main family in the world of the Crimson Desert. And if I had to explain the concept of an old, open world video game to someone who had never played one, I might show them this just because

it's every game in one game for both better and worse. You can get lost in this game in good ways and also bad ways. It can be overwhelming. There's always going to be a tradeoff if you're stuffing this much into a single game and this many mechanics and this many areas. Of course, it's going to get complicated. It's not going to be for everyone. There's going to be some jankiness or some cumbersome aspect to it. But if you can get lost in this game in good ways and bad ways, for me, it's mostly good ways. So we're going to wrap our heads around this thing as best we can. And the pleasant surprise, I think, for me, is that I did not actually bounce off this thing. This was not a case of having to force myself to play for podcast purposes. I was worried that

that would be the case because all the pre-release messaging, the reviewer briefing that I mentioned was, look, there's no tutorial and we're just going to plunge you down in this giant world and you've got to figure out where to go and what to do. That is not my experience with Crimson Desert. You can play it that way, but it does hold your hand. It does introduce you to its mechanics and its areas. And yes, because I was worried. That completely open-ended, where do I go? What do I do next? That doesn't always work for me as much as I admire it and appreciate it

and I just have to commit to it and invest in it. But that's not what this is. When I said quote-unquote RPG, obviously there's a lot about it that's RPG-ish, but it's much more of an action-adventure game. It does remind me much more of Red Dead Redemption 2, of Breath of the Wild Tears, the Kingdom. of Assassin's Creed, Ghost of Yote type games,

not saying it's as good as all of those games, just that it's more in the mold of those games than it is, say, Dragon's Dogma to or Skyrim or Kingdom Come Deliverance to, which are all great games, but also do not hold your hand, right? And this is actually a nice middle ground for me. So, Matt, how did you feel about how it onboarded you, basically?

I think it's a rough start in this game. So I agree with Steve on that front. I think you have to come into this game prepared to be attentive to all of the things that the game is trying to teach you at the start. You need to be prepared to learn. And if something pops on screen, you need to make sure you're reading it and taking that in. because there is a tremendous amount to learn here, and a great amount of it is not intuitive at all. One of the bigger criticisms that people will have with this game

is that a lot of the way that things are designed is a bit obtuse. They do a lot of stuff in ways that feel like they've never played games before, and they do a lot of other stuff in ways that feel like, have they ever stopped playing games for a second? there's this dichotomy, like in the control scheme, like there's, when you're jumping between platforms in this game, you would think in a normal game like, okay, you'll move forward and hit the jump button, which you can do.

Yeah. But there's also a way of precision jumping this game where you hold the left bumper in. You'll get an icon on screen. You aim the icon and then hit X. And that is cumbersome. A platformer, it is not. No. Right. And it is something that people will initially say, this feels awful. And it doesn't feel super great. But there are all of these little design decisions that are just like, how did you come up with this? Like the inventory wheel sort of system that is bound to holding left or right on the D-pad at first makes absolutely no sense. The menu system to get into your menu. use, you have to hold start and then navigate up or down to whichever page you want.

There's all these things that are like very hard to grasp while you are trying to do various different things all at once. So the onboarding procedure for this game is pretty bad. But hours later into the game when all of these things are second nature and they're not clouding your view of what you're experiencing, it's a different story. Yeah, I think that's all true when it comes to the UI and the menus and the navigation and everything. But where I think it's less true is in terms of missions and the main quest line and where do I go and what do I do, which is often the thing that puts me off the most.

That can be very intoxicating for people. It's just, hey, you set me down in this giant world. I now have complete freedom. For me, it's almost paralyzing because I just don't know where to go or what to do and how much time am I going to invest in this thing and what can I accomplish in a short play session. In this game, though, and I know that Matt, you think that this is probably not the ideal way to play. But if you want to play this way, if you just want to follow along the linear main quest line, you can do that quite easily.

There is never a time when there is not an objective. there's not a mission, there's not an icon on a screen that is saying, here's where you go, here's what to do next. And at least initially, until I got more comfortable exploring,

I was very grateful for that because I could just play and progress and feel like I was on the right track. And that's my biggest concern with a game like this that I just won't know where to go or what to do.

And I never had that sense in this game. Yeah. My biggest problem is with the onboarding, and it kind of makes me feel a tad more antagonistic when I play it. Because I think the biggest thing about what all of these great games that we compare this game to, like an Eldon Ring or a Zelda, even a Dragon's Dogma, too, which I think is actually a great comp for this in certain ways, is that like the onboarding process actually teaches you and makes you at least feel like you are playing the game. and is playing you right. And I'm not just talking about tutorials, but I'm talking about like those first few hours that immediately, if not reward you,

like give you some level of dopamine or reassurance that this is done properly. And to me, like Crimson Desert is that meme of the person screaming in the back of the car at their kid, like just be normal. And Crimson Desert is just like, ah, like that. For the first 10 hours of this game, And if you're not down for that, that is going to be like, might be like some of the worst

gaming you've ever had because of the fact that it's going to offer you everything at the start and nothing works. I think the precision jumping and the picking up items. Oh, my God. Very finicky at first. It wasn't even that. It's about having to lock onto a character simply to talk to them. Yeah.

and not have to like listen to them and like I walk through a shop. You might just want to greet them, Steve. Yeah. You might want to pick-tocket them. Just wave at them. I waved it every single beggar and gave them like five bucks because I didn't realize how much money I even had. Me too. I was a big spender.

I was just splashing cash all over the place. You want some arms. You're the king of the beggars now. Yeah. There's a quest line for that. There is a quest line for that, it seems. But no, I think that like the biggest pushback that I've had with this game is the fact that it never, never actually felt like it was rewarding me as I was playing it until I already have this

like sort of idea of how I think the game is played and then I just go along with that. And this isn't me saying like, oh man, if this game was just normal, it would be a masterpiece because I don't like to think that like there can be only one way to make an adventure game or only one way to make certain games that we think games should be played in order for them to be good. I don't want to be that person. But in every formal convention of an adventure game, action RPG, action game, this goes against that. And only until you learn the game on its terms,

will you be rewarded for it? And for some gamers like myself, that is too much to ask for. Stubborn Steve Alman. There are definitely times where, like, you know, it's not just adjusting to the way things are done. There are some things that are like, this design is just objectively not great in this instance.

Like, I had my frustrations too early on. In fact, I have a quick little story of my frustrations, which was right at the jump of the game, there is this mission that, from my understanding, has been fixed. Oh, love this. there's a very early mission where the mission is you are to create. It says fish porridge, right?

