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PC Gamer

Stacey Henley

Everything we know about Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss (Organization) Black Desert (Location) Gamescom Harvey Randall

Crimson Desert's player character clashes swords with an enemy.

Crimson Desert is an open world action game from Pearl Abyss, the devs of Black Desert Online, and it's not long now until we all get to play it. So even though it spent a few years in conspicuous silence after its reveal at the 2020 Game Awards, it's firmly back in the spotlight now, with a release date fast approaching, previews for days, and a bunch of footage and gameplay details to pore over.

Crimson Desert seems a little Witcher-ish, a little Dragon Dogma-esque—there's even some Grand Theft Auto DNA in there? And of course, there's plenty of the flashy, punchy impact that Pearl Abyss brought to bear in Black Desert Online. Here's everything you need to know about Crimson Desert before its imminent release.

Crimson Desert release date

There's really not long to wait now, as Crimson Desert is coming out on March 19, 2026. The delay from its previous "late" 2025 date to Q1 2026 was announced during a Q2 2025 earnings conference call, then the more precise March release date was revealed during Sony's September 2025 State of Play.

Pearl Abyss stated that Crimson Desert was "unavoidably delayed" because of "longer than expected timelines arising from schedule coordination and collaborations with multiple partners for offline distribution, voice-overs, console certification, and other launch preparations."

Boring conference-speak aside, I guess this delay could have been a lot worse, considering Pearl Abyss initially slotted Crimson Desert in for a Winter 2021 launch but later announced its first delay. A follow-up Q2 2022 earnings presentation estimated another window it missed, yet again, for late 2023.

Crimson Desert trailers

Crimson Desert sure does like its hype trailers, as this latest from the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted is yet another highlight reel of the gargantuan number of activities you can do in the game. This one does show off a bear mount though, so that's neat.

This trailer debuted at Sony's September State of Play, and it packs a lot into its short one-and-half minutes of screentime: A lovely scottish voiceover telling us to seek out our Greymane comrades, lots of combat, dragons, and a rotund mech. If you want to get hyped for Crimson Desert before its launch in March, this is the trailer for you!

Crimson Desert gameplay

Want to see an extended look at Crimson Desert in action? The video above shows almost an hour of early gameplay footage for your viewing pleasure.

Feature overviews

If you're after something more bite-sized, the recently released "Features Overview" videos are a quick way to get caught up on the billion-and-one things you can do in Crimson Desert. The story and open-world video below is still 15 minutes long, though, so you might want to grab a snack and a drink before settling in. Then you can grab some more when you get caught with the game's Combat and Progression, and Life in Pywel feature overviews.

Our Crimson Desert preview: delightfully absurd high-fantasy rampage

Harvey Randall might have been slightly skeptical of the game before his Gamescom 2024 Crimson Desert preview, but it won him around in the end. In his latest six-hour preview of Crimson Desert, Harvey was left convinced of its delightfully bonkers action and overabundance of features, despite showing "absolutely zero restraint."

That action? "It's like if George R.R Martin had gotten really into Bollywood action movies." In practice that means doing things like using a grappling hook to put on your best Spider-Man impression, or hurl enemies with it, or "launch into a Sonic the Hedgehog-style attack" where you spin into a ball to attack enemies. Oh yeah, and you can throw a whole-ass tree at people, if you like.

In between dispatching enemies in ways that would make anime blush, you also have access to "every videogame at once." That is to say, there's a lot you can do in Crimson Desert, including: riding dragon and mech mounts, Breath of the Wild-style cooking, getting a GTA-style bounty on your head, gambling, taking part in wrestling minigames, earning faction reputation, fishinging, and clearing outposts. And that's just covering the stuff Harvey found in four hours.

Needless to say, if you want a massive, slightly mad single-player game to lose yourself in, Crimson Desert seems to tick all those boxes, and then some.

What’s the combat like in Crimson Desert?

It seems at first to be your standard, vaguely Medieval-era fare. There’s swords, shields, axes, bows, that whole deal. The trailer puts far more emphasis on the melee weapons than the ranged ones, but bow and arrows clearly still feature. It seems to be a lot of close quarters fighting with big power swings rather than precise movements. Also, dodge rolling. There’s one moment where the player character just drops a Stone Cold Stunner (outta nowhere!) too.

In the Gamescom 2023 gameplay trailer above, combat in Crimson Desert seems to stay pretty sword-heavy, but the enemies the player character faces get progressively more bizarre. At one point, he's advancing through a barrage of projectiles so that he can swordfight the Da Vinci-esque tank that's shooting them. Later, he's in a swordfight with a clockwork golem while a metal dragon swoops down to observe.

