Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss

Late on Thursday night, Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss released a roadmap of changes and additions to the game coming in the next two months. Not even a day later, they patched in some of them, continuing their lightning-fast, almost unprecedented speed of improving and expanding the game.

Here are the highlights of last night’s patch:

• Damiane and Oongka now have access to Kliff traversal/combat/puzzle-solving moves like Axiom Force and Nature’s Snare. They also changed their shield toss and scatter shot moves to act like Force Palm. Great change.
• They gave Kliff a new move called “Focus Aerial Roll,” the second time a movement “exploit” has been turned into an actual feature in the game, the last time being aerial stab. This goes even further, being a new skill-tree investment.

• They now allow shields, bows and other weapons to be hidden from a character’s back, or appear in certain contexts (a bow when in use), a much-requested cosmetic change as sometimes your shield especially could cover your entire character if it was a larger one.
• They changed the Pailune Greymane camp, where you move after a series of construction projects, to group your old vendors closer together. And some of them got replaced, which will no longer happen. Now the move seems fine to make.
• Probably my favorite change is a feature added where the map will not give you a changed icon for the caves, treasure chests and Abyss puzzles you have already completed, rather than you having to guess or mentally remember them. Great for exploration and treasure hunting.

• You can now teleport while mounted, falling, swimming or climbing.

There are other changes like some new music tracks, some additional puzzle hints and bug fixes and visual updates, but the above are the biggest highlights.

Some of the larger things mentioned for the future that were not added in this patch were boss resets, enemy takeovers, new pets, new armor and sorted storage, but obviously some of these are going to be bigger challenges than others. The Oongka/Damiane issues with there not being nearly enough skill points to upgrade them remain. Some of that may be solved by enemy respawns, but that’s only in the ultra endgame, and it still makes little sense to use them through the story.

The pace at which these changes are being made is astonishing. Some of these are things that would take other games months or years to implement and Pearl Abyss is cranking them out rapid fire. How? I think it’s some combination of being an MMO developer used to a higher speed of production and Pearl Abyss working within their own custom engine they made for this game. But it’s been fantastic, and is only getting better.

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