I spent an hour fighting 4 of Crimson Desert's bosses and learned to embrace the hack-and-slash, but it wasn't enough to kill its giant enemy crab

A man riding on horseback over a lush green field, riding toward a distant city beneath blue skies.

There are things about Crimson Desert I wish I'd learned quicker. Coming into a pre-release build of the game, I expected it to play something like The Witcher 3, Dragon's Dogma 2, or even Elden Ring. You know the type: gruff third-person action-RPGs where you're dodge-rolling more often than walking, in which sweeping scores kick in whenever you approach a suspiciously-empty circular space.

Crimson Desert has all of that, yes. But in other ways, it plays closer to a hack-and-slash than any of its contemporaries. During the preview – which is a gauntlet-style run of four of the game's bosses – it takes being stabbed by a territorial lord and poisoned by crows for me to cotton on to the differences.