There's more pro wrestling antics on display, though. At one point, the player character grabs an enemy by the feet so he can whirl them around to strike other nearby enemies, before throwing his improvised hapless improvised weapon as a living projectile. We'll have to see whether Crimson Desert offers more styles of combat.

Is Crimson Desert single-player, or an MMO?

Breaking from its MMO pedigree with Black Desert Online, Pearl Abyss has confirmed that Crimson Desert is a single-player game. However, earlier interviews and press releases closer to the game's reveal had mentioned online elements without any specifics. Crimson Desert's latest appearance at Gamescom didn't mention any online or multiplayer elements, so it's unclear whether Pearl Abyss is still planning any online features. For now, it's safer to expect that Crimson Desert will be primarily a single-player game, if not entirely.

What else can you do in Crimson Desert?

The Crimson Desert gameplay trailer from Gamescom 2023 shows all kinds of gameplay. While we don't know any of the mechanics involved, here's a brief summary of what was shown:

Lots of melee combat, primarily involved swordfighting, but also featuring a lot of pro wrestling-style grappling
Tavern arm wrestling
Toppling an entire watchtower in combat
Horse riding
Horse archery
Horse taming
Horse drifting
Sheep-wrangling
Wagon hijacking
Hostage rescue
Buying cooking ingredients (so, presumably, cooking)
Fishing
Mushroom gathering
Dog petting
Cat cuddling
Playing a pipe while leading a procession of small void sprites
Piloting a hot air balloon
Entering a magic portal to an otherworld of geometric light-forms
Puzzles on floating islands
Climbing trees and buildings, Assassin's Creed-style
Telekinetically manipulating objects with a telekinetic tendril, almost like moving things with Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand
Pole vaulting
Leaping from a sprinting horse to sprout a mess of ribbon-like tendrils from your back, allowing you to glide
Climbing a treant
Skydiving through a field of aerial incendiary mines
Combat quick-time events
Falling through a cosmic portal

Crimson Desert story and setting

What’s the story of Crimson Desert?

We still don't have much information to work with, but Pearl Abyss has given us some background on the story itself. Set in the world Pywel, you play as a mercenary in Crimson Desert, recruiting allies to your cause as you travel to different regions.

There’s a few snippets on the game’s website, but the clearest summary of the story is this: "The King of Demeniss, Unifier of Lands, lies in a coma. In the ensuing power vacuum, those who have suffered under his iron rule now seek to exploit his weakness. Some who have felt the oppression of his conquests seek only independence, but others dream of gaining their own absolutist rule."

In this new power vacuum, you need to step in and earn yourself a slice of glory.

The trailer from the PC Gaming Show in December 2025 also provided a little more detail on the personal stakes involved, as in it, we see your character Greymane Kliff ambushed by a rival gang and left for dead.

Is Crimson Desert a sequel to Black Desert Online?

No, it isn’t a Black Desert sequel. It was originally planned as a Black Desert prequel, but developers Pearl Abyss have since suggested that it is not especially connected to Black Desert, and instead is its own standalone IP which shares some themes.

We know then that it’s not directly linked to Black Desert’s story, but they may share the same universe. Or they could be completely different. With the reveal trailer sticking religiously to a gameplay highlight reel format, and the story summary on the game’s website avoiding references to Black Desert, we can’t say for sure whether the games share a universe. Seems like you won't need any Black Desert experience to play it, though.

Are there fantasy elements in Crimson Desert?

Oh, you betcha. Pearl Abyss claims "each location has its own unique character that is both fantastical and grounded in gritty realism," and it certainly doesn’t skimp on the fantasy elements in the trailer. We saw dragon fighting, mystical runes, ghostly swamps, magically appearing walkways, a host of other fantasy creatures and of course, that weird gate thing.

What’s up with that weird, magical gate?

Weird, right? No idea. Something magical, I guess. With no story given away in the trailer and it still unclear how closely this is tied to Black Desert, all we can say for sure about this weird, magical gate is that it’s a gate, which appears to be magical, and seems quite weird.

Crimson Desert PC specs

The pictures above show the whole shebang of acceptable spec ranges, from minimum to ultra (and the ROG Xbox Ally specs, for some reason), but if you just want a quick glance to see if your hardware can run it, here's the minimum and recommended PC system requirements for Crimson Desert: