Crimson Desert Hype

I’m trying an experiment in writing in a single topic individual post with a relevant title. A weird concept.

I’ve been hearing people talk about Crimson Desert for what seems like my entire life. Now that it’s actually imminent, I’m hearing more people talk about it in a distinctly hyped manner.

My humble question is: Why? What am I missing?

Not once in the entire history of my knowledge of this game have I ever thought, Oh neat, I can’t wait to play that.

My memory of the combat in Black Desert is that it was overwhelmingly meh. Or I guess mid is what they say now. Or default. Or whatever. I have to assume the combat in Crimson Desert will be based on the same concept: A lot of flashy (and flashing) animations that block the whole screen, but not a lot of tactical depth.

I’ve never been a fan of combat where you press a single button and it looks on the screen like you’ve set off a series of nuclear explosions with your sword, vastly more powerful than what you, the player, actually did. It feels cheap and unearned.

From the videos I’ve seen of Crimson Desert it has the same basic look as Black Desert, which was a hyperrealistic overly-sharpened style that dazzles at first, but then gets old and samey pretty quickly, as there isn’t much variation in the color palette or models or clothing and you start to notice all the seams where nothing quite fits together.

I honestly don’t even know what kind of game it is yet. When I look at the Steam videos it looks like an open world action game, but there’s so much stuffed into the video that it looks like a mishmash of ten different games.

There’s a million different types of flying, there’s fighting with that typical Asian-style where the frame rate keeps slowing down and speeding up at awkward times to throw off your timing, there’s crazy anime combat moves that look way over-the-top silly, physically impossible, and wildly impractical, there’s boss fights, there’s story stuff (though they conspicuously don’t show much of that), there’s outfit customizations (but no character creation), there’s some kind of gambling thing, there’s grappling hooks, there’s petting dogs, and who even knows what else.

Anyway, I don’t get it. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about buying it, but since everyone is so pumped about it, I suppose I have no choice but to jump on the bandwagon and watch the inevitable let down and train wreck from the front row. At the very least I’ll do the standard Steam thing of buying it and returning it within two hours.

But maybe I’ll be surprised and it’ll be awesome. That would be a refreshing change from the status quo.

Post-Post Analysis: I don’t like writing posts this way. It really eats a huge chunk out of my day. I like it a lot more when blogging feels like writing a diary solely for myself, with no thought whatsoever for the reader’s convenience. That’s the fun part of writing; the rest is drudgerous work.