IGN reviewed Crimson Desert..

We have had a very very interesting development. So IGN and a number of other developers or sorry game reviewers have been relatively negative about the new game Crimson Desert. I found this to be very odd, kind of confusing to me. But you have, this is what he was saying, Jason Shrier about Crimson Desert. Boring and soulless that I absolutely did not want to play anymore. It feels like a game designed for people who just want to consume content. H, this is very interesting. So, uh, let me pull up another one. Uh, let's go take a look at what does that mean? IGN Crimson Desert. Okay, let's see it. Jason Crier. IGN has given Crimson Desert a six. They rated it a six. So, just for a comparison, Dusttor was a seven. Concord was a seven. And Dragon Age: The Veilg Guard was a nine. Oh my god. So, this game's coming out. We are going to play it. I I've got it downloaded and everything. It's It's It's ready to go. I've just got to wait for it. Non-binary. Oh, here it is. Here's another one. Team of interesting and endearing companions. Complex, memorable, likable, distinct personalities from across Theus. I was very pleased with the character designs, too. The armor and outfits are fabulous. I spent more than an hour in the character creator. This might be some of the best looking hair I've ever seen in a video game. As a non-binary person myself, Veilgard includes some of the most authentic representation of gender stuff and having to navigate your family's reaction to it. It doesn't feel like an afterchool special or like I'm being pandered to. Finding out that the writer for this character is non-binary themselves did not surprise me at all. If we never Why? Cuz it was [ __ ] Get another Dragon Age. At least it got to go out on a high note. Team of Yep. The non-binary doesn't exist. It's just a uh it's a mental disorder. That's just that simple. Like I don't know why anybody even plays around with this. And uh the fact that any the fact that any adult plays even slightly into this delusion is outrageous to me. It's totally outrageous. I find it to be offensive if you want me to be honest. Let me look. All right. So, IGN, where is it? Let's look at Crimson Dessert. Okay, here it is. With Travis Northup, our reviewer of Crimson Desert. Travis, how are you holding up after over a hundred hours with this game? I'm holding up. This is This is the gig, man. This is This is my Super Bowl. whenever a big chunky RPG comes out and I know I'm about to lose my life. So, I'm I'm getting close to the end there and it feels good. Let's talk about this review process for a little bit. Why we don't have a final review right now, although you do have like a score in mind already at this point with a 100 hours under your belt. Uh the review process for this one was weird. It's a huge game. Like we said, it's over 100 hours and there's tons more side content you could be doing beyond just getting to the end of the game. Not that you haven't been doing none of that or anything like that. Uh, we only got code for this about 2 weeks before the embargo, the review embargo, and the first two days of your playing, they went, "Oh, sorry. We have to push a patch that's going to completely wipe your save data." So, we lost the first two days. You hit a game-breaking bug at one point that made you lose a ton of progress cuz you had to reload a save file from like 7 hours earlier or find a different save file. There was a day where like a 100 gigabyte patch came through that was slow to download and it was just like a very uh stop and start review process even in the context of only having two weeks to play this huge huge RPG. You're really close to the end and then going to spend some time with the end game. For those who haven't seen much or don't know, have only seen trailers, have just bought into the hype, whatever, what actually is Crimson Desert? What does it play like? What type of RPG is it and what do you think of it so far? What do you think of it after this 100 hours you spent with it? Yeah, so Crimson Desert is a super ambitious openw world RPG in a fantasy setting, the same setting as uh Black Desert Online. Um, and uh, if you haven't seen uh, this this game, it's very much kind of going for like the Witcher 3 vibes where you're riding around on a horse and you're uh, taking out bandits and you're helping the land kind of knights and gallantry uh, type stuff. It's simple. So, if a game has a horse, it's like Witcher 3. If a game has a tree, it's like Elden Ring. Uh, but with a very weird kind of, you know, eastern fantasy vibes where there's also just like strange creatures and lore and stuff like that. is a interesting fantasy world. And I would say the game it's it's sort of like trying to be Witcher 3 with a little bit of Red Dead 2 cuz it has like these long rides on a horse where you're just like talking with a teammate. It has like that that sort of thing. Uh and then it's also got a little bit of like GTA openw world like craziness and also you have to tap A to run which I thought was something that only GTA was allowed to do. Yeah, it's sort of going for all of those things, but I would say that it ends up landing closer to something like Dragon's Dogma where it's not exactly of the same kind of um caliber as like a Witcher 3, but it it presents a compelling case for this type of bizarre uh super ambitious RPG, even if it doesn't always bizarre achieve the stuff that it's trying to bizarre. Yeah. So, let's dig into that because, you know, the I feel like it's been a bit