That is the mission. And you go to the vendor and they give you all the ingredients. They're like, I just don't know how to cook it. Can you cook it? And you're like, okay. So the prompt on the screen on the left, the mission title will tell you that the mission is to cook fish porridge, right? So I go to the cooking pot and I have my ingredients and I see.

oh, there's actually a few options. I can create a hearty fish porridge or a fish porridge or a modest fish porridge. Yes, just your regular bog standard fish porridge. I was like, oh, you know what? I have like a lot. She actually gave me more ingredients I need. I'm just going to create a hearty one. I'm going to like overachie here.

You got fancy. Yeah. It turns out that in the details of the quest at the time, it said make three modest fish porages. I had made one hearty fish porridge and as a result, did not have the materials needed at that point afterwards to make three modest fish porridgees.

Sounds like a reading comprehension issue. Oh no, that's, that's, yeah, and to a degree it is absolutely my fault. But simple mistake, obviously. And I was like, okay, well, I'll just get more of the materials needed to make the modest fish porridge. Yeah, easily rectified.

Sure. I love fishing. I'll go get more fish. Right. So take my fishing rod and I go down to the water and for 40 minutes I am unable to catch fish.

Sometimes they're biting. I end up jumping into the water when I see a school of fish and grabbing fish with my hands. And I later learn that I didn't know how to fish properly and here's why.

When you start fishing, there are controls listed on the bottom right. There's a control that says move with the right stick or you were to move the line. And then there is reel-in, which you would wind the right stick. Say move is left stick. Reel-in is circling around the right stick.

So I was like, okay, that's simple enough, fine. So when a fish bites on my line, I start tugging and reeling, instantly flies off every single time, every single time for 40 minutes. I later learn that once the fish starts biting, while I am looking at that fish, because the fish is what I'm looking at,

in the bottom right-hand corner, it all of a sudden tells you you can hook the fish by hitting right trigger. And I never saw that because I was never looking in the bottom right-hand corner while the fish was on the line. Got to set that hook. It's little things like this.

So it took me an hour of time to end up making the modest fish porridge and this is the language on this quest I understand has since been fixed but like there are tons of little design things in this game like that where

you're just like why did you design it? Why wouldn't you tell me that I could hook the fish in the controls listed at the start of fish? Why wouldn't why did you not say modest fish porridge in the quest like list? Matt let me tell you something.

If I was confronted with four different types of fish porches, I'm uninstalling the game. I'm telling you that right now. If I have to, like, if I have to discern that, like, you lost me there already. And that, and that's the type of thing. I'm like, I get it. They want to do so, so, so much. But like, there's nothing in this game that's offering me any sort of onboarding to reward me for trying those things. It is only figure it out. And if you don't figure it out, too bad. You're going to keep figuring it out. Like, I'm not, I'm not going to be surprised if a third of your playtime ends up being fishing because of the ways that those

quests are structured. No, I'm really good at it now. Now that I think I certainly hope you are. Get goods. It sounds like a skill issue to me. No, I think it's supposed to mirror the frustrations of real life fishing. That's true to my experience as an angler, I would say. But, no, I've had that same experience where sometimes things are complicated just because they inevitably have to be you're cramming this many mechanics into a game. It's a lot to remember. There's going to be a learning curve. And once you get a hang of it, then it's rewarding. You are the master of your domain. And that kind of comes with the territory. And ultimately, the first five hours or so might be the tiniest fraction of the two to three hundred hours that this game offers you. I also think that,

As you said, Steve, there's a lot about this game that is not normal. And that is both a blessing and a curse because many of the best things about this game are that it is not normal. It's an extremely abnormal game in a lot of good ways, too. And some of it is just that things are sprung upon you, you know, 20 hours into the game, I discover that there's a banking system. Because I just, I happen to wander into a bank. and there was a giant teller, and suddenly I was learning all about interest and investing, and I'm kicking myself because I could have invested 20 hours ago.

I could have made my money work for me. That compound interest could have piled up by that. Investing late, it happens to us all, Ben. Yeah, got to start saving early. But I'm constantly still coming across things like that, where it's like, what, did not know this was in the game? And sometimes the game has its ways of telling you those things. It introduces those concepts in the course of a quest line.

Or a crow randomly shows up and lands on you and brings you a letter to tell you something. And I say, thank you, Crow, how consider it of you to tell me about that game mechanic. But yeah, there's a lot to wrangle here. And for me, it's mostly charming after you get past the initial. You know, Matt, because I was slacking you to be like, I can't unequip my weapon. I have to be unarmed for this mission. I will fail if I'm holding a sword,

but I can't just go into my inventory and press unequip on my sword. It's grayed out for some reason. Instead, you have to put fists into your secondary weapon slot and then equip your secondary weapon. Weapon wheel with unarmed options. Yes, so things like that. The puzzles also.

Yeah, let's talk about the puzzles. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business. And even this podcast, that's why I trust Spectrum Business. They keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services, plus 24-7 U.S.-based support. Millions of business owners already trust Spectrum business. So visit Spectrum.com slash business to learn more. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. are here and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, wishes, and misses. Predict the spread, the total points, and even the game winner.

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Is that the main puzzle of the game? Yes, that's the meta puzzle. But yes, sometimes, look, the setup for this game, which I probably should have mentioned earlier, without giving anything too detailed away that you don't learn almost immediately, You play as this rooting warrior named Cliff, Cliff with a K, it would not quite be as fitting if it were Cliff with a C, but even so. And Cliff is a warrior, and he is gruff, gruff cliff, and he is a gray main, which is a faction that is in one particular part of this gigantic continent. And in the beginning of the game, your gray main gang gets split up and attacked. And it turns out that there's something supernatural about Cliff and he gets the second crack at things.

And so for the first part of the game, at least, you're getting the gray main gang back together. You're trying to round up your buddies who have been split up, essentially. And it's a fantasy setting, you know, kind of your classic medieval for the most part, except that it's not pure. fantasy because there's also sort of a futuristic steampunkish sci-fi elements to this and sort of a supernatural mythological element to this. It's a really interesting blend of influences and sometimes gets wacky and weird. Like this game is quite funny sometimes. So I give it kudos for that. But there are many types of gameplay. There's combat, which I think is strong. We can get into that. But there's also puzzles.

