Shadow of the Colossus, Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring; every so often, a boundary pushing open world game emerges, breaking new ground for immersion through sheer ambition. Crimson Desert is poised to be that sort of ground breaker. The developers are crafting a world where mechanical systems collide: traversal feeds combat, exploration shapes progression, and through its suite of tools, abilities, and augmentations the ability to express yourself becomes the experience’s core.
These emergent moments happen across the wartorn continent of Pywel, with the game disinterested in funnelling you down a single heroic path. Instead, it wants you to experiment, improvise, and create your own stories. So, from territorial warfare, to dynamic traversal and physics-driven skirmishing, here are fifteen things we can’t wait to do in Crimson Desert.
Liberate Occupied Territories Across Pywel
Pywel is a seamless open world divided into five countries, each shaped by distinct cultures, conflicts, and geopolitical powers. Throughout your journey, you’ll liberate occupied territories via a progression system tied to the continent’s political landscape. Each victory unlocks rewards, builds faction allegiance, and potentially alters how the regions function. This isn’t static base clearing but liberation imbued with narrative consequence. You’ll be exploring not just for loot but to expand your influence across ruling houses and organisations.
Experience Multiple Playable Perspectives
While protagonist Kliff, the highly-skilled mercenary of the Greymanes, anchors Crimson Desert’s narrative, the game also includes additional playable characters, each with their own abilities, weapons, playstyles, and upgrade paths. Once they’ve been unlocked, you’re free to embody Oongka and Damiane as they support Kliff through side quests and exploration, imparting their own perspectives, approaches, and philosophies to Pywel’s shifting landscape.
Undertake Quests At My Own Pace
Crimson Desert’s quest design appears built around self-curation, where you’re free to engage in any number of tasks in whichever order you choose. Like the shifting perspectives, there’s variety in what’s on offer here too – one moment you’ll be participating in a large-scale assault on a fortified, heavily guarded stronghold, the next you’re helping townsfolk with mundane busywork. This contrast brings new levels of believability, where life in Pywel isn’t just defined by epic battles but by everyday struggles amid upheaval.
Wander Using a Raft of Traversal Mechanics
Engaging in various traversal mechanics when exploring Pywel will be one of Crimson Desert’s defining features. As the developer puts it: you’re able to go pretty much anywhere. See that hilltop spire in the distance? You can scale it. And, you can glide across valleys, gallop through fords, and climb sheer rockfaces on your way there. Likewise, hidden ruins, ancient mechanisms, environmental puzzles, and secret artifacts reward your wandering. In a world where verticality is scalable, anything distant that intrigues you is always within reach.
Use Traversal Skills as a Combat Advantage
Even more exciting is how traversal skills flow directly into combat. Grapple rope physics, for instance, allow you to swing, launch, and spin mid-flight, enabling acrobatic assaults that are as much a spectacle as they are effective attacks. Closer to improvised stunt choreography, these encounters highlight the need to utilise space when battling; dropping from above, ziplining over arenas, double jumping, flying, where swordplay hinges on a gilded edge, your traversal toolkit brings consistent chance to reposition yourself unpredictably.
Ride, and Pilot Into Battle
Another indication that Crimson Desert embraces spectacle are the various mounts and crafts you can take into battle. Horses, ferocious black bears, rocket-launching mechs, prehistoric raptors; there are opportunities to shift skirmishing’s rhythm through explosive robots and deadly steeds. The real excitement, for me, is in the unknown; in wondering what’s yet to be revealed. Mechs, for instance, might initially seem an odd inclusion, but they’re emblematic of one of Pywel’s science-focused countries, meaning exploration through each region – if you needed further incentive – could bring a stream of surprise acquisitions to ride and pilot into battle.
Finetune My Own Combat Identity
In an approach that’s more commonplace among action games than ever – see Nioh 3 or Marathon – Crimson Desert brings deeply customisable combat, allowing you to specialise in aggressively offensive damage dealers, tank-like powerhouses, or something in-between. Different weapon types pair with melee skills too, encouraging buildcrafting that breaks out of rigid class roles to provide progression that feels earned as much as constructed.
