Even Crimson Desert's lead actor knows you're not here for the story: "The boon of this game is clearly the size of the open world, and, you know, the fact that you can pick up a cat"

Even Crimson Desert's biggest fans will tell you that the story's not the biggest draw, and even the actor who brought protagonist Kliff to life can't argue with that point. In a new interview, actor Alec Newman says he tried to push for the game's protagonist to be a more complete character, but the constantly shifting nature of Crimson Desert's development made that difficult.

"The boon of this game is clearly the size of the open world, and, you know, the fact that you can pick up a cat," as Newman tells the Friends Per Second podcast, as highlighted by This Week in Video Games. He says that's because of "the preferences of the developers and the people who wrote the scripts for these games, which kept changing."

Here, Newman alludes to the fact that the single-player open-world game originally started life as an online prequel to Black Desert Online. "At various stages it felt very much like making a TV series where they kept moving the focus," he explains, "and in fact it's not a secret if you look at the way that Crimson Desert came into being – they did move things around."

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As an illustration of that point, Newman says he had "been recording various iterations of this character at various stages of development for ages, and in fact, for the first year and a half or so, it was just a demo as far as I knew." It was "nearly two years into recording" before "they sort of said, 'Well, we're going to start recording in earnest now.' And I went, 'what the hell do you mean? We've been doing this for ages!'"

Ultimately, Newman would end up working on Crimson Desert for five years, and through much of that time he tried to get more character development for Kliff. "I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could. And really, I have to be honest, I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer with a certain type of game."

Need help figuring out Trade Goods and Trading in Crimson Desert? We've got you covered. You can also check out our Crimson Desert review to find out if its one of the new games for 2026 that's worth playing.