And some of the puzzles depend on your axiom force. I keep wanting to call it Axiom Verge, but that's not the name of it. But it's essentially a Tears of the Kingdom-style way of grabbing stuff and manipulating it and twisting it around and reorienting it to solve various puzzles. That's not the only kind of puzzle that you will confront in this game. but there is a distinct lack of signposting in the puzzles. And obviously, there's a fine line there. Puzzles should be initially kind of confusing. You shouldn't be able to solve them immediately.

And you should get some sense of satisfaction when you finally figure them out. But too often in Crimson Desert, it was unclear in a way that I found unsatisfying because it became trial and error. And sometimes I would solve a puzzle and not know how I did it exactly. and the parameters of the puzzles were just not made clear in the way that I wanted too often. And I think that that's like, again, the clear frustration that I would have

when it comes to puzzles here because I think my main question for the game designers of Crimson Desert is when do you want to either subvert or issue traditional game design to make something compelling or interesting

versus actually taking the time to teach the play and give them tools to be rewarded for thinking the way that you do. Because that to me is just the testament of good game design. If you give the player the tools and onboard them in a way that makes them educated in your game's mechanics while still allowing them the freedom of thought to solve something, that's where a good game is made. And especially like with the puzzles of this game, forget trying to. trying to know the mechanics of how to incorporate everything that you have.

Because like I've seen like a couple of times where like you could use your sword to like reflect light off of things to burn them and stuff like that. Never really reinforced, never actually shown to you that this is like a main way to like burn away Ivy or certain things in the world. I think that to me is what makes something more and more rewarding for a puzzle is if the game enforces the fact that you can do something. And I think my main question to you, Matt, is like, does that matter

when it comes to making a gaming experience that's rewarding? Because for me, it's not. Well, I think that, man, the puzzles in this game are a huge topic because I think a lot of people are going to come to this game, you know, looking for Red Dead, right? And they're going to hit a lot of puzzles

that are puzzle game level puzzles. And I think the difficulty of a lot of these puzzles is pretty high. I think the vast majority of the puzzles are good. I think that there are a few that are horrible. I do think, though, that the first, so basically the tiers of the kingdom of this is that above the game world sits the abyss high above.

And that's you've probably seen in trailers, you know, cliff falling from the abyss down to the main world. tough thing to make the abyss above something, but yeah, we get it. True, but it's very tears of the kingdom coded in that way too. But the abyss is primarily puzzle-based, and it has puzzles that operate in a certain way. And the first abyss puzzle that you encounter as part of the mainline quest of the story, I think they could do with a bit more hand-holding on that, because that initial puzzle sets a lot of rules for what the abyss

puzzles are like, how they function. And you can discover the way that first puzzle works on your own. I feel like most people are going to get a little stuck there for a while. So I think that could be handheld a little better.

The deeper into the game you go, the more familiar with their sort of game logic you are, the less frustrating these puzzles tend to become. Now there are, again, some puzzles that are bad.

There are a few of them. Not most of them, not a lot of them. I think there are a few that are bad. But the big benefit that players will have that we all didn't, right, is that if you get stuck, you just go online and look at it, right? I was in the Discord,

the review Discord, constantly sort of interacting with people, sharing knowledge and everything. And that was a really fun experience that kind of reminds us. reminded me of blueprints, just in that way of discovery in a game before it's come out. That has so much to figure out. But I think that the puzzles are going to really mess people up and hamper a lot of people's enjoyment who aren't puzzled people.

Now, people who do like puzzles, I think are going to find a lot to like here eventually. Yeah. Yeah. And I can't emphasize enough how much is crammed into this game. You mentioned the cooking. the number of different options for fish porridge. It's very Breath of the Wild-ish, but even more extensive. Even in that sense, though, one of the weird little quirks of this game is that whenever you go into a shop and you find an item or a type of food for the first time, you have to learn it, essentially, by just kind of putting your cursor over it or selecting in a menu.

and so you're constantly just acquiring knowledge about bread. Yeah, Cliff is learning beer. Yes. Which I'm like, I haven't said this guy lived long enough to know bread at this point. Like, there's got to be something that this guy knows before we came into his life. The players came into his life. Yes. Yes.

You have discovered bowls and plates. What? What were you using? Gotta catch them all, guys. No judging. But yeah, I mean, Cliff is, I don't know how to explain his. his complete ignorance in every way. But he is essentially just like a babe in the woods.

He's brick tamland of video games. And he says, I love lamp. I love bread. I love bull. So that was just a funny little quirk. But there's so much in this, there's sort of a management sim, because you essentially, you know,

as you collect gray main buddies and allies, you can dispatch them to do things. You can build up your camp, which is one of the more, Red Dead-ish elements. I don't think any game has reminded me more of Red Dead 2 than this game. Just in terms of what it's like to be in this world, the depth and detail of it,

the deliberate pace at which it encourages you to play, that base that you develop and the faction that you collect, it's extremely Red Deadish. Now, I think it falls short, far short, of Red Dead story-wise, at least in what I've experienced. That is one of the weaknesses. I wouldn't say it's got nothing going for it. The writing and voice acting just on a line-by-line level is fine, is good even.

Yeah. But I don't care deeply about Cliff. It's not the narrative masterpiece that Red Dead did. No, but not, you know. But to me, I think that's what makes Red Dead so special is because of the fact that the story, like, the story is so immersed. and so incredible that it almost makes you

the player role play Arthur Morgan. Like you will just have him fish for a while because you think that that's who he is. And like he'll like all of those things that can be done outside of the main story adds to the depth in who you think that my character might be inhabiting such a beautiful and amazing world.

What this game has is a beautiful and amazing world with a character that, to me is absolutely nothing. I mean, you're talking about Breath of the Wild too, then. Yes. But like... Yes. Okay, so fine. We have like 35 years of precedent with behind that character to like

imbue upon him some meaning rather than a game like Red Dead that tells you exactly who a character is. As opposed to Crimson Desert, that actually makes a character kind of nothing. And then you need to learn what bowls and bread are and doesn't know how to fish, doesn't know how to do,

anything and just kind of talks in grunts and all those things. But all of that wouldn't matter because if the game world and the story and all of the immersion that happens within, again, I don't want to be hung up on these first 10 hours, but I'm very much an anti-it-gets-good after X-Hours gamer. And I love the fact that both you, Ben, and Matt have been enjoying this for a lot more hours than that it is great. But to me, that's a lot to ask for something that you're just not giving me any form of reward into who this character is, what the story is, to immerse me in a world that is fully realized but not presented to me in a way that makes it that attractive, only for the

pure fact that it is discovery. Yeah, it's a barrier to entry for sure. Now, it helps that that 10 hours might be 5% of the game. So in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket. That's also daunting because not everyone has that kind of time. And it is tough to say, oh, just watch, you know, it gets good in season three. That's essentially, but I didn't find it to be that dramatically tough to get engaged in. But yes, your mileage may vary.

