Pearl Abyss is done showing off what to expect in their upcoming open world adventure Crimson Desert with its third and final featurette. After going through exploration and combat in previous features, the third feature overview is about the little things that add up in this open world game that seemingly have just about everything.
The setup of Crimson Desert’s story is how the Greymanes, the clan one of three playable characters Kliff is a part of, was utterly destroyed by a rival faction. You will be undergoing this rebuild of the Greymane Camp which houses a variety of features including farming and crafting gameplay systems. You can cook and craft as well as invest in resources to upgrade and grow the camp. It’s the sink to dump resources you collected throughout the adventure. You can individually decorate the housing with your own furniture and props, because why not.
By venturing out in Pywel, you can find the members of the Greymanes that scattered and displaced ever since the attack. The members can contribute by going on missions to attack enemy strongholds in different parts of the continent.
At camp, you can customise the playable characters with coloured dyes where you freely choose through a large swathe of colours to recolour the hair, apparel, and tattoo. Even the mech can be recoloured.
The village and city appear alive with NPCs reacting to your unlawful behaviour: there’s a bounty system and you can either get swarmed by the law or be sent into jail to serve time for your crime. Some NPCs will request some help doing menial tasks, or pickpocket you. There are plenty of shops where you can purchase new equipment, food and materials, some can simply be purchased by interacting with the item displayed on a stall.
If you’re familiar with Black Desert’s rich yet complicated life gameplay, a lot of these features shown in Crimson Desert are no-brainer inclusions. Though we don’t see any logistics and mercantile gameplay. But still, it will be interesting to see how these mechanics are balanced for a premium single-player game experience as opposed to a live service MMORPG.
Curiously, there’s a snippet of Kliff reactivating an old machine where items are moving on a conveyor belt but until we see more that’s the closest thing to a factory builder/automation game.
Crimson Desert has now accumulated over 2 million wishlists worldwide (no specific platforms were stated). So there’s a good number of people now has this game under their radar. Is it too good to be true? Only time will tell, and the time for its release is real soon.
Crimson Desert launches on March 20 for the PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Mac and Xbox Series X|S.