Even if you weren’t privy to the details of Crimson Desert’s reportedly chaotic development, there are signs of it in the game itself; Pearl Abyss’ open-world RPG has too many ideas and no way to eloquently stitch them together. Still, if you wanted an on-the-record account of how disorganized it was, Alec Newman, the actor who plays the game’s protagonist, Kliff, says his five-year recording process was also affected by a lack of direction and an everchanging plot.
In an interview with the Friends Per Second podcast (thanks This Week in Video Games) Newman describes the recording process as constantly changing, with “various periods of low and then very high intensity.” Details such as his name (originally MacDuff before being changed to Kliff) and parts of his backstory were in regular flux over those five years, with Newman saying that he was told that it was time to start recording “in earnest” about two years into the process.
“In fact, for the first year and a half or so, it was just a demo as far as I knew,” he said in the interview. “They sort of said, ‘Well, we’re going to start recording in earnest now.’ And I went, ‘what the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!’”
The constant back and forth made it difficult for Newman to keep up with what the plot of the game actually was.
“With this project, it was interesting because they kind of, I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel, you know, various characters and ‘he’s from this faction and he’s from that faction,’” he said. “And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
Newman says that about halfway into the process, he had to push Pearl Abyss to write more of Kliff’s personal arc into the story.
“The whole Greymanes thing, after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate, this idea of family and trying to bring something back together,” Newman explained. “I think that’s the main story strand of the game or the only story strand of the game when you begin. I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to care about his comrades,’ and I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue.’ So we brought it in gradually and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out. But I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.”
Newman says that it was important to him that Kliff be more than just “stoic,” and saying “it’s very, very hard to play 150 hours with somebody who doesn’t give anything away ever.” I appreciate that he cared enough to fight for those beats to be more than subtext. Even in big ol’ open-world capital C Content games like Crimson Desert, an RPG protagonist needs to be more than a vehicle for the player to run around doing stuff in my opinion. The sandbox can only take you so far if you don’t care about the world you’re exploring and the people in it. Was Crimson Desert ultimately successful in that endeavor? Depends on who you ask.