People were becoming increasingly suspicious about Crimson Desert. While the forthcoming action-adventure from Pearl Abyss—a spin-off from 2016’s Black Desert Online—built up a lot of hype with its astonishing PC footage, console owners began to notice there was never any sign of the game running on Xbox or PS5. Well, we’ve now seen 20 minutes of the game running on a regular PS5 (as opposed to the Pro), and you can kinda see why they weren’t showing it off. Not because it’s bad! But because it’s far more ordinary.
Digital Foundry broke down the myth that the viral game footage could be bullshots when it sourced its own footage from the developers, with specified tech and all detail settings, showing the game still looking as extraordinarily beautiful as the earlier clips put out by Pearl Abyss. It was still on a very high-end machine, running at “Ultra” settings, and undeniably breathtaking, but it was demonstrably not requiring a quantum processor with terabytes of RAM—in fact the GPU, while not cheap, is four years old. And yet still there was no information about consoles.
Then, only nine days ahead of the game’s March 19 launch, the studio revealed the full specs across PC and consoles. This showed that while it was possible to play the game on surprisingly low-end PC builds, the PS5 and Xbox Series is going to aim much lower. The PS5 and Xbox Series X will run at 1080p in Performance mode, aiming for 60 FPS with raytracing on “low,” while in Quality only reaching an upscaled 4K at the cost of framerate, maxing out at 30. The Xbox Series S, meanwhile, will only be able to sputter out 720p in Performance, and scrape its way to 1080p at the very best. The PS5 Pro performs better, managing a native 4K but only at 30 FPS, but offering an upscaled 4K at 60 FPS even in Performance.
Which is a lot of techy terms that can really work out extremely differently depending upon the game. And now, just two days before launch, we can see this running in reality on a regular PS5, thanks to Sony’s Japanese Play Play Play outlet. (Thank you Push Square.)
It would be silly to say the game looks bad! It looks like a regular PS5 game. But it certainly doesn’t look like the astonishing PC footage that caused the game to gain quite so much buzz. It doesn’t help that for some utterly mystifying reason, Sony has uploaded the video at only 1080p, meaning YouTube’s ghastly artifacting deeply affects the quality. It’s possible the game in person could look a lot sharper than this, and dear god everyone (looking at you, movie trailer industry), YouTube’s 4K is there for a reason.
This is all incredibly fair! We are over five years into this console generation, and every single time this is the point when developers can no longer resist the technical leaps forward taken by the PC. It’s certainly a galling period for console owners, watching their factory-sealed boxes age while PC owners tinker away on their rig of Theseus, but it’s nothing new and perfectly reasonable.
It’s perhaps less reasonable to hide what the game will actually look like on the devices for which it’s being made until this close to release, as CD Projekt Red learned to their extraordinary cost six years ago. But this new footage suggests we’re not facing a similar disaster, just a more average-looking game for those playing on console. Which, if it’s as fun as the previews have hyped, shouldn’t be that serious of an issue. Still a bummer, though, given the intensity of the hype around its graphical prowess.