And you can customize Cliff. You can shape the way you want to play and you can express your preferences just in terms of play style. And so what you wear and the skill tree, which is an excellent. excellent skill tree. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. There's a fine art to a skill tree. And easy to respect if you need to.

There's a common item for that. Yes, you are not locked into your choices forever, and you will want to do that depending on where you are in the game. And there's a real sense of progression and everything that you unlock actually gives you some tangible upgrade and ability. And another clever thing that I haven't seen much, if at all, is that you can learn a lot of those abilities just by observing them in the game world kind of organically. And so you can buy them. You can use your abyss artifacts to upgrade or you can just kind of come across them. And they don't skimp on

the abyss artifacts either. You're going to get those pretty regularly. They will drop if you have a big fight of some sort and there's a clump of enemies. You will often get that instant validation and satisfaction of, oh, I can get stronger now in some very tangible way that affects the way I play. But it's true that you're limited in terms of shaping the story. It's interesting. You can interact with almost everyone in this world on some surface level, but there are no dialogue trees in this game. You don't get to choose what Cliff says, right? And so a couple times. But yeah, it's definitely no Boulder's Cape. No, it's very rare. And you can choose which quest lines to pursue and you can ignore the main quest line entirely and play to your heart's content.

That's what I did. Yeah, but there's sort of limited interactivity in certain ways, even though there's extremely impressive interactivity in other ways. And just like, you know, is there a GTA-style wanted level system in this game? Yep. There's that. There's just stuff that like would be the selling point for many other games. It's almost just an afterthought. It's just part of your fish porridge of Crimson Desert. And that's just incredibly impressive because I just think of the amount of time and effort that went into making this thing. It's sort of staggering, as are the visuals. And I know we mention that, but I don't want to undersell that. Right. Because of course, it's cool to say, gameplay matters more than graphics. And it's true, too. And it's especially true these

days because usually the distinctions aren't that great, you know, like we're all sort of jaded and we've seen these great-looking games and how much better, quote-unquote, does one game look than another. Plus, many games are built in the same sort of engines. I just read in the Game Discover Co newsletter this week that the percentage of games that weren't built in some sort of off-the-rack preset engine that a lot of companies use, it's decreased from 27% in 2017 to 13% last year. So it's very rare now that something is not built in Unity or Unreal or Godot or whatever. And it's risky. There's a reason for that because you want to start with those tools and those scripts and something that's proven instead of striking off on your own. But if it works,

and this time it worked, it is spectacular because it's a real differentiator. It doesn't just look like any other AAA Unreal game, it looks like I've never seen anything like this really. I think in particular, the incredible draw distance is the thing. And it's the macro and the micro because often the weak point of games with great graphics are like you'll look at something super close up and then the textures expose themselves. You know, you look at a leaf or something or a fern and it looks like you're on N64 or something. not here. You can zoom in on stuff

and it looks fantastic but also, and I don't want to get to Todd Howard about you can see that mountain you can go to it. But even when you're looking clear across the map

and this map is enormous, you can see that stuff and it appears to be and maybe there's some trickery. I don't know how they pull this off but it appears as if they're just rendering this stuff clear across the map

because you can see individual trees. swaying in the wind, what would take you probably like half an hour to get to? And somehow it's dynamically moving. It's not just shadowed as well. Yeah. And they're shadowed. And there's, you know, wind and things are blowing and their leaves scattered through the air. And it's just so dynamic. And there were absolutely times where it was, it was really, you know, it's hard to impress us these days when it comes to graphics. But this was literally like breathtaking, jaw dropping. I just had to sort of stop and take in the scene. And again, I was not playing anywhere close to top specs here.

Right. I think you're probably playing fairly comparable to a PS5 experience. I would think so, yeah, because again, like, I'm not typically a PC gamer. So this was sort of an adventure for me. You can't bring on the steam machine soon enough, but there's no RAM left on Earth, as we have covered. So I made do with what I had here. And it becomes kind of a game within a game. It's a meta game of configuring your PC settings. You know, it's sort of a puzzle to figure out, okay, what can I optimize here so that I'm still getting a good frame rate? Maybe I could just this one setting. And there's an anxiety to it that I haven't done it right, that I'm leaving something on the table.

This could look a little bit better if I just went to that one setting and ticked it up one bit. And there's a FOMO, there's an envy because I know that other people are getting a better looking game than I am. And I know that when I'm playing on consoles too, because a multi-platform game is typically going to look its best if you have a high-powered PC, but I can at least tell myself, well, this is what every other console player is getting. It's just a generic one-size-fits-all experience,

whereas here I'm more conscious of what I'm lacking and also that I might be doing it wrong. So that's, I guess, why I typically gravitate toward playing on consoles when I can. That said, the game ran quite well. Well, for me, I have experienced one single lone crash in my time with this game. And we should have stipulated this earlier, but we're playing pre-day-one patch, which is another reason why we like to get a look at what this game is actually going to look like for people when they play it. Because sometimes there's significant fixes on the day that a game comes out.

So the fact that we are playing this pre-patch and that there are known issues and known graphical bugs, et cetera, and I was still so blown away by this, I mean, that's pretty impressive. The engine, this black space engine that they've created, I think it's the star of the show here. It's black magic. In addition to just looking great, it feels like a whole new experience walking around in this game.

It's something that's hard to fully articulate, but this adventure being in this engine really just feels, like a unique experience. The lighting, the way that they have enabled ray tracing, even in lower spec systems, and the scalability of this thing, and the stability. I have played 96 hours.

I've had two crashes. If there are parts of this game that are unpolished that need fixing later, they are in dumb little things like text. or like, you know, the steps of a quest, but they're not in the engine. They're not in the bones and structure of what makes this game run.

Yes. And I think that, you know, when we think of graphics, we, you know, and boy, we've thought about them a lot this week with that DLSS-5 news. Boy, howdy. Yeah.

But as you were getting to, Ben, like this game, even if you don't have everything dialed up, is so beautiful in unique ways that we haven't seen before. And there's so much detail to it, the way that after a giant rainstorm, the ground will stay wet for hours of game time. And you can hear with each step that the ground is as wet as it appears visually.

