Crimson Desert has been building up in peoples' minds for well over half a decade now, and has spent a fair bit of that time looking too good to be true. Developer Pearl Abyss knows that kind of hype can easily backfire, and is now doing its best to ensure players have the proper expectations, especially as the game has changed shape over the years.
"In a sense, we're kind of victims of ourselves – we announced the game too early, and, honestly, that's just inarguable [to dispute]," marketing director Will Powers tells IGN. "Things happened that way for multiple reasons; the game changed, and we built an engine, and not just for this game, but an additional engine altogether. So it's not just strictly development time for a singular title. But if we had to do it again, I don't think anyone would say we should announce the game six-and-a-half years in advance. That's just not a thing that happens often."
Indeed, you'd need to look at something like The Elder Scrolls 6 for a similar timeline between reveal and release – that game's already been in the public's consciousness for longer than Crimson Desert, and it'll likely be several more years before it finally launches. Yet people have a certain expectation in mind for what a new Bethesda RPG will be. Pearl Abyss, known for the MMO Black Desert Online, hasn't proven what it can do with an open-world action-adventure game.
"It becomes less of a question of people not knowing what the game is," Powers explains, "and more of a question of, 'Well, how can this be too good to be true?' Or, 'how can this not be real?' We never want to be accused of hiding anything, because we have a lot of ground to make up. We initially revealed this as something else, so we needed to do more than a game traditionally would to course-correct for our own actions from five and six years ago."
Crimson Desert was originally set to be a prequel to Black Desert Online but eventually shifted to becoming a single-player game, and that's part of why its systems seem so wide-ranging. "Even though this game has pivoted to a single-player open world," Powers says, "those single players are benefiting from systems from when it was a different type of game, which is why many people say they haven't seen a game like this before. This isn't what this game was originally intended to be. This is an amalgamation of what it is morphed into, benefiting from where it came from."
Powers also says, "Like with anything, there's a balance of making sure that the awareness is out there for Crimson Desert without over hyping or setting impossible expectations to be able to hit. That's really where you need to achieve that balance, because you don't want to let people down at launch by making them anticipate something to such a high level – like it's the second coming. So you have to strike a balance between awareness and not over-promising."
We'll find out for sure whether Crimson Desert can deliver on its promise when the open-world RPG launches on March 19.
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