Bring More Flavour Through Elemental Skills and Fluid Combo Chains
Beyond weapon choice, elemental abilities and movement-based manoeuvres add style and environmental interactivity to encounters. Grapple-assisted combo chains and fluid transitions ensure Crimson Desert’s combat maintains momentum, while core elemental firepower – fire, ice, wind, lightning – can imbue your blades. Together with the deeply customisable combat builds we just alluded to, the developer is evidently striving to remove any barriers that may block your personality from seeping into the game’s combat mechanics.
Tailor Progression Around How I Actually Play
Beyond freeing occupied lands, Crimson Desert’s progression systems are built around artifacts and discoverable techniques. Fallen from the overhead Abyss – a mysterious Tears of the Kingdom-style realm of floating platforms, the true nature of which the developer hasn’t confirmed – artefacts are found by solving puzzles, defeating bosses, or through general exploration, and they increase core stats, unlock new skills, or upgrade your existing moveset. Other techniques are unlocked by engaging with the world; discoverable “live” demonstrations that’ll show you the ropes if you observe. Put it all together, and you’ve got the option to tailor progression around how you want to play. Want to pursue stamina to maximise exploration? You can do that. Perhaps fortifying strength will boost your grappling proficiency? Give it a bash.
Gather Materials to Customise My Weapons
Mining, hunting, and resource scavenging feed into Crimson Desert’s weapon customisation systems beyond cosmetic upgrades. Certain materials adjust stats, apply special effects, and augment gear to create blades and sidearms that’ll feel mine. Even small details, like the tactile pickaxe mining animation, suggests the developer wants this system to feel satisfying rather than a tacked-on mechanical requirement.
Challenge My Build Against a Raft of Boss Battles
Boss encounters appear to vary wildly throughout the game, from embattled warriors to mythical creatures and mechanical structures. Crimson Desert isn’t a soulslike, but each battle seems designed around unique mechanics much like FromSoftware’s playbook. What’s more, defeating bosses allows you to learn their signature abilities, providing an extra push of motivation to best a particularly gruelling encounter should a meaningful evolution in my skillset be the reward.
Discover Whether the Game Truly Offers 200+ Hours
That’s according to the game’s Marketing Director Will Powers, who’s personally roadtested two-hundred hours in-game and still hasn’t seen it all. Claims of this ilk are always bold, but with a smorgasbord of side activities – fishing, archery, arm wrestling, horse racing, the aforesaid resource gathering, and more – Crimson Desert might just be a sandbox with near-limitless distractions. And, to be clear, two-hundred-plus hours isn’t just signalling a huge quantity, but an opportunity to unhurriedly exist in the world, chasing curiosity instead of checklists.
Experience a Continent Transformed By Time and Weather
Given the most up-to-date gameplay previews, dynamic day-night cycles plus shifting weather and seasons appear to dramatically alter the game’s atmosphere, and any encounters you may experience. Community comparisons over on the Crimson Desert sub-Reddit show identical boss battles which look and feel completely different depending on lighting and environmental conditions. Crossing a stone bridge on horseback is eerie and mysterious during candlelit rainfall, whilst a morning stroll through autumnal farmland is crisp and vitalising.
Dive Into Water Mechanics
Crimson Desert’s water mechanics might be deeper than expected. Yes, beyond surface physics which, according to Digital Foundry’s recent writeup, is via a 3D-based volumetric application, making waves and ripples interact realistically, the developer has shown glimpses of other water-based activities. Boating, swimming, and possibly galleon sailing, each opening new routes for traversal. Elsewhere, freezing water with ice arrows to create temporary platforms hints at systemic experimentation. Let’s hope the game’s water mechanics are as deep as official footage and gameplay leaks are suggesting.
Combine Systems to Create Emergent Moments
Expanding on the unexpected ice arrow mechanic just-highlighted, one of the most compelling arguments for Crimson Desert’s potential as an open world all-timer is the interconnectedness of it all. Each system flows into another – exploration feeds progression, progression boosts traversal, traversal encourages combat dynamism, and so on – but we’ve also seen glimpses of experimental or unforeseen manoeuvres that are a direct result of the game’s systemic maturity. Flying, gliding downwards then landing on a moving horse – one mode of travel flowing into another – is just one example I’ve seen.