And there are so many little details like that. The audio in this game is fantastic, by the way. Yeah, it's exciting to be excited about graphics again. It's been a while. And not just art style, which routinely were amazed by indies that just looked distinctive and incredible, but it's not just the sheer number of polygons they're pushing. You know, this is just the sheer verisimilitude of this world is pretty inspiring, honestly. It really is difficult to describe how new this game feels, purely.

because of the fact that it is not one of these conventional engines and the way in which they designed to visually present this game is something that's like awe-inspiring because it is something that I thought of like with Wukong which is namely made on

another conventional engine but it's doing things that a lot of games don't dare because of the restrictions of these major popular engines that we've been used to and to see like frankly the

the types of like loading back into this game after playing it for a while it's a very like Assassin's Creed-esque load screen where like the character is sat in like this nether space and then the world like kind of like

digitally reforms around them and it starts with the farthest point out into the map and then it draws itself back in I'm like I don't understand how that you could even conceive of something like that let alone showing like from when

you fall from the top of the abyss and then just seamlessly drop down onto the main world. Like, we've seen this in Breath of the Wild. We've seen this in other games. And it's never looked this good. Yeah. I don't know if this will translate to consoles, but for me, it felt like the first true next gen game. It felt like, finally, this is what we were waiting for.

There's no pop in. There's none of this thing. Like, I know Digital Foundry has done their work and does in their homework, but it really has to be seen to be believed of how that looks so good. I am worried about this being lost on the console folks because of the fact that like the amount of step setbacks that it has to take and how this might look just like another game to some people. And that's a real shame because the fixes that come from like a debacle, let's say from like a cyberpunk, which was like wholly insufficient for console gamers and PC players that you could say that that's like an existential fix. I just don't know if like the current generation of consoles is equipped to handle this. And it's going to make the legacy of this game something that is going to be underappreciated,

at least until another generation of consoles comes out, or this gets optimized a bit better for PC and consoles. Yeah. Yeah, the specs are pretty permissive and pretty forgiving, I think, given how good it looks. And I was using DLSS4, not five, crucial distinction. But yes, for everyone who's wondering what we're talking about, NVIDIA just demoed this new DLSS that was quickly criticized by everyone is essentially AI slopifying visuals, yassifying everyone, to make them look sort of generically, quote unquote, better,

but perhaps taking away the artist's intent. Invidia disputes this, says the developer has some input. But this is going to be a big thing as AI upscaling becomes more and more common and maybe more and more necessary, given the ram shortages that we're going to be dealing with here for the foreseeable future, when does it become kind of tampering

with the developer's intent and what is actually better as opposed to stripping some of the character and personality out of a game, especially when it comes to characters and faces as opposed to environments. But this game is not just beautiful,

but also feels handcrafted, feels curated. This is not some sort of star-feel look how huge it is, but we kind of forgot to put anything in it. And so everything sort of looks the same and there's procedural generation. And so, yes, you can go to all these places, but why would you exactly? I know there are new Starfield updates. Maybe that'll be better, but probably not better enough.

Anyway, this map is so huge. It takes forever to cross it. I haven't come close to crossing it. There are, of course, many mounts from horses to dragons. Yes, there be dragons. and even if you're on one of the faster amounts that will take you forever to crust. Am I right in thinking that none of us

has actually been to the titular Crimson Desert? Not even close. Not even close. We have not even reached the Crimson Deserts. I am not in my 96 hours been to the Crimson Desert. There's a lot that we haven't seen here. I could have. And yet, but I haven't.

Right. As big as it is, it does not feel empty. It has that kind of breath of the wild sense of around every corner, over every hill, there could be some secret, there could be some encounter, there could be some treasure, there could be some side of that feels spot on. Yes. And part of that is the graphics, but it's also that they have actually crafted stuff. It's not just a look how huge our map is. It's actually that it feels like there's a great attention to detail here, which is again, why it just blows me away thinking about

how much work went into this. But that's one of the greatest redeeming factors of this, is not just that it's big, but also that it doesn't feel, I mean, it feels big in the best possible way, but it doesn't feel empty. And you can sink a ton of time into this thing and just not notice how much time you have been playing, at least for me.

Absolutely. It doesn't feel like a chore, beyond a certain point at least. And also just wanted to shout out some other, we've given it some grief for some of the lack of quality of life stuff. I do appreciate, as I said, how forthcoming it is with the skill points. Also with the inventory slots, I never really run out of room for anything. So we have to talk about that really quick. Okay.

Because I hopped into this game right when we got codes and the inventory was very limited. And there's as of right now, no real chest storage that you can drop things. in, it's all sort of on your character. There have been some talks that, you know, to some degree there might be storage added in the future. But basically, we wind so incessantly

about storage in the review Discord that they already patched more inventory slots by a large amount into the game. And that's what you experienced, Ben. Yes. And I think that a lot of the

problems that are present in this game are things that could be fixed fairly easily. And, you know, we've talked a lot about on this show over the past few years about the live service push and studios that are typically single-player game studios being forced to make live service games are pivoting into that unfamiliar space. And what we have here is we have an MM-O-R-P-G team that's pivoting to a single-player experience. And I think that when we were in the review Discord talking to them about issues, and all of a sudden they're like, okay, we got a patch, and that's fixed now. And we're like,

whoa, what? And he was like, yeah, these people are used to making MMRPs. Right. So it's a possibility, like, I don't fully know everything that's going to be in the day one patch yet, but I do know that this team is very responsive and quick. to fix things. Like the inventory thing was a massive issue within the first few hours of the game, especially.

And that is just not a problem. As you've dated. We've only had this code for what? A week and a half, two weeks? I forget. It's hard to grasp time. Right, sure. Matt spent most of that time

how many weeks are 200 hours? Let's see. Yes, Matt's been in Pyewell for most of that time. That's the world. That's why I'm impressive to hear and to know that I think my problems with this game aren't

like existential to the game itself. It's just things that... Right, there's little details. It's details and those things that make to me a game playable and rewarding that make me want to keep playing it. Rather than finding that on my own, I'm the type of gamer that can, you know, arguably

you can say get good, but also like I like to be rewarded immediately and then encouraged to be constantly rewarded by those things. And to know that that team is essentially just being like, all right, people don't like this, we will change that. Rather than we've seen this before, like the, like a no man sky or a cyberpunk or other games that either refuse to change because they think that that's the intent of the game and people just misunderstand them.

