[PlayStation #178] Het is geen sprint

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Op woensdag 18 maart 2026 22:01 schreef Peejtur het volgende:
Te laat

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Unfortunately, Kliff often isn't the badass he claims to be. He moves like an eighteen-wheeler, runs out of stamina frequently, needs to eat forty-eight cows every time he fights a boss, and has no concept of storage. The world of Pywel is not a masterpiece of open world game design like Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Witcher 3 (despite looking better than both of these), it's a single-player MMO, meaning the grind is relentless and the difficulty spikes are random.

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Unfortunately, it often feels like Crimson Desert does not respect your time. Take the Bounty missions, for example. These are dotted across the map, and you can get a good deal of silver for them, but you need to go to the location, pick up the target, and then carry them all the way back to the single jail in the region, which is sometimes a couple of thousand metres away. The entire time you're doing this, the person on the back of the horse repeats the same three voice lines over and over again. I did three of these missions and gave up.

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Crimson Desert is also riddled with bugs in its current state. A late mission involved a key item that goes missing forever when destroyed, and as far as I'm aware, it's meant to respawn. But it didn't. What should have been an epic moment in the story is reduced to tedious grinding and repetition.

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I had several more quests that didn't really seem to work, or became broken if they weren't completed in the perfect way. It felt like I was testing the game for Pearl Abyss, and countless more bugs are bound to surface when the public gets their hands on things

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I blasted through 150 hours of Crimson Desert in a little under two weeks. So, it's possible I simply burned out on the experience before reaching its end and now find myself jaded beyond repair. Putting this aside though, there is so much that Crimson Desert does well.

Combat, exploration, and the sense of progression are all top-notch and have the potential to be crafted into something masterful with future updates. And yet, many of its more frustrating elements are impossible to ignore and are in dire need of refinement.

It's highly ambitious and one of the most intriguing triple-A games I've played in years, but I just wish so many parts of the whole weren't inherently flawed.

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Crimson Desert is the absolute definition of a massive disappointment. It’s a Ferrari body with a lawnmower engine under the hood. Pearl Abyss tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one: Elden Ring fans will be driven mad by the clunky combat, Witcher fans will be bored to tears by the lack of depth, those looking for a world as organic as Breath of the Wild are in for a rude awakening, and the general public will struggle with the abysmal UI and unwarranted difficulty spikes. Riddled with technical issues unacceptable for a blockbuster of this scale, and weighed down by dated writing, Crimson Desert is on the verge of a total systemic failure. The hype train has well and truly derailed. See you in a year, after 150 patches and a mountain of DLC, which, of course, are already in the works.

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Crimson Desert is een uitstekende game met een boeiende open wereld, zeer uitdagende bossfights en breinbrekende puzzels. De game is zeker niet helemaal perfect, maar de bereidheid van Pearl Abyss om naar feedback te luisteren stemt mij hoopvol dat Crimson Desert in de toekomst alleen nog maar beter zal worden.

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I’ve played over 110 hours of Crimson Desert and already feel like I’ve seen just about all there is to see, but until I complete the main story and explore whatever secrets the endgame holds, I’m not ready to stamp a final score onto this ambitious yet flawed RPG quite yet. So far the highs have been very high, and the lows have been very low, which has made for an amusing adventure that’s also difficult to recommend outright. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story wraps up (though I’m not expecting much from it at this point) and what the post-game experience looks like. I should be ready with a final review in the coming days.

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Crimson Desert draws attention for its ambitious open-world adventure proposal, but the experience ultimately falls short of expectations. The game features a confusing narrative, with uninteresting characters and missions that feel like generic MMO tasks. The combat has many mechanics but little depth, with artificial difficulty spikes and unresponsive controls. Even with impressive graphics and a high degree of exploration freedom, issues with art direction, bugs, and design decisions make the game feel vast in content but shallow in quality.

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Make no mistake, Crimson Desert is a technically proficient game with killer combat (pesky lock-on aside). Yet its characters and story are fatally undercooked. And for all Pywel's spectacular visual construction which impresses in its gigantic scale and gleaming prettiness, it lacks a certain distinctiveness. Think of The Witcher games: you can practically taste the fetid water, churned-up mud, and hunks of charred meat dined on by noblemen. Those are works of grit, texture, and a genuinely idiosyncratic sense of place. How does Crimson Desert taste? Well, it is not nearly so flavoursome - imagine, instead, a banquet where almost every dish has the faint taste of cardboard, and you have to eat it for what feels like forever.

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TLDW: Crimson Desert is a generational game. A game that fundamentally changes our perception of what is possible in the medium. Its open-world, exploration, and sheer scale all offer something that almost no other game has even attempted. It's NOT perfect: there are bugs, occasional quality dips, and its scope can sometimes leave ideas on the table for too long, but overall I'm thoroughly impressed. After 60+ hours I'm loving it. I think it will probably take me 120+ to roll credits and likely 300+ for a completionist run; even so, I cannot wait to see what else the game has tucked away for me to find and I'm actively playing it even while writing this pinned comment.

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Op woensdag 18 maart 2026 23:29 schreef Jimbo het volgende:

[..]
ja en als het een 8.2 had geweest had je nu blij geweest ...

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All the verdicts you find online today are based on PC review code. Pearl Abyss, the game's developer and publisher, has not provided anyone with console access, meaning any reviews based on the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions are not available at the time of writing. We've been told we'll get access to the PS5 version on release day.

While we understand review code is never guaranteed, it is disappointing we can't provide you, the readers, with our own thoughts before Crimson Desert comes out. Once we have access ourselves, we'll start work on our coverage, including an initial Hands On piece covering how the game runs on PS5. We'll also have our full PS5 review in the future alongside guide content.

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Though I’ll call it imperfect but patchable, Crimson Desert is still impressive enough to be within striking distance of the juggernauts of this genre. At the very least, this represents one of the first few must-plays of the year. Perhaps contradictorily, Crimson Desert is a lush and generously-sized oasis of awesome that needs to be seen to be believed on PC. Here's hoping the console versions are up to snuff as well.