Pearl Abyss' upcoming open-world action adventure Crimson Desert is definitely "not a Soulslike," its marketing director says, but "does that mean the game's easy? Hell no."
Speaking in a recent episode of the Dropped Frames podcast, Will Powers, director of marketing and public relations at Pearl Abyss, discusses "the beauty" of Crimson Desert being an open world game, noting, "There's no progression gating in the sense of, 'I just need to get good in order to do this.'"
While there will be some bosses on the critical path you'll need to beat in order to progress the main narrative, Powers explains that "you can just leave, you can do something else, you can upgrade your weapon, you can do side questing, you can find different things in order to make that fight easier for you," so in theory you should never be stuck being forced to attempt the same thing over and over again if you don't want to.
"That's something that I think is really interesting, because when people see the boss fights in this game, they immediately think Soulslike. This is not a Soulslike game," Powers continues. "Because Soulslike, again, has connotations and has specific definitions of narrow dodge windows, things like that. This is much more combo-driven and you kind of dictate the pace of the fight. So there is no 'get good' moment."
While "there are definitely skill checks," he clarifies, if you struggle with any of them, then "you can get additional buffs from food and camp, you can grind a bunch more consumables to make the fight easier for you, you can find a blueprint for an item that lets you revive in a fight to get an extra, second shot [...] and you can craft multiple of those. So you can overprepare and make any fight accessible to you.
"Does that mean the game's easy? Hell no," he laughs. "But I think that it allows that layer of accessibility so you're never hard stuck, which I think is really, really important in the single player game."
In the same podcast episode, Powers notes that Crimson Desert won't have any microtransactions since it's a premium game, so "that is the transaction. Like, full stop." While we'll have to wait and see how the game lands, we don't have long to go, as it's finally launching on March 19.
