The latest big Crimson Desert patch is upon us, and though Pearl Abyss has already been calling it the "largest update yet," it seems the massive patch notes haven't even done it justice as fans take note of several additional quality-of-life tweaks the devs haven't officially called out. Unfortunately, there are also a fair few unintended bugs that the community is tracking.
But first, the good news. According to the community change tracker, you've now got "faster and smoother" interactions with some characters, including for the Duo minigame, which should make repeated retries a whole lot more palatable. The quest for winning three hands of Duo in a row also no longer requires you to do it in a row. It's unclear whether that's a bug or a feature, but the community sentiment is clear: "PLEASE KEEP THIS."
Teleporting is also now faster, enemies seem to be leaving behind better drops, and focus recharge appears to be twice as fast as it was before. Are those changes intentional? Nobody seems to know for sure, but players are preemptively begging for Pearl Abyss to keep many of them in place. But hey, even if these are bugs that will eventually be fixed, the devs seem amenable to turning beneficial glitches into features – that is, after all, why you can now get cats to stay on your shoulders indefinitely.
Unfortunately, not every item in the community patch notes is beneficial. In fact, most of them are obvious bugs. Thankfully, an issue that was stealing mounts has already been the subject of a hotfix, but plenty more bugs remain. Save files are often getting relabeled as "Chapter 2" regardless of what chapter you're actually in, but thankfully this is purely a visual issue.
Crimson Desert 1.04.00 - Community Compiled List of Issues, Bugs and Unspecified Changes from r/CrimsonDesert
More seriously, Greymane characters are having their trust reset to zero, and some players are hitting a crash during the final boss cutscene that's currently rendering the game unbeatable. PC players seem to be having it roughest of all, with a wide array of interface bugs on keyboard and mouse, particularly when it comes to house customization.
The most serious issue will affect a fairly small number of players, but it hits in a major way: the game no longer launches on Linux. The OS is not officially supported for Crimson Desert, but up until now users were able to play just fine. After the patch, however, the game often won't boot on Linux at all.
I recently switched my gaming PC entirely from Windows to Linux, and Valve's work in making games compatible across OS configurations has been so magical that I've barely noticed the change at all. I'm getting my Crimson Desert time in on PS5, thankfully, but I'd be pretty bummed if I'd picked the game up on PC.
But whether or not Linux support gets fixed, these unofficial patch notes suggest that there are a lot of extra changes under the hood that are quietly improving the game, and the devs have already been working quickly to address the inadvertent bugs.
