It sounds like Crimson Desert is coming to the Nintendo Switch 2, although perhaps not for a while. Pearl Abyss’ CEO Heo Jin-young told a shareholders meeting (thanks Nintendo Everything) that the smash hit open-world RPG is now in the R&D stages for a port to the handheld console, but that it would require a fair number of compromises.
Crimson Desert received an enormous amount of hype ahead of its March 19 launch, largely on the basis of how strikingly impressive it looked. Using a proprietary engine, BlackSpace, rather than Unreal, it took tech heads by surprise with the levels of fidelity shown off in demos, although it also caused some amount of controversy by simultaneously hiding how it would run on Xbox and base PlayStation 5 until the eleventh hour. When it was finally seen on PS5 just a couple of days before launch, the reveal was…fine? Obviously, those super-high-end abilities of BlackSpace require a heck of a lot of computation power that six-year-old consoles just don’t have under the hood. Which brings us to the Switch 2.
Nintendo has never chased bleeding edge technology in its consoles, which is a large part of how it sells the products for a profit. That of course comes with a cost when aiming for cross-platform parity, although the Switch 2 has held its own surprisingly well with a few big titles. Crimson Desert, however, is a whole other challenge. As Heo Jin-young says (via machine translation), “Since the Switch still has lower specifications compared to other consoles, there are aspects we have to give up on.” Ordinarily that’d be a reasonable compromise given Switch owners know they’re not lugging around a $2,000 PC, but for a game of this scale, and one that’s arguably quite so reliant on its looks (it’s not like it can fall back on its brains), it’s a tougher call. “Internally,” adds Jin-young, “we have taken an interest and have started R&D.” It’s unclear if the nod to necessary compromises is purely a reference to graphics, or whether the sheer scale of the game would need to be reduced as well.
Crimson Desert is doing fine without the additional sales, incidentally. It sold three million copies in four days, despite being such a wobbly shopping cart to control. The same shareholder call revealed Pearl Abyss has yet to decide whether to further monetize the game with paid-for DLC packs, or rely on free updates to draw in new players. There’s also no decision on whether to allow mods, although it seems the team is keen, and multiplayer still looks very unlikely.