This is, okay, we are listening, we are hearing. and like to for me like I bristle at the idea of participating in a game when a official games discourse simply for the sake of quote unquote fixing it yeah you know it's it's not an early access it's a seven dollar game exactly our job not be right and and these things like like it's this double edge sword of like this should have been like fairly obvious and playtet you guys play tested this right but then on the other side it's like oh my God, you're so responsive to these things. You're telling me that an MMO developer doesn't know about inventory space, guys.

Yeah, and lots of little perplexing choices that would just require small tweaks. For instance, this was a source of some frustration for all of us. You can fast forward through cutscenes. Oh, this is, oh my God, I forgot about this. This is my biggest complaint. This is my biggest complaint. If you're listening to this at 1.5xb, you're going to love this. Yes, it's very much like that.

And that's quite clever because you can fast forward through a cutscene. I don't the first time, but you can. And you don't miss anything important. It's just it's sort of sped up, but you're still seeing everything and hearing everything essentially. But you can't ever skip a cutscene even after you have seen it. If you're going back to a boss who's beaten you a bunch of times, then you still can't skip the cutscene. And so you're giving me the option to fast forward even on the first playthrough, but then on my 10th playthrough, I still can't skip it.

perplexing, but presumably a pretty easy fix. Yeah, actually infuriating in my opinion because of the fact that like, it's not like, and here's the thing, it's not like I'm like banging my head against a boss or whatever to where like there's like a cut scene right before an important fight and I keep dying and thus like made to re see a scene all over again. But the mere fact that you can always fast forward a scene and never actually skip it, it feels like playing in my face a little bit. Because why would you want to fast forward it if you could simply skip it?

And the fact that as I like I try, so I tried it for like an entire scene. And some scenes go on for like minutes at a time. And the dialogue, the pre-recorded dialogue that each character says, it goes so fast that its play is at a normal speed. But it has to cut off to let the other person speak because that part of their scene is about to play. Right. So it's like, like maybe every third one. and their sentence gets cut, cut off sometimes.

And it's just, it's completely baffling to me. That's my rant about, don't fast forward scenes. Why would you fast forward scenes? I've never had a game, fast forward scenes. Give me the option to do both. I'm fine with fast forwarding. Yeah, but I don't fast forward to me to main line. I've seen this before.

Yeah, but. Put this feature in Kojima games. How about that? Put that in Kojima games where you can play it at 1.5. Heresy. A couple other stray observations. We haven't talked a ton about the combat, but it's strong. I quite enjoy the combat. There are a number of ways you can play.

You can kind of customize your preferred playstyle and weaponry, et cetera. Now, one concern is that there are difficulty spikes because your generic run-of-the-mill enemy presents no challenge whatsoever. You can just mash a couple combos and they go down. And there are times in this game when it just turns into Dynasty Warriors suddenly and you're taking on dozens of guys. Which I actually love that. Hundreds of guys in some missions.

Yeah, which is kind of cool, but each of them is extremely disposable. And so you get lulled into this false sense of security. And then you hit a boss and there's a difficulty spike. And some of them were quite challenging, quite frustrating. However, I will say that that is to some extent a skill issue now that the inventory is enlarged. Because you can just stock up on food. you can just cram your pack with every healing, whatever you need,

and you can just have sort of an infinite heel. And that helps a lot. And the checkpoints are fairly forgiving, too. And there isn't like a cool down on eating something. Right, right. Yes. So you're just, if you're having a hard time with the boss, it just means you're overeating.

Yes. But it's not sort of like Dragon's Dogma or something where it's like, well, the combat is not necessarily the selling point here. Clearly they focused on other aspects. Or Kingdom come where it's unique. It's distinctive. Some people love it. Some people hate it.

It's realistic to the extent that we can tell. This is not bad. This just feels like it could be any other top tier action adventure game just in terms of the depth and the responsiveness and just how good and satisfying it feels. So the combat is extremely strong. I think the map is good because there's all, always something to do, but there's never too much to do, or at least it's not overwhelming.

I did comp this to Assassin's Creed, et cetera, but it is not a Ubisoft map game. It doesn't look like that, at least by default, when you open up a map. It doesn't. No, it doesn't. Yeah, there's so much to do, and yet it's not constantly hammering you over the head with, there's too much to do. So you never feel overwhelmed, and you never feel like you're just checking off a list of things that you've got to do, and you have to be a completist, then it becomes a chore. It's not really like that in my experience. So that's pretty impressive too.

A couple other little things I like. This is just generally in games. I love when you whistle for a mount and they come out of nowhere, you know? And they just suddenly appear and you turn around. I love when they sort of sneak up on you. And they're just like lurking there. And it's like, what do you mean? I've been here the whole time.

I constantly try to do that thing where I'm like 360ing, the camera just so I could see where. You're going to chance you're spawning in. Yeah. And then suddenly my horse is just like lurking over there as if it was just there the entire time. No, I'm on to you. You weren't there. There's a little horsehead icon on the minibap.

So that's convenient, but also I find it quite funny. I also find it funny when you're wearing a helm much of the time, or at least I am, because I want to get my defensive stats up. And so Cliff, testament to the sound design. But when he's wearing a helm, his voice is extremely muffled. You can barely make out what he's saying. That's very funny. He's just like, bro, whoa, bro, ro, boy, it's like Charlie Brown teacher voice.

And yet somehow everyone understands him and also almost everyone recognizes him immediately. It's like, Cliff, I can't believe it. I knew I thought I'd see you again. And it's like, this could just be anyone who's wearing a helm and is completely unintelligible. But I guess the gray main bond just goes that deep. So those are a couple little things that I quite enjoyed about this game. and games in general, like open worlds, I know we all have some degree of open world fatigue,

but this felt fresh and exciting and like something new. And it does amaze me that you have so many studios building these absolutely massive open worlds. It almost makes me think, like, what if they could just combine their efforts in some way? Like, this just seems like almost wasted work where you have separate teams who are building these enormous, enormous maps, and if they could somehow fool their resources,

I guess that's sort of what you get in a unity or an Unreal or something, but it is kind of incredible and good, because I would not want every game to be set in the same open world and for everything to be sort of fortnighted and Robloxed, basically. So I love that we have many different studios making many different open worlds, but my mind just reels at the thought of how much work goes into making something like this and goes into making dozens of games every year that are not this scale, but still a big scale.