a little bit of a roller coaster when I've talked to you about this game during this review process where there's, you know, it's sort of a rocky start and then you find a groove with it and then it just gets laborious at parts and there's all these bugs mixed in there. So, like there's bugs. What is it doing right, what is it doing wrong? So, yeah, the very beginning it's a little tough just because the controls on this game are crazy. like very uh they they have you hold buttons and do combinations of uh joystick clicks and if you're on keyboard you're hitting multiple keys at once to like access different tool sets. It's just a very common control scheme. We should note also that we only got like BDO like probably it's probably a BDO access to they only gave access to the PC version ahead of release. We're getting access to the console version at launch and we'll we'll take Oh, no wonder they didn't like it. They weren't ready for the PC ver they weren't ready for the real version. Look at it there, too. But you've played you've played on both with both a gamepad and a mouse and keyboard at this point. That's correct. Yeah. And so the beginning you're kind of figuring out a lot of stuff that the game doesn't do super uh intuitively and you're it's a little bit rocky. Then you figure it out and you're sort of like, okay, I get it now. I'm in an open world. Let's go see what's out there. And I would say that that's like the best part of the game is when you're just like exploring and you're finding like mini games like, "Oh, there's arm wrestling. Oh, I can go fishing. There's this weird side quest where I'm helping somebody." And you're just kind of like exploring the world and it's all very new to you. Uh, and that sort of is like the best part of any RPG, right? And I think this game it has so many surprising elements in it that you're continually like, "Oh, okay. I kind of wasn't expecting that to be here." It has a little bit of Tears of the Kingdom as well where you're like grabbing things and solving puzzles and it's not to the point where you're like building contraptions and all that, but you are uh you do have like abilities and also it does that thing in in Tears of the Kingdom where there's a sky world and a floor world and you're kind of going back and forth between the two and falling from the sky down back to the normal world. And so it does some stuff like that where you're just like discovering and having fun. And then you hit a moment where two things happen. one, you start going more into like the main story and the boss fights and some of the bigger war set pieces that happen. They have like war encounters and you start to realize that this game is a little janky uh in more ways than one. So, the boss fights in this game are real bad. They're they are not fun encounters. They are They're bad. The boss fights are bad. Scaled way too aggressively. They take a really long time to do. you die a lot and it it's one of those things where you know I play a lot of Souls like so it's not like a skill thing like I was able to get through a lot of the encounters with like lowlevel loot because I wasn't really focusing on leveling up my loot for a lot of the game and also not a thing where you mind dying and having to try again. You're used to that in I don't mind that at all. It it's it's more that like the fights drag us he's telling us that he's good at video games. He wants us to know that for a really long time. They are way harder compared to the rest of the combat in the game that I would describe as like dynasty warrioresque easy. Uh it just go it just goes like the complete other direction where you're just getting your butt kicked. 80% of the time in this game I was unclear if I was doing things as intended or if I was brute forcing it. Like there was a puzzle once where I was supposed to get up on top of this thing and and do this stuff, but I couldn't find an easy path up it. So, I did that thing in climbing games where you find like a little al cove that you're not supposed to stand on, but then you do stand on it and it like gets your stamina back and then you climb the rest of the way and that's how I got up it. It like felt like I was cheating. And then it turned out, as far as I know, that's how you're supposed to get up the encounter. And so, like I never knew if I was brute forcing combat encounters, if I was brute forcing puzzles, or if it was just I don't Is this supposed to be like bad? Like I I what like I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Designed for you to sort of like flub your way through it and it kind of seems like you are supposed to flub your way through a lot of these encounters and it makes it feel real bad. That's distinct from Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild have a similar feeling where you're like that am I supposed to be doing this right now sort of thing. But that that game really rewards you for being creative. That's the feeling you get is like, "Wow, I cannot believe that this weird thing I wasn't think I didn't think I was supposed to do worked." Whereas you're saying this feels doesn't really evoke that same rewarding feeling. It feels like it you either did it wrong or you broke something. And sometimes you are doing it wrong. By the way, like I was talking to Mitchell and I Mitchell Saltzman and I have been talking about this game a lot and like he missed an entire ability that you're supposed to get mandatorily in one of the early chapters and if you don't get it, you just can't get it. And