How long does it take to finish Crimson Desert?

How long it takes to complete Crimson Desert can vary but the time to beat this RPG is potentially enormous, with 30+ hours at a minimum if you just mainline the story. But if you plan to comb all of Pywel and achieve 100% completion then there's potentially hundreds of hours to be had. These numbers will vary significantly depending how much you do, your skill level and levelling, and what kind of experience you want to have with Crimson Desert, but I've got the basics here, based on my own and several other members of the team playing it.

How long does Crimson Desert take to finish?

How long is Crimson Desert — (Image credit: Pearl Abyss)

How long Crimson Desert takes will all depend on how long you want to play it, and how much you want to do. That said most players will take between 60-90 hours for a playthrough, and potentially/probably more. Here's how those numbers break down:

Just story/main campaign: 35-50 hours
Story + side content: 60-90 hours
100% Completion: 140-200 hours

The variation in part is also due to the fact that Crimson Desert can be very difficult in places, unpredictably, especially with boss fights and certain puzzles that can ramp up the challenge without warning. Skill or luck might help you breeze through some of these encounters quicker, but more likely you'll end up stuck on certain things here and there for hours.

That's partly because of how the game handles levelling, and most players will have to engage with side content fairly frequently, or risk being underpowered or poorly prepared for challenges on the critical path. Beyond that Crimson Desert is a huge game, with plenty of quests, challenges, locations, secrets, and optional content to find, easily comparable to something like The Witcher 3. Players who want to exhaust Pywel for content will likely have to commit weeks, or even months of time to Crimson Desert.

If you want to get through the huge RPG as quickly as possible, you might want to use Crimson Desert fast travel, as well as our guides to completing the most difficult areas and puzzles. Just some examples are the Crimson Desert Ancient Ruins puzzle, and the Crimson Desert Abyss Cell puzzle.

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Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and Very Tired Man with a BA from Brunel University, a Masters from Sussex University and a decade working in games journalism, often focused on guides coverage but also in reviews, features and news. His love of games is strongest when it comes to groundbreaking narratives like Disco Elysium, UnderTale and Baldur's Gate 3, as well as innovative or refined gameplay experiences like XCOM, Sifu, Arkham Asylum or Slay the Spire. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at Eurogamer, Gfinity, USgamer, SFX Magazine, RPS, Dicebreaker, VG247, and more.