Crimson Desert stole the limelight at last year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live with a trailer that included everything from sword and shield-based combat, to fishing, to tavern arm-wrestling, dog petting, flute playing, goat carrying, horse taming, monster climbing and more. However, while the game was playable at Gamescom last week, Pearl Abyss (developer of Black Desert Online) decided to show a much more focused demo.
If you didn’t know any better, you might come away from this demo thinking Crimson Desert is a boss rush Soulslike, as during our hour with the game we were shuffled on from a brief opening sequence onto four mid-game bosses. This wouldn’t normally be a problem - getting to grips with controller schemes and game mechanics quickly during a demo is part of the job - however, it seemed like for several of these bosses we were missing important context as to their weaknesses and mechanics that we would have learned about beforehand in the story or travelling through the open world.
Source: Pearl Abyss
As a result, almost every journalist I spoke to at the show described having a PR person hovering over them trying to explain some pretty complex boss mechanics and strategies, telling us to use certain equipment or target scarecrows around the arena and not the boss itself. This isn’t bad per sé but it is an odd choice for a vertical slice, especially for an open-world game, and the developers seemed to know this too providing us hundreds of healing items in our inventory to try to help us through this demo.
It isn’t often helpful to describe a game as like another game but with [blank], but in this case, it really does feel like the team has amalgamated mechanics and design philosophies from other games to create what’s here. While Crimson Desert has stamina bars and focuses heavily on guarding and parrying, it is also much faster-paced than the FromSoft games and enemies will come at you quickly. On top of this, attacks are much more animated and over the top than a From game, feeling somewhat similar to something like a Devil May Cry’s stylish combat. Also in line with more traditional action games, there is no manual lock-on, meaning you are somewhat at the behest of the camera when it comes to who you can target.
All these disparate mechanics came together to make boss encounters quite challenging. Acts are fast and there is a temptation to start mashing but you are also locked into the animations, and since enemies’ attacks are just as quick and often combo into each other, you can quickly find yourself taking huge damage and out of stamina to run away. This was especially challenging in the opening sequence where we had to fight a brutish enemy tribe leader, while his foot soldiers swarmed us with little room to breathe.
If that weren’t enough, the final boss we encountered was a Queen Stoneback Crab. This monster was several times bigger than us and basically a walking hill. To defeat it we had to mount and clamber over it, grabbing onto and stabbing weak points, similar to something out of Dragon’s Dogma or Shadow of The Colossus. In fact, the encounter also began to feel like something out of Monster Hunter as it went on so long that our demo wound up ending before we could land our final blow.
While this may sound negative, a poor demo doesn’t mean a game is going to be bad and there were plenty of things that interested. One boss fight in the snow in particular felt especially fun, as it stripped back the gimmicks and we just found ourselves learning the monster’s attack patterns and getting into the rhythm of combat.
Crimson Desert is a hard game to judge at this point as our demo only left us with more questions than before, but we are certainly curious to see where it goes from here.
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replyLexi Luddy posted a new article, Crimson Deserts' boss fights are spectacular if not a little overwhelming
