Crimson Desert is one of those games where, if you see it, you can likely go to it, living up to the Bethesda-ism that Skyrim was built on. Unfortunately, with great freedom comes great regret, as players warn that you could break quests by exploring too soon.
Fans took to the game’s official subreddit to decry the dilemma. Specifically, Great-Remove-844 posted on April 6 that, after taking the Fruit of Life key item during the Passage of Malice Abyss puzzle, the corresponding Fragment of Life mission breaks. Because the mission sends you to collect the Fruit of Life, if you already have it in your inventory, the game registers it as unusable, essentially softlocking you from completing this questline. This has been a contentious point for days, with Redditors posting about the Fragment of Life mission breaking since at least March 29.
This isn’t the only questline that can break if you collect or sell certain items before their intended use. In the comments of Great-Remove-844’s post, user No-Goal-3634 explained that, after selling a specific flower basket before the Surprise Gift mission, the questline was no longer completable. Elsewhere in the comments, Redditor grindgrindwilli said that collecting a certain note before turning in a bounty will brick a treasure hunt quest tied to that bounty. There’s an order of operations, it seems.
Not all is lost. Redditors have found workarounds for bricked or softlocked quests, mostly by either reverting to a previous save file or downloading an inventory manager mod. Depending on the quest, as in the case with Surprise Gift, you can find a suitable replacement that the NPC will accept. And, according to some Redditors, it appears that developer Pearl Abyss is reworking entire quest chains to make them easier to finish. But, at least for now, the Fragment of Life mission is the one to watch out for. Like the story of Adam and Eve, you probably shouldn’t take the forbidden fruit–yet.
Crimson Desert is the latest project by Pearl Abyss, the South Korean studio behind the MMORPG Black Desert Online. Since its March 19 launch on consoles and PC, the game has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, skyrocketing the developer’s stock. The team continues to be attentive toward the game, too, releasing patches that seemingly replace “unintentionally included” AI art assets and add more storage slots to make inventory management less frustrating–even though it still irks some players.
