While Crimson Desert has seen huge success since its March 19 launch on consoles and PC, toppling its own concurrent player numbers and selling over 3 million copies to date, the game isn’t without its flaws. The narrative is one of them, as it’s so confusing that not even Kliff’s voice actor was able to make much sense of it.
Speaking on Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast on March 29 (via Eurogamer), Alec Newman expressed how important writing is for any medium. He said he kept seeking clarity about the story and the characters because the project, to Newman, “felt very much like making a TV series” where the focus kept changing. This isn’t a secret–Crimson Desert started as a prequel to developer Pearl Abyss’ MMORPG Black Desert Online before transforming into the single-player action-adventure RPG that it is now–but it certainly presented continuity changes for Newman and the other VAs.
“I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywell and the various characters,” Newman said. “He’s from this faction and he’s from that faction, and I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?'”
Newman–who you probably know as Adam Smasher in Cyberpunk 2077 or Dane in Elden Ring–said that while Kliff does give something “more emotional sometimes” later in the story, he’s mostly a stoic character throughout the game’s many hours. Specifically, the crux of Crimson Desert’s narrative–caring for and rebuilding The Greymanes faction–didn’t really come to fruition until many years into the game’s development cycle.
“The whole Greymanes thing, after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate,” Newman said. “This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. […] 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.'”
Newman also expressed some confusion over the progression of recording lines for Kliff. He said that, over the last five years, he’s been recording various iterations of the character, but things didn’t come into real focus until near the end of development because Crimson Desert was “just a demo” as far as Newman knew.
“Nearly two years into recording, they sort of said, ‘Well, we’re going to start recording in earnest now,'” Newman recalled. “And I went, ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages.'”
Fellow voice actor Alex Jordan, who breathes life into the Greymane Duane, said he was familiar with Crimson Desert’s premise not just because he’s a self-professed gamer, but also because he’d been working on it for about as long as Newman. While Newman admitted that he has yet to play the game (he “was” an impatient gamer and “suspects” he might not click with Crimson Desert), Jordan explained that, as a gamer, the discourse around Pearl Abyss’ project hasn’t been all that surprising for him.
“I could see all the conversations going on, and I was looking and going, ‘I know what this is, but I can’t say anything’,” Jordan said. “Because obviously, you’re bound by NDA. You don’t want to give anything away. So, I was fully expecting the exact response.”
Crimson Desert is out now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Developer Pearl Abyss has been listening to and addressing fan feedback, releasing a new patch that makes fast travel less tedious and seemingly replaces “unintentionally included” AI art.
