It’s been roughly three weeks since Crimson Desert dropped, and it seems like developer Pearl Abyss is still hard at work fixing problems that emerged during its less than stellar launch week. Now, the team has shared a roadmap for the game’s next few months, showing off both quality-of-life changes as well as some pretty significant changes to gameplay.
On Friday, Pearl Abyss shared a blog post detailing some changes coming to the game between April and June, and man, there are a lot.
The post confirms that locations will now be able to be recaptured by enemies, which should be a relief for the players who have spent hundreds of hours clearing out the map only to realize that the map felt static and lonely without opponents bombarding them at every turn. Bosses will also be able to respawn for rematches instead of just…disappearing forever.
Possibly the most exciting feature, however, is a boost to Damiane and Oongka, the game’s two non-Kliff playable characters (who you might not even know about because it’s currently impossible to get through a lot of story content with them). Pearl Abyss is finally giving them better abilities to hopefully make them as viable as Kliff, who has a massive skill tree with abilities that can—and often have to—be used to complete puzzles and other challenges.
Other features inbound at some point this spring are difficulty settings, new outfits, specialized storage systems for things like cooking ingredients and clothes, new pets and mounts, UI accessibility options, and visual improvements to distant background scenery. Players will also be able to hide weapons on characters’ backs, which should hopefully make things feel a bit less awkward.
The blog post also teases more customizable controls. Crimson Desert has a notoriously weird control scheme (I still can’t get over this post that shows off possibly the most convoluted input chain in all of gaming), so allowing players to customize these further is a promising start, although I wish they’d just make them more intuitive to begin with.
Crimson Desert obviously did not have a fantastic launch, but it seems like Pearl Abyss is pretty earnestly dedicated to rectifying that and making it a game worth picking up. Let’s just hope they patch out that ugly AI art soon, too.