it's a huge part of the game. It's like a power you need to get through like lots of side quests and optional stuff. And you know, he he we asked the we have access to the developers during this period luckily. And so he said, "Hey, what's up with that? Am I screwed? Is my file broken?" And they were like, "Oh no, just beat chapter 9 and you'll get there." And chapter 9 is 80 hours into the game. It's like miles and miles away. It was just one of those things where I was like, "Okay, I didn't I didn't have that encounter, but as you mentioned, I did run into a gamebreaking bug that completely shut me out of my save file. Uh, I could not progress in the main story." And because I was seven hours behind, I had to choose, okay, am I gonna start seven hours over or am I just gonna It seems like half of this reviews criticism is problems that they had with save files and data transfers for the review copy. I don't even think like none of this is relevant at all to the actual game quality or whether it's going to be fun to play or not. Like I mean, yeah, the review copy was really buggy and it was really annoying for you guys. Like, I get it, okay, but like, what does this have to do with the user? What does this have to do with the actual product? Like, this obviously isn't what's going to be like on release. And if it is, then yeah, obviously the game would be terrible. Like, duh. But like, I mean, what are we even doing talking about this? Like, I I I don't understand it at all. And they fixed it. Yeah. So, like I I don't even see like what does this have to do like you're this is like your person. It's just like this is like somebody complaining that like you know basically the video game was bad because like there was a lot of traffic on the way up to driving to GameStop to buy it. It's like okay yeah I can yeah I've had traffic too. I can see that being annoying but then like yeah then you got the game and so what was the game like? Right. I mean what does this have to do with it? Don't forget the al cove. Well yeah I mean I just I don't get it. Like it's just it's not has nothing to do with the actual game itself. borrow somebody else's save file who's around the same part as me and continue playing through their file. And so I think that there's a big there's a big issue with a lot of video games now where people are expecting to have a game be pretty much completely like exactly what they want. And I think that players now and gamers now are less willing to let a video game take them on an adventure. And I think that now there's much more of a impulse, I guess, for people to want to go on an adventure in the video game. And I understand this is like maybe a semantic difference, but I don't think that it actually is. I think that a lot of people are looking for a game to try to uh, you know, like have this experience that they've already they want to have the same experience they had in Tears of the Kingdom or in Elden Ring or in Red Dead Redemption 2 or in Dragon's Dogma in Crimson Desert. And that's not what you're going to have because Crimson Desert's a different game. And I think that, you know, with things like, for example, like not getting certain items at the beginning of a run or or whatever, like it's annoying, but it also provides an experience that, you know, they're bringing up right now. And this is like that's part of your experience of playing the game. And I think that like a good parallel that I would make to this is that like in Dark Souls 1, I remember I got cursed, which is where do you lose half your health? And I didn't know how to get rid of the curse. So, I spent like two hours figuring out how to get rid of the curse. Now, is cursing annoying as [ __ ] Yeah, it's so annoying. Did they get rid of it in the future games? Yeah, they did. But whenever that happened to me at the time, it's something that I remembered and it was an experience that I had inside of the game. It's kind of like, you know, in in like Dungeons and Dragons. I think one of the exciting and compelling things about Dungeons and Dragons is the emergent player behavior and the emergent uh narrative that comes out of rolling a one whenever you're negotiating with a goblin or whenever you're opening a door, you're rolling a one and now you open a door and you know it's a portal into into hell or something like that. And so instead of looking at these, you know, inconveniences as a uh, you know, like an opportunity or a flavor of the experience, they instead look at these opportunities as kind of inhibitors to the experience. And I think that there is a there there's there are points where that's true, where certain different friction points become inhibitors of gameplay and inhibi inhibitors of the experience. But I think that too often players are not willing to meet the game halfway. Which is not ideal. Oh no, not ideal at all. And it sucked because I really was attached to my character or my build and it felt like I had like my own story and um yeah, that sort of stuff between like the jankiness like there are bugs, like weird stuff happens, quests break, like stuff just happens in the game where you're just like, "Oh man, that sucks. It really hurts." And then also just like the momentto moment gameplay where things just feel very poorly tuned and out of offkilter and out of nowhere between the unintuitive puzzles and the boss fights that just feel arbitrarily difficult where you're not sure if you're supposed to be getting good or leveling up your equipment or if you're just supposed to