Crimson Desert is known to be an incredibly extensive open-world adventure that can easily captivate you for 150+ hours. MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz has now finished it and is sure: The original plans of Pearl Abyss must have been much more ambitious.
How big is Crimson Desert? I have now completed the 12 acts of the main story and the epilogue. All the witch ruins have been cleared, and I have defeated a little more than 50 bosses and the entire map has been revealed through the 8 bell towers. In total, I was able to check off 55 percent of the knowledge entries. Time spent: about 150 hours.
To bring the game to 100 percent, I would certainly need to invest another 100 hours, maybe even more. The first player to achieve the Platinum Trophy reportedly took 305 hours.
Nevertheless, I am now sure that Crimson Desert should have been much more extensive. There are several hints of this, one of which relates to a place you are supposed to visit during the epilogue after the finale.
I won’t reveal anything about the actual finale or how the story ends. However, I will briefly touch on the epilogue and hint at how Crimson Desert tries to frame the events of the past hours of gameplay. If you want to experience that without any prior information, you should not continue reading.
The places where the bells toll
Still there? Good! You surely know that there are several larger settlements or cities in Crimson Desert where you meet countless merchants and quest givers, and they often play an important role in the main story. At many of these important locations, you will find a bell tower that you can climb to ring the local bell.
This way, you uncover the immediate surroundings of the respective location on the map. If you ring all 8 bells, you can even see the entire splendor of the continent Pywel. However, without a guide or interactive map, it’s not so easy to find all the bells in the game.
The last bell tower is located in the far north of the namesake Crimson Desert, in the city of Varnia. There are a few NPCs and a fast travel point, but not much more. No special story events or exciting quest lines take place here. Unless you are specifically looking for the last bell or want to explore every inch of the game, you probably won’t end up here quickly.
Karsten has been looking forward to Crimson Desert since the first trailers. In the past weeks, he has spent almost every free minute on the continent Pywel. Almost 150 hours have been accumulated this way.
What about Varnia? After the big finale, Kliff sets out in the epilogue to visit his most important allies again to talk to them about the current situation and his plans for the future. So, it goes back to all the important places like the town of Hernand, Calphade Castle, or Delesyia Fortress.
The last task in the epilogue, however, noticeably stands out: it sends Kliff to Varnia. No problem, I was already there, for the bell. But why should I specifically go to the sandy butt of Pywel? I don’t want to reveal whom Kliff meets there at this point. However, this person has nothing to do with the place itself.
Since that meeting, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that the developers originally had different plans for Varnia and that the city was supposed to play a role in the main story.
Pywel is full of hints like these: Those who are currently playing Crimson Desert and have already put in a few hours will agree with me: Hernand is bursting with content. You constantly stumble upon new tasks, puzzles, and secrets. Anyone who wants can easily spend 100 hours in this starting region.
However, the farther you move away from Hernand, the less densely positioned the content seems. This is especially noticeable in the endgame zones of Delesyia and Crimson Desert. Although these are also large, there is much more downtime, but also more challenges that have received less investment of effort.
More and more frequently, for example, you can simply pick up Abyss artifacts instead of having to solve puzzles for them (as is almost always the case in Hernand).
It’s fitting that some of the later story acts come across as less elaborately staged and designed than comparable events in the first half of the story – I don’t want to spoil anything here either.
All of this makes it seem as if the developers significantly scaled back their plans for the later regions over time in order not to develop Crimson Desert for two, three, or more years. If that’s true, the original plans must have been absurdly ambitious… considering the current extent of the game.
Would Crimson Desert have become an even better game with these contents? Maybe. Perhaps it would have scared off more players with its size, which it is already doing in its current form. It might have been the best solution to design the continent smaller from the start and to give all regions the same developer love. However, the size of the game world is also a big appeal of Crimson Desert… difficult. What do you think? You can read more from me about Crimson Desert here: Like in the good old days: Why Crimson Desert suddenly feels like WoW Classic after 140 hours
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