How MMO-like are the quests?
Crimson Desert uses not only at the beginning but also after dozens of hours its quests to allow you access to new functions and features of the game and to try them out. Due to the enormous variety of content – from farming to taming horses to sending NPCs on missions – variety is guaranteed right from the start.
The quests of the main story and larger side mission chains culminate repeatedly in memorable highlights such as well-staged boss fights or an epic siege battle that is divided over several hours into multiple phases with very different objectives.
Tasks are sometimes received from static NPCs standing around in the world or from the bulletin boards of the settlements, as is common in many MMORPGs. However, people (or carrier pigeons) often stop you and hand Kliff an urgent message.
Or the gray mane stumbles right into a task, like when a man suddenly falls at his feet. It turns out he was just trying to clean the chimney. Thanks to the parkour system, with which Kliff can literally climb everything (if stamina allows, hello Zelda), he finds himself on the roof a few moments later, swinging the broom.
I equally enjoyed intentionally following a quest line or simply going with the flow while exploring and seeing which quests awaited me while exploring a region. Boredom is a foreign word in Pywel.
The downside of hero work
I found it annoying that some quest chains do not logically build on one another. In these cases, after completing target X, suddenly the new target Y appears, which has nothing to do with recent events, and I think to myself: Where did that come from? This was never mentioned. Did Kliff have a revelation?
From time to time, quests even lead to frustration, as Crimson Desert continuously under-explains despite numerous tutorial hints. Sometimes it is enough to overlook a small detail, and you puzzle over the solution to a task for an eternity. Sometimes, however, you also have to be at exactly the right position for the crucial button for the action required by the quest to appear.
And then I occasionally felt that the German texts were not always perfectly translated, which made some dialogue-heavy quests, where you have to collect and evaluate evidence, frustratingly unclear or misleading.
Daily life in Pywel also includes – as in many other open-world games – some repetitive tasks. I found the bounty quests from the bulletin boards particularly negative, which always go the same way: Track down criminals, knock the fleeing NPC down with a button press, punch him in the face until evidence appears, and then deliver him to jail.
The game makes no distinction between whether you need to catch a hulking giant or a petite woman. The brutal overpowering often feels grotesquely inappropriate. It’s also not very fun to have to transport the bound criminal across half the continent – so far, I’ve only discovered one place where you can turn in the bounty target.
Even if you unlocked a fast travel point nearby, you can’t use it with the NPC on your shoulders. So you get on your horse and ride through the wilderness. During that time, the prisoner repeatedly spouts the same three or four sentences over and over again. After a few minutes, it dulls your brain…