eat 50 stacks of meat while you like chump your way through these. Like it it seriously is just a very I I don't know whether that's necessarily a bad thing either. When you have a boss fight where it's like you have three different ways of solving it. You can brute force it by overleveling. You can also brute force it by spamming consumables or you can get better at the fight or you can get different gear. Like I think that that's definitely I've always said that the best video games are the games that tell you to get to the number four, but they don't say that you have to use 2 plus two. You can do 3+ 1, 4 - 0, 5 - 1, 2 * 2 instead of 2 plus 2. Like there's a lot of different ways that you can approach this, right? And so, you know, like 10 - 6, it's like, okay, well, what the [ __ ] does 10 - 6? Well, in Elden Ring, that means you're playing a summons build or something like that, right? And so there's depth to it that I think makes it exciting. So I I don't necessarily think that having encounters that you basically like Marget is a great example of this in like Elven Ring where I think Marget is probably a little bit too hard for an early boss because like maybe you don't really introduce the player into like what they're supposed to do. But the one thing that's like most negative things in video game design also have a silver lining to them where Marget also teaches the player, you have the same three solutions. Because whenever you first reach Marget in Elden Ring, you're not really ready to fight Marget unless you're really good at the game. And so the truth is that at a lot of points for other people, they now it's like, okay, well, what the hell am I going to do? Am I going to go and level up? Am I going to get a better weapon? Am I gonna try to just get consumables and like, you know, maybe use the Morgot shackle or something like that that you're able to get from patches? Like, what do you do? And so that that's Morgot Morgot's hard as [ __ ] I think Morgot's easy, but okay. I mean, sure. Weird. Butterfly, not necessarily. So, the longer I've played it, the more I've been kind of frustrated because I'm running into these issues and it's just sort of getting old. And one of those is that they just don't know when to end a combat sequence. Like the big war sequences, they go on for way too long where you're like doing multiple steps. Like you have to carry around a flag and plant it while 80 guys are around you hitting you and if one of them hits you, you drop the flag and then have to begin this long button mashing process to pick it up super slowly and and move it another couple feet. Like stuff like that where you're just like, "Oh my god, I've been at this for four hours and I'm still on the same step of the quest." And it's just I mean, I can see how somebody would feel that way. I definitely can. I think that's a valid It's like t like cinematic gameplay that goes on too long and becomes tedious. I think that's fair. Sure. Like please let me out of this. I would say the description is the highs are quite high because they've done the super ambitious thing and they've kind of thrown everything at the wall, but the lows are really low and it kind of feels like this game tries a little too much. It bites off more than it can chew and it ends up being kind of a jack of all trades and a master of none, particularly in kind of the shape of its story and combat encounters and the stuff you're doing out in the world. It just has a very uneven kind of feel to it. So, you are pretty you're close to the end like we said. What's kind of left to see? What's the lingering questions? End game if there is that stuff. Pretty much. I think that like another game that's kind of like this is where winds meet. is that like where Windsme meet is definitely a game that takes a maximalist approach to things and a lot of its stuff isn't like super deep, but I think that if you just kind of take if you take away your biases and you take away your expectations and you just play the game for what it is rather than what you want it to be, I think that you'll have a better experience playing just in general. Yeah. So, I've tried to focus mostly on the story, uh, which I don't really recommend. Like, you you kind of need to smell the roses in this game. It kind of forces you to to be ready for the next part of the story. So, I And it's not like you've done none of that, right? No, no, I have. And in fact, the game basically forced me to at one point where I was it was like, "Okay, I'm very clearly not equipped for this, so I'm just going to go back and and do some other stuff and build your settlement and do side quests and level up your gear and kind of figure out the uh the stuff there." Um, you it really does want you to do that, but 40 patch. Okay, let me give me one second. People said there's a patch. I'm going to go ahead and just close and reopen Steam real quick. Let me just I'm going to go through task manager and do it that way real quick just to kind of speedrun this. But I do think that like there's a huge component where a lot of people have a perception of a game where they get way too attached to the way that they want to play the game rather than playing the game the way it's designed. And I think that the process of that causes people to kind of basically have a worse experience because they're trying to make the experience in this game the same as the other game. I think it's a huge mistake and uh you see a bunch of people making that mistake. It's extremely common. Okay, I've got the