We didn’t expect we’d be here so soon for this very purpose but the team behind Crimson Desert has once again surprised us all with Charting The Unknown, an expansion for the action rpg that we’re quite intrigued by. It defies what you expect from a typical RPG expansion, just as the base game has changed the way we think about open worlds and how constantly one can continue to evolve if there’s a concentrated effort to make that so.
While it might seem all right to have expected a brand-new region , perhaps a new storyline, some new enemies, bosses, weapons, and perhaps a few new abilities before this, and there’s nothing wrong with that, Charting the Unknown is doing all of that alongside something equally important. It’s transforming how the very game is played alongside it, which is a facet of the upcoming experience that has us paying rapt attention to anything that comes up about it.
Here’s why Charting the Unknown isn’t just more of the game you already know and love, but an evolution of its gameplay and player activities that adds weight to both Pywel as a whole, and to its trio of protagonists on a more granular level.
New Places To Be, New Things To Do
We’re focused on how the expansion is bringing things that you previously couldn’t do in Pywel, and it’s quite a long list of changes that’s set to take us across both the lands and seas within the region’s vast borders. Yes, the water is now going to be a new playground, and its a welcome change after the addition of the ability to literally sprint across its surface. That one already addressed the atrociously slow swimming speed for Kliff and the others, and it’s now set to take things below the surface in the expansion.
There are clearly new threats that have risen up for the Greymanes to look into, and it ‘s looking like the new search for answers is slated to take Kliff underwater, a place that once existed in Pywel as a boundary just as it has in many other games. Yes, you could use that mechanical horse from Marni to ride on the ocean floor if you managed to track that little nugget of content down. But there weren’t even any underwater chests to find, with most of the interesting ones needing us to stab waterfalls to discover what they contained within.
Well, all that’s changing now with your new ship, diving equipment, and abilities that let you stay as mobile underwater or on the seas as you are on land. Obviously, there are secrets to discover beneath the tranquil waves, and potentially new regions that have their own lore and secrets to discover. Charting the Unknown takes both parts of its name quite seriously from the looks of it, but it’s equally interesting to see how it expands not the game’s scope but its ambition – something that seems to have no ceiling even after almost transforming the experience already.
It’s a lot more meaningful than putting an island on the map, instead taking Pywel’s existing exploratory framework and building on it in ways that could bring new systems and mechanics alongside new locations and content. It’s an intelligent approach that’s not just restricted to the sea, but to the place Kliff and the Greymanes call home. We’re happy to see the expansion place a narrative framing of their new-found status among Pywel’s residents, and equally glad to see Damiane and Oongka apparently playing a role in leading their respective factions.
That leadership aspect blends in nicely with the new base building system, which looks like it’s taking the concept of the Greymane camp and expanding its scope to include a much more personal, and far more granular experience. It makes sense to have the faction put down roots after its ill-fated run in with the Black Bears and everything that followed in the aftermath. Pailune was a good place to be, but we couldn’t help but think that it had fallen before.
Wouldn’t a more defensible location be a deterrent to future threats in and of itself? What if we could make that location reflect our personalities, and the general vibe of the people that it protects? What if we could make that base feed our progress, getting our companions to work for its welfare and for the welfare of the land, just as we’d been doing from our camp on Howling Hill? The base and exploration working together are a showcase of what already works in Pywel being expanded upon to give it more breadth and depth.
Systemic Interactions
One of the ways by which Pywel has managed to be as captivating as it has been is in how seemingly disparate mechanics tie into each other. Mining ores ties in to upgrading your gear as well as the economy and alchemy systems through gold ores and the like. Unlocking traversal options meant getting access to new places, new secrets, new quests, and potentially new story threads to follow.
The expansion, when considered from the lens of that intersectionality, becomes exponentially larger in its scope thanks to the sheer number of possibilities that can come from its new systems interacting with the existing framework that the developer has managed to build over the better part of this year. That freedom of traversal is now taken up a notch, adding a ship to an open world where having one is not just cool, but is sure to come with its own innovations to make it stand out.
A ship might not stand out on its own but it’s a perfect showcase of how a single new mechanic can change the way a game is played if it is designed to fit well within the game’s systems and overlaps enough with them to make the experience on offer come together as seamlessly as it can. And when it becomes the catalyst for a bunch of other discoveries and activities that would otherwise not be possible on it, and perhaps even create potential interdependencies in the process, you know that things are going to be very good.
Where another open world would just add in another twenty hours of the same content with twists and call it a day, the best ones come with enough to make those additional hours worthwhile in ways that make sense. Mechanically transformative DLCs are still regrettably too rare, although we do have gems like Phantom Liberty, Heart and Stone, and the ones on offer in recent Monster Hunter titles as shining examples. Charting the Unknown is firmly in the latter camp, and Crimson Desert is all the better for it.
That’s because its value never lay in one particular facet of what it was offering up as a whole, such as its story, the map, or its combat. It was in how all those elements came together to provide a gameplay loop that had an almost ridiculous amount of things you could just lose yourself doing, the studio’s previous MMO experience being translated very well into an open world that was best enjoyed solo. It isn’t just thinking about where it can send players next, but about all the new stuff they can get to do once they get there, and perhaps even on the way.
The cadence of it all is noteworthy, as the expansion’s follow the base game mere months after its release, and with a host of substantial updates that have already felt like expansions all on their own at times. We can’t help but worry if all the new systems were conceived alongside the base game, or if Crimson Desert is now the staging ground for an ever-evolving experience that’s going to continue growing until it’s too big for itself?
We cannot deny the risk of the game stretching itself too thin, the very systems meant to prop up the experience crumbling under the weight of everything that’s expected of them. It’s easy to add new mechanics but harder to make them blend in as seamlessly as they can into an experience that has already been shifting and changing so much. Can the new base building system keep its players coming back for more, and can exploring underwater locations continue to keep you holding your breath once the novelty wears off?
Crimson Desert treads a very fine line between astonishing variety and meaningless bloat, and it needs to be careful about how new things to do are introduced into the mix. Yes, it has been a gift that keeps on giving all along, but in expanding its possibilities, it must acknowledge the very possibility that its own ambitions could be its undoing. However, its first expansion looks unusually committed to making us feel capable of feats we couldn’t achieve before, which is saying something in a world that lets us accomplish so much.
It’s making an already capable game become so much more, and its own self-actualization might just be a part of the new journeys it facilitates, and the memories we stand to make along the way later this year.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
