Crimson Desert is the hottest game around right now, selling over 4 million copies worldwide and breaking its own concurrent player records since its March 19 release. While everyone appears to be loving it, some are still finding it quite frustrating and unwieldy, particularly when dealing with the stuff you loot and carry in Pywell.
Inventory management has been a sore spot for developer Pearl Abyss’ open-world action-adventure game. Critics dragged inventory management for its tedium, with reviewer Richard Wakeling calling it “aggravating” and a “prickly source of frustration” in GameSpot’s 7/10 Crimson Desert review. The South Korean studio has somewhat addressed the issues surrounding fiddling with your stuff by introducing more inventory slots in a March 29 update, but the headaches are still pounding all over the game’s official subreddit.
Players took to the Crimson Desert subreddit to air out even more of their grievances with Pearl Abyss’ inventory management system. The hottest post right now, created on March 30, is a discussion about how “key” items–typically something purple in your bag, such as those Deluxe Edition bonuses–shouldn’t take up any inventory space. They don’t add any weight to Kliff, and they don’t technically impede the now 240 available slots in your inventory. But while they don’t fill up your inventory in the same way a bug or a flower or a sword might, these “key” items–bounty notices, quest items, treasure maps, etc.–do sit in your inventory, cannot be discarded, and contribute to the overall clutter you’ll accumulate as you explore the world of Pywell.
Another point of contention with inventory is weapons. Equipping one-handed weapons isn’t a problem; it’s the two-handed equipment. Redditors discussed on March 30 how “tiresome” it is to switch between a two-handed weapon and the tools–such as the pickaxe and shovel–all of which must be used in the two-handed weapon slot. This is a manual action on the weapon wheel, too, so you can’t use the, say, Quick Swap skill since that only switches between your one- and two-handed weapons.
Tangentially related are the frustrations around skill points. Specifically, Redditors said on April 1 that skill points shouldn’t be shared between the three playable characters. Because skill points, obtained through collectible and unlockable Abyss Artifacts, are so precious in the early goings of the game, players find it “aggravating” to invest in one character when it will inevitably force them to play as one of the other characters. If you haven’t poured points into the other characters, Redditors have found them to be severely underpowered for how late in the game they are.
Everything comes back to inventory management, though. Just doing a cursory search on the Crimson Desert subreddit pulls up pages of discussions around dealing with your items. “Inventory management is not very good,” one post reads. “Storage shortage,” reads another. “I needs more inventory space,” goes another still. There are helpful suggestions for managing your inventory to be found in the subreddit, like dropping (or selling) the things you’ve read and using the “group” feature to gather similar items together, but all in all, the headaches with inventory seem to be never-ending. And that’s with the additional slots Pearl Abyss just added.
Despite how “aggravating” and “tiresome” and “frustrating” managing your inventory is in Crimson Desert, the game is still popping off for Pearl Abyss. Not only has it sold over 4 million copies, but the company’s stock has seen a recent surge on the back of its rising sales. Pearl Abyss is really tending to the game, too, dropping patch version 1.01.00 that increased the number of slots in your inventory and seemingly replaced some “unintentionally included” art assets.
