Although Crimson Desert has been largely well-received among critics and players alike, most who've played the game are in agreement that it takes a while to get going – but that slower pacing in the early game is key to its success, reckons Arkane Lyon studio director Dinga Bakaba.
Bakaba, who obviously knows a thing about crafting immersive experiences, having overseen development on games like Dishonored 2 and Deathloop, recently took to Twitter to share his thoughts on the Crimson Desert spell everyone's under at the current moment. For context, consensus on Crimson Desert isn't nearly as uniform as, say, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but among the majority of players enjoying Crimson Desert, most would agree it's a slow burn at least in the early game.
"Interesting how Crimson Desert functions opposite to most games of this type: generally the beginning is magical and after a while you start to see the strings 'ah this is close to this game, oh this is going to be repeated etc," says Bakaba.
Crimson Desert has drawn comparisons to a bevy of culturally significant open-world games including Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, and The Witcher 3. And while it's natural for any work of creative fiction to stand on the shoulders of giants, Bakaba thinks Crimson Desert has its own unique identity hiding beneath its familiar surface.
"You start with the gameyness front loaded: the inspirations, the controls, the systems: it's almost all you see. But after a while all this takes the back seat: magic kicks in and doesn't disappear because you have already accepted the rules/constitutive elements."
I feel the same way about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The game does very little to let you know there's an incredibly rewarding combat system, emotionally gripping story, and myriad examples of emergent gameplay waiting behind hours of frustrating interactions and disruptive systems, but if you invest the time and energy you'll inevitably discover all of that for yourself. Bakaba likens this sort of wait-and-see approach to another medium entirely.
"It's almost like the specific type of immersion of a board game where at first all you see is the board/rules but then you enter the magic circle properly and the real fun begins," he adds. "And where it excels is at this point the game hasn't thrown everything it has in store at you.
"It keeps on introducing new things, giving more significance to systems and making them interact with each other. It doesn't hurt that most of them are 'meaty' and realized diegetically, and that there is also some tonal liberties with some (smartly engineered) stupid fun."
Ultimately, Bakaba says this all "coalesces in an singular player journey from game to magic to discovery that might be why so many find investing time in it rewarding and 'personal,'" adding that, "In a time of fast consumption, a game that is sticky because it has friction, and not because it's smiley feels amazing."
There is definitely something to be said for the satisfaction of persevering and overcoming a game's demands and discovering that your efforts are being rewarded, whether that's through the unlocking of new levels of interactivity, items, or narrative beats, but again, Crimson Desert's overall reception is divided.
For some, like Palworld publishing lead John Buckley, Crimson Desert is an open-world gem the likes of which we haven't seen since The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but for others, it just makes them want to play Breath of the Wild.