And it really does. I think the game, to me, as for all of the gripes that I have about it, and I would say that, like, ultimately, I can't personally recommend it. But, like, the most rewarding this game feels and the best looking and best presenting this game feels is that it does feel like the culmination of every possible open world influence that has ever existed. Nothing has been forgotten. Nothing has been left out.

like to my knowledge and gaming history unto this point that you cannot say this game does not have there's nothing that you can't say that this game doesn't have because I like a majority of the time that I had spent after the opening hours of the game I just walked around one town to see how many things I could just do in it and it really was daunting that like you walk in

you can arm wrestle a guy at a tavern you can help somebody make food you can play kids at rock paper scissors. All of this doesn't actually affect the game at all in any meaningful way. But it is, to the best parts of it, quite immersive. Yeah, and you can tell, okay, this is probably something that they borrowed from this game, and there's clearly an influence of that game here. But it doesn't feel so derivative or as if they're just saying,

how do we steal this mechanic from that game? It's just integrated and implemented well enough that it does feel like it. its own thing. And obviously, you know, in all mediums and art forms, people are constantly learning from each other, you know, the old line about the best artist stealing, et cetera, like everyone standing on the shoulders of giants, sometimes literally in this game. But it does feel like, yes, they have kind of incorporated everything. And so in that sense, it's, it's exhaustive and maybe exhausting. Your mileage may vary, but it is just a monumental achievement in that way.

And I feel like you just, you got to try it. Like you have to experience this. You might bounce off it the way that Steve did. And yet, are you sorry that you at least experienced Crimson Desert? Because it is sort of a singular experience. It feels like a capital E experience. No, I am not, I do not regret it for a second. Truly, I don't.

Like, I am very happy to have experienced this and known for a fact that it is not for me. but I infinitely admire every swing that this game takes because it's taken the most of any game I think I have ever seen in my life. The ambition is ridiculous. And the sense of discovery is just unmatched from what I, like Steve, you mentioned earlier,

like it was frustrating that it didn't tell you that if you reflect your sword, you can generate fire from it, right, to burn vines. So, sure, I didn't know that one. I got to a bunch of vines. But what I did was I was like, oh, there's fire over here. I wonder if I draw my bow and just kind of walk into the fire.

Sure enough, I lit my arrow on fire. And that's how I got that vine to burn. And I didn't realize the sword shining thing until a little bit later either. But like, there are a number of ways in this game that you can stumble onto things in your own way organically. there are puzzles. There is a puzzle without spoiling anything where you're having to adjust pillar height and you're using this mechanism to adjust the pillar height.

And I was getting really frustrated because it wouldn't just snap into like, this is one high, too high. It could be off five or ten percent. And by the time I was done with all these moves that I made, I solved it, but like things are off and they're not lining up. So the puzzle's not completed.

And I was getting so frustrated. And then I was like, hold up. Let me, this is a theory. And I climbed on top of one of the pillars and I butt stomped it. And it went down like 2%. And I was able to butt stomp it the fine amount I needed into place. And I was like, that's crazy that like. And there is a magical sort of super punch that sometimes you have to deploy to punch things into place.

And sometimes it can be quite awkward because you have to punch at a certain angle. And so you sort of have to jump and punch, and it's just weird. And it doesn't always work that well. It can be quite frustrating. But then you can incorporate that into combat too. And you can just figure out the way you want to use that. The way the skills can be simultaneously related to puzzle solving and combat and exploration is awesome. Yeah.

It's amazing. So we promised that we would make our predictions for what the Metacritic rating will be, I was going to suggest that we all say our number at the same time, but then no one would understand what we were saying. We would all sound like Cliff with our helmet on. So on the honor system here, we have all pre-decided what we think the number will be, not going to be influenced by what one another say.

So I don't know who should go first. I'm happy to go first. How about this? Who thinks that they have the lowest medical school? I think you do. I think that I do. Unless you think that you, yourself, far an outlier and that everyone else will love the game a lot more than you do.

This is what I think. I think that this game will sit at a 68 on Metacritic. Holy shit. You are way off, my friend. You think so? You think so? You don't think that there will be like-minded people? Oh, I do.

There will be. There will be. But not enough of you will be that wrong to drag down the average. I'm going 87. I said 87 as well. 87. I was born between 86 and 87. and I just, I opted to go.

Because to me, this game sits firmly in the mid-90s, despite all its flaws. I was going to say, what would be. This isn't a reflection of my personal score. This is what I think that, like, I think that this will be a wildly divisive game. Your personal score sounds lower, if anything. There are, like, there are, like, definitive flaws with this game that will keep it, I think, from hitting those scores in the 90s on, on Metacritic, obviously, which I think it otherwise would have been capable of getting to,

but there are going to be people like you, Steve, who've been so turned off in the first, you know, 20 hours of the game, and there are people who are going to have had worse experiences than others by chance, by interacting with things. Like, I have experienced, like, bugged quests that I found ways around, luckily. But, like, there are definitive, flaws. And I think that there are going to be some scores that reflect that. Yeah. Yes. It's like everything else and nothing else simultaneously. And I think if you can play it, you owe it to yourself to try just

because love it or hate it. It's just going to be, I think, a defining game of this year and of this generation. It's a game that people are going to want to talk about and are going to want to analyze. You can probably tell them kind of giddy to be talking about it finally today. And I could go on. So it's a game that people, I think, are going to find fascinating and are going to have a lot of thoughts about. And I would guess that the embargo is so close to the release, less because they were trying to sneak one by us than to encourage reviewers to see more of the game.

Sometimes it reflects a lack of confidence. You're trying to hide something that you know as a stinker. That's not the case here. I can't speak to the console experience. I'm sure that even though this game went gold months ago, they were probably polishing and optimizing up until the last possible second. But I don't think that they were trying to sneak past people and not give people a chance to see the critical consensus, because I do think the critical consensus is going to be strong, despite the distractors.

There will be a high standard deviation when it comes to the review score. Some 87s, they're all between 80 and 90. This is going to be an 87 where you have some mid-90s and some sixes. And it's just going to be kind of across the board. I think it's going to be crazy. Do you think that like there's genuinely going to be a lot of people that like a big portion of this I think is going to want to be played on consoles? And I think that this is going to actually kick up a lot of like, again, I don't encourage this discourse. And I certainly don't even think that like, hey, use Metacritic as a way to outsource your opinion on a game before you play it.

