Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss

Pearl Abyss has been rightly praised for its blindingly fast patches, fixing issues with Crimson Desert, adding QoL changes, and lots of fun content like new mounts and combat moves. Yet they still seem to be ignoring the biggest elephant left in the room: Damiane and Oongka, the game’s second and third playable characters.

What’s baffling to me is that they keep sinking work into the Crimson Desert alternate characters, which is welcome, and this past patch gave Damiane more unarmed moves that literally turn her into Chun-Li/Tifa where you can take out entire enemy bases without a weapon. It’s awesome.

The problem? It took me 315 hours to get Damiane to a point where this was even possible. And I have not even touched Oongka yet.

There. Are. Not. Enough. Skill. Points. For. This.

I have said this many times, but the game requires you to sink points into Kliff in order to be able to take on main story content, and you can be 250+ hours in the game and have nothing to spare for the other two characters. It’s about filling in the skill tree, yes, but also spending 50+ points to upgrade their armor and weapons.

While Kliff racks up loads of skill points from missions and combat and achievements over time, there is no point in the “main” game where it’s smart to invest in either of the other two characters, much less both of them. To make that work, you’d have to completely respect and steal Kliff’s points, and that doesn’t even solve the problem of needing to permanently put points into gear.

I wondered if Pearl Abyss was going to fix this with a recent change that at least you could keep fighting enemies on the map as forts and quarries and such refilled during new blockades. I’ve been doing those, and what I’ve found is that you can spend 10-15 minutes clearing out one of these bases for maybe one skill point, and you can do the math on how long that will take to make any meaningful progress. Again, I am at hour 315 and I still have Kliff at maybe 90% upgrades, and Damiane is maybe 70%. Oongka, 0%.

This cannot be how this game is supposed to work. It’s not like these characters are even half-baked. Damiane is super fun to use and after all this work, has gotten quite strong. But There is close to a zero percent chance she or Oongka will see any amount of use outside of a few forced missions during the “main” game, and players should not have to sink hundreds of hours into Crimson Desert to even make them passably usable. And I’m headed for 400 hours if I actually want to do Oongka after this. But the point is, all three of them should have been able to be used effectively hundreds of hours ago. That’s close to impossible.

For as good as Pearl Abyss is at solving problems, they have not figured this out yet. They have added a lot of new moves and functionality to Damiane and Oongka in time, but have not solved the problem of actually trying to use them. This, above all else right now, needs a fix.

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