Pearl Abyss has been relentlessly updating Crimson Desert since its launch last month. It seems like almost every single piece of community feedback has been addressed in stages, from problems with controls, to better storage management, boss changes and nerfs, and so much more. The speed at which these updates are being released is quite unheard of in the triple-A space, and doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
In the most recent patch notes, we’re getting an entirely new storage system that allows you to segment items into different storage containers. There are wardrobes for clothes, a sort of Kuku fridge for foodstuffs, and a large container for ingredients. You’ll also be able to store your collectibles outside your inventory, freeing up precious slots. On top of that, you can finally stack things like bugs and fish in a single slot. I think Pearl Abyss has remedied my most major issue with the game in one swoop: the inventory is actually usable now.
Quality Of Life Is Going Through The Roof
During my review playthrough, I beat most of the bosses in the game before they underwent major balance changes, and it was extremely frustrating at points. It’s good to see that Pearl Abyss is continuing to tweak boss attack patterns and general difficulty, even adding in three new difficulty modes to the game: Easy, Normal, and Hard. Normal is the base difficulty that people have currently been playing, but if you want to take it a bit easier and prefer a more chilled experience, the new Easy difficulty reduces damage taken while also nerfing enemy attack speed and increasing the length of the parry window.
These big changes come alongside small tweaks to the control scheme, including a setting that can be turned on to stop the annoying overlap of keys when you try to pick something up and end up jumping at the same time. There are also new bird pets, more outfits, more tattoos, and even a well in the Greymane Camp, so you don’t have to travel to get water for cooking. All of these quality-of-life changes stack up to make meaningful improvements to the game, and so far, every patch has been like this.
This patch did introduce some bugs, like removing the option to summon mounts and removing trust with the Greymanes. These will likely be resolved quickly if past patches are anything to go by.
A lot of these changes come directly from player feedback - someone at Pearl Abyss is paying close attention to the discourse online. But as the patches roll in, the requests from players also start to dwindle. Obviously, the game is still far from perfect, but with every patch we do actually get closer to that. Once Pearl Abyss has fixed everything, what’s next?
DLC, Online Mode, More Content?
I didn’t think the conversation around what’s next for Crimson Desert would start so soon after launch. Due to the number of issues with the game, I thought it’d be a good few months before it was in a state where additional content would be worthwhile. Yet, here we are. I’ve spent over 200 hours in the game by now, and I can’t help but start to wonder what we might have in store in the future of Crimson Desert. Hopefully the developers can take a break before anything