Don't listen to me or really anybody unless you really want to find out for your. yourself. Please play this game. It is worse your time. Do your own research. Yes, you do. Like, truly. But like, I truly think that there's going to be a lot more bad faith, both reviewers and, like, general populist discourse around this game being like, it's too hard, it's impassable. Like, you need to have either a PC or a PS5 pro to run it. And it's not going to be penetrating to a lot of people. I think there will be some of that, and I think there will be some just because the hopes were so sky high and the expectations were so boundless that some people are bound to be disappointed, though I don't know how you could be by purely the scope of the stuff in this game. But I think between that and some of the flaws that we've identified, yes, there will be detractors. But I also think that people are going to give the game the benefit of the doubt to some extent just because it aims so high that I think you will.

almost have to be like, you know what, I have to hand it to you because not only was there degree of difficulty in having your own upgraded engine here and going from online to offline and issuing live service, but also you just aimed as high as anyone could possibly aim. And even if you fall a little short of that in some respects, you do in fact have to hand it to Pearl Abyss here. Yeah, I think so too. And just a quick note for people who are trying to to play this on console. If you're trying to play on a PlayStation 5 or a series X, they have a few modes for you.

They have performance, balanced, and quality. Performance is going to be 60 frames and is going to upscale 1080p, and quality is going to be 30 frames rendered at, I think, closer to 1440. But I think, like, if you want the ideal experience on console, I would assume that it is going to be the balanced mode that targets 40 frames per second.

But if you're going to do balance mode, you need to have a TV or display that has a 120 hertz refresh rate, which a lot of people don't have on their TV. If you have a newer TV, you might. So just that's something to be aware of if you're playing on console and you have a PS5

and you don't want to get a PS5 Pro, but I don't know, maybe one TV you have has 120 hertz. That's what you're going to be looking for. Is that 120 hertz display to play this with. Yeah, before we go to ease the onboarding process and maybe lower that difficulty level and learning curve a little bit for people so that people can have a smoother experience than our pal Steve here did, I wonder if we could all, or you especially, Matt,

could share a few tips, a few things that made this game a little more intuitive for you once you figured it out. Fish porridge and fishing aside. For example, you will want to invest in stamina early on. It's very much like Breath of the Wild in that respect, because you can kind of go anywhere, you can kind of climb anything, but not only are you going to want to climb, but also you get gassed quite quickly in combat.

When you're running, when you're sprinting, when you're stringing combos together, you will run out of stamina. You can fly in this game. We made it this far into this thing. We didn't even mention Cliff can fly, people. You can glide. You can glide.

Cliff has wings. Cliff. Yes. You're going to want a lot of stamina to cover as much ground as you can with that. Yes. So invest heavily in that.

It will make your experience much smoother. And also, you will want, and you gave me this tip, Matt, and it helped. But there is one particular skill

upgrade in the stamina area that is sort of about swiftness and perrying and blocking in combat and rolling and evading. And that's very helpful. It is the keen sense. set of skills that is under the green side of the skill tree.

That is going to let you do dodges and stuff like that a lot easier. That's when you definitely want to target early on for sure. Trying to think of other critical, I think just generally when you're playing this game, a lot of people, if you're mainlining the story, I think you're going to come up against that boss difficulty wall pretty quick. I am like a side quest and exploration field. so I will like basically clear entire maps before progressing the story. You don't have to play that way.

But I do think that because of the way the game works, when you're fighting a boss, you're going to consume a lot of food. So it only kind of makes sense after you beat a boss, maybe go on a side quest in exploration spree and that'll help you kind of replenish your ingredients to make food and also sometimes they'll just stumble upon meals. And that'll sort of naturally replenish your healing supplies rather than like you're going boss after boss

and you're like, oh, I'm out of food. Like where can I get food from? So just that kind of like boss exploration side quest, like doing all of those elements. Pretty stingy with the fast travel early on. So there's a lot of traversal. You do have to unlock fast travel points. Any giant question mark

that appears on your menu is going to be a fast travel point. There are some that are not giant question marks, but any giant question mark is guaranteed to be a fast travel. Some of them you can just step on to activate. Others, you might have to solve a puzzle or use a skill, but definitely go after

those giant question marks on the map. Yep. All right. Well, I think this is an unforgettable game, and I hope other people get to try it. We said 87, Matt, for me, I think it's a 92 or three for me, most likely. and I'll hedge somewhat just because there's still so much

that I haven't seen it could get better it could get worse even after 96 hours so just take that with a bit of a grain of salt and asterisk and caveat but yeah it's at that level

for me. Let me just really quick I just want to articulate exactly where I am in this at 96 hours I am less than half the way through the main quest line and I have roughly like

I would say like one and a half to two sections of the map which is in I think five parts uncovered like almost fully explored so you have a fifth of the map unlocked no I have like two fifths of the map sort of fully

one and a half to two fifths of the map fully explored and less than halfway through the main story quest yep the scale of this thing I am a slow gamer I will say that I do tend to be on the slowest of my Still. So 400 hours, you might say.

I might. I don't know. We'll have updates on future episodes at where your play clock stands. But guys, I have very much enjoyed this conversation. I'm glad that we were not all in lockstep here, that we had some points of difference and also a lot of things that we agreed on. So thank you very much for joining me on this Crimson Desert experience. Thank you. Everyone be nice to stay.

Always a pleasure. Don't be mean to Steve online about this, okay? Listen, I'm on the Midnight Boys, man. I've done my best story. You've taken work. Yeah, it's true. You've had so many terrible takes over the years. It really helps.

This hardens you quite a bit. But thanks. True. And don't be intimidated. This is set, by the way, in the same universe as the pre-existing MMO, but you don't need to know the war. Or I assume you don't because I didn't. So don't worry.

Don't worry about that. And I really, I can't wait to, hear and read what others think. I'm going to be refreshing my Metacritic at 6 Eastern just to see. What's the cutoff, do you think? After two weeks, would you say? Just when it sort of stabilizes, you mean? I guess, yeah.

It's usually faster than that, but it depends, I think, on just how much the game evolves. It'll probably take a long time for this one. For this one, I think people will reserve judgment. Yes. So I can't wait to hear if we are in line. with others or we are outliers. We'll find out along with the rest of you. And I'm also very curious for your thoughts on Crimson Desert, you, the listeners.

So please do let us know. Send us questions about the game. Send us comments. Send us your reviews in progress at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. Thank you, as always, to Devin Milano for producing this podcast and to Arjuna Rangipal for his senior podcast management. We will be back in a couple of weeks. to discuss the Super Mario Galaxy movie on But Mesh. And hopefully this podcast and this game

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