the patch downloading. All right, good. And let me go back up. Okay, sorry about that, guys. We're good. Isn't that the same with High Guard? Uh, the game just wasn't fun to play stuff unlock that I won't spoil here, but I'm looking forward to playing that for a couple hours. I really just want to finish the game cuz, as you know, part of IGN's style guide as we finish games before we write reviews. And even though this happens to be an enormous RPG, I just review games. Probably nobody should try to finish in two weeks. like I'm going to try to do that just so that I can uh you know speak from a completely informed uh perspective before I put a final score on it. So, you've got a little bit more to see. You've seen a ton already. Uh what do you if you had to score it now? What realm would you be in? Obviously, this isn't official final score. We're still It could still shift if the end really saves it or botches it or the end game is truly amazing, whatever. But like what realm are you in right now? Yeah, it's it can always change and I I try to keep an open mind during these things, but after 100 hours, you're going to have some opinions about a game and yeah, and I and I have a lot of them, right? And so, I'm going to be writing my review in progress later today as as the at the time of this recording. Um, but my overall thoughts is like it tries so much. It's a technical marvel, which we haven't really talked about, but like it just looks absolutely stunning and performs surprisingly well. A technical marvel outside of all of the game-breaking bugs. Yes, the game-breaking bugs. I mean, technically, like frame rates and the way it just looks pretty throughout. Performance-wise, yeah, performance-wise, it looks good. Um, but like the stuff that it does bad, the lows are just really low. Enough for me to have trouble recommending this game. Uh, especially like if you're going and looking for Witcher 3, like, man, this is not it. Like, it's closer to Two Worlds 2, which by the way is a game that is really janky and uneven, but a game I also had a lot of fun with. and I've had fun with this game, but I probably would am going to be looking at like the six range for this. I think it falls short of of me being able to get a refund recommend it with a seven as like a good game. I would say it is an okay honestly like maybe I should just get the stuff that it does it it does super well and the fact that it just has so much in it. It's hard to just call this look away from that because they tried so hard with all the different things they put. You know, they threw everything at the wall and now you're you're going to the buffet and there's a lot of options here, but none of the food is particularly good at the buffet. You know what I mean? Why don't you shut the [ __ ] up, okay? Like, if you go to Golden Corral, you're right. Yeah, the food isn't the greatest food that's ever been made, but it's Golden Corral and you better put some [ __ ] respect on that. Don't ever say that. Don't ever say that. The That's the dumbest thing you could even say. Uh, and that that sort of is where I'm at with this one. It's a lot of stuff, but the amount of stuff that I would describe as like definitively good and that I've had like a great time doing is getting thinner and thinner the longer I play. Man, it's just it's been it's been tough. Well, Travis, thank you very much for telling us your thoughts so far. Obviously, like you said, 100 hours is a ton of time with it, so you already are very well informed in that regard, but I'm glad we're taking the time to really put it through its paces, finishes this review up, and we should have a final review hopefully in the next week pretty soon. Uh, so keep an eye out for that with a final score. If you want some other recent huge fun games, uh, check it out. Okay. Well, uh, yeah. I don't know, guys. Like, let me see. Is this [ __ ] working? Okay, it's on 30%. So, then then we got to play it. And, uh, it's up. It's going to be up whenever the download is finished. That's when it's going to be up for, right? And, uh, why is it at 30%. Why isn't going to 31? Go to 31. Okay, never mind. I was getting stressed out for for a minute. Okay, I'm waiting for it to download. We'll play Red Dead Redemption 2 instead. Yeah, guys, I don't know. Like, after after looking at that review for the game, if IGN says it's bad. I think it might just be a bad game. Like, this is really Yeah, I I don't know what I can do. And uh big ass game, I guess. So, people love Concord. Who cared? I mean, who cares? I don't know, man. Played any more midnight? No, I haven't really played Midnight at all, honestly. Like, I really haven't. And uh so, I mean, here here's here's my outlook on it, right? is that I mean a lot of video games are I mean let's be real, right? They're not going to be perfect. They're not going to be exactly what you want them to be, but you know they're going to be what they are. And I think that there's a lot of games like recently that I've played that it's like you have to kind of meet the game halfway rather than trying to make the game exactly what you want it to be. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of people make is they try to just make the game uh you know exactly what they want it to be rather than thinking about you know like anything else. They just focus entirely on making it exactly the way that they want things to be. So uh yeah it's not the Witcher. Yeah, this isn't the Witcher. It's not The Witcher. It's not going to be anything else. What?