Love it or hate it, Crimson Desert launched in March with no small number of issues and unfortunate points of unnecessary friction. Pearl Abyss has been rapidly patching the game to address every pain point in the weeks since. The latest wave of improvements comes by way of Thursday’s 1.04 patch, which adds new difficulty modes and tons of more intricate changes. Players are once again impressed with the range of tweaks. “They just added so much random sh*t, I love it,” one wrote in response to the patch notes.
The new easy and hard modes are the main attraction. Easy will reduce incoming damage, extend the parry window, and make bosses less likely to counter-attack or dodge. Hard, on the other hand, makes you much easier to kill by reducing health, upping incoming damage, reducing dodge invincibility and parry windows, and even giving some bosses new attack patterns to contend with. Pearl Abyss says a boss rematch feature is coming soon for fans who want to go back and revisit these encounters on the higher difficulty setting without starting a new game.
But Crimson Desert is an incredibly complex and detailed sandbox, so the devil really is in the details. “Materials stored in the Sturdy Gatherables Chest can be used for crafting or refinement even if they are not carried in your inventory,” reads one big fix. “Added a function that allows you to turn your lantern on and off while aiming,” reads another. Even the game’s graphics got buffed: “Improved the rendering quality of distant objects and textures.”
Better graphics, more cats
This is the tip of the iceberg for a patch that tweaks everything from certain weapon attack animations to the ability to color-code map markers. And of course, their pets are also getting some love. There are five new types of cats, Abyss Heuklang can now become your pet, and horses and pets can finally be renamed. “Fixed an issue where cats could remain on the player’s shoulder indefinitely, contrary to the intended design,” writes Pearl Abyss. “However, considering that many Greymanes actually liked these cats’ behavior, we have added an item that allows cats to stay on the shoulder for a longer period of time.”
“It’s like 2.0 Jesus f*ck,” wrote one player on the Crimson Desert subreddit. “Nah this is like 4.0, every patch is a huge W,” wrote another. Hyperbole aside, it’s clear that the sheer number of big and small changes is slowly transforming the open-world adventure into a pretty different, much better version of what launched just over a month ago. It reminds me of The Witcher 3, which was also a bit of a clunky mess when it released. People now forget just how much CD Projekt Red had to fix in the first year. We’ll see if Pearl Abyss can find a way to buff Crimson Desert’s story and characters along the way.
