Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss

I wondered where Crimson Desert’s next giant game-changing patch would be, as Pearl Abyss has been pumping these out non-stop. We got an update last night where there wasn’t a patch drop, but news about what’s coming in the not-too-distant future. And given the scope of the changes, it’s easy to see why they’ll take at least a little bit of time. They will roll out gradually from April to June.

Pearl Abyss listens to Crimson Desert players intently, and any time I complain about something it seems to be fixed almost immediately (though I am certainly not the only one complaining). So here are eight player requests in the works. The biggest issue I have may not be addressed, but I’ll get into that later.

1) Boss rematches. There will be a way to re-fight old bosses after you’ve killed them. Any boss, and keep in mind this is a game with 70+. Details like what rewards you may get (Abyss points? Materials?) are not revealed. Whether they are the same strength or harder or easier will depend on the new difficulty settings.

2) New difficulty settings. Crimson Desert launched with no difficulty settings, merely easy locations/bosses and hard/locations bosses. But now, the entire game is getting easy, normal and hard difficulties. I sort of liked the design of having no difficulty levels, but now that I’ve finished 95% of the game, I’d like to up it to hard mode, so that works for me. And I don’t really care if people want to play on easy in a single-player game.

3) Enemy respawns. You can currently kill the entire map in Crimson Desert to the point where finding any enemies to take on can be almost impossible if you’ve played a bunch. Now, enemies will “re-blockade” zones. I’m not sure if these are random events, but they don’t say it’s a manual reset. It does not sound like you can just re-fill the entire map at will.

4) Damiane and Oongka skills. Both alternate characters will get skills like Force Palm and Axiom Force, which can be used in combat, puzzles and traversal, as losing those from Kliff makes the game play differently, and worse. At the very least, this will give you more spaces to use them.

I will use this moment as an aside here to say that the idea of shared skill points is not addressed in these updates. The lack of more Abyss points, where acquisition slows to a crawl in the endgame, means you can effectively not use these characters without total respecs. At 250 hours, I have made exactly one maxed set of Kliff armor, and have not even maxed Spirit, Health or Stamina yet. Filling up skill trees and making good gear for Oongka and Damiane is almost possible.

However, the solution may be in these additions. I don’t know if bosses will continue to give Abyss points (I can see how farming easy ones quickly would be a problem), but the fact that more enemies will be on the map for the re-blockades will mean that you can definitely earn more points through combat XP alone. That, combined with a few other methods, may be enough to fix this problem.

5) Hide back weapons. A request fans have made is to make their character look better from behind without a giant shield on their back. No word about full transmog in these notes.

6) More outfits. I assume outfits also means armor, not just normal clothes. They’re also saying that some of those outfits you pick off dead enemies will be wearable.

7) Specialized storage. Rather than dumping everything in a big pile, there will be specialized storage for food, armor, gatherables and collections, further freeing up inventory space.

8) More pets and mounts. More pet types are coming. More mounts past the most recent boss/legendary ones will be added, and there will be armor added for non-horse mounts too.

Past that, there are more graphics and controls improvements, including more customization options. Again, these will roll out in April through June.

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