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Dec 20, 2023

Let’s Break Down The Crimson Desert Gamescom Trailer

Crimson Desert stole the show in Opening Night Live, here's everything you might have missed Crimson Desert had a show stealing trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live - it was so blisteringly fast

Crimson Desert stole the show in Opening Night Live, here's everything you might have missed

Crimson Desert had a show stealing trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live - it was so blisteringly fast that you might’ve missed what was going on as the game jumped from mechanic to mechanic it had liberally nicked from other modern blockbusters. There’s a lot of influence from Black Desert Online, Pearl Abyss' MMO that it has worked on for many years, but there’s also elements from The Witcher 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin’s Creed, and so much more.

The trailer opens with scripted boss fights that alternate between real time action and quick-time events - I’m pretty sure we see three different boss encounters in the first five seconds. It flicks to an arm-wrestling scene in a tavern, typical of Black Desert Online’s various mini-games, then to a street brawl that looks very Assassin’s Creed. The puddle on the ground reacts to the footsteps and tumbles of the NPCs and reflects their flickering armor. We move into open fields, castles, cities, all with a flurry of explosions and shrapnel. It looks fantastic.

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Then it’s all about the horse. If you’ve not played Black Desert Online, these mechanics are drawn directly from the MMO. You can drift your horse, spur it on, but also canter and stride from side to side. In BDO it feels organic, and is one of my favorite aspects of the game for traversing its expansive open-world. In all likelihood, Crimson Desert will echo the mechanic step-for-step, just upgraded in the game’s new engine. While on horseback, we get a glimpse of the enormous draw distance as the mountains and an enemy camp full of colorful tents stretch into the horizon.

As we exit a tavern, the light diffusion changes, and it’s a seamless exit and entry - much like the menuless quest board that sends us on a quest to help a farmer with their missing sheep. This is a classic MMO-like quest, except in Crimson Desert, you actually heft the sheep over your shoulder and carry it back. Again, this is BDO in essence: the game is riddled with almost insignificant details, small mini-games and interactable objects that make the world feel more immersive. You can pet the dog and pick up a cat, play a flute while you walk, or take a rest on some hay bales. If you walk through a bush, your character will push the leaves away, and it looks like you can climb trees to get a better vantage point. The developers have expressed in the past that this is one of the most enjoyable parts of building a game, and it’s likely that Crimson Desert will be full of these similar mechanics.

This immersion is what brings Red Dead Redemption 2 to mind. In the following scene, you ride your horse through a crowded city street, then kick a cart rider from their caravan and take control. We enter a small shop, and you can buy oranges, garlic, grapes, and other fresh vegetables - although there isn’t a cooking mechanic shown in the trailer, these ingredients suggest this will probably be something you can do. Black Desert has cooking, so by extension, it’s likely Crimson Desert will also. The same can be said for the fishing.

In terms of traversal, we’ve got a horse, parkour, but also a hot air balloon, and then later in the trailer, a morph-form where you turn into some sort of crow creature. This is also where we get a glimpse of a new area, a sort of extra dimension, which appears to have environmental puzzles and trials. The spectacle of the boss fights just grows and grows - with a tag-team of some sort of robot backed up by a fire-breathing dragon. A Reed Devil dances through the windswept grass. It builds in tempo and bizarreness, verging further into fantasy.

The breadth of content shown is almost unbelievable, but it’s important to remember Black Desert Online - an MMO that has been in consistent development for almost a decade, which includes some of the most detailed life sim and immersive features of any game in the genre. What you have with Crimson Desert is a single-player game that potentially removes some of the baggage that comes with the grind of an MMO.

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Writer based in Glasgow, UK. I am buried deep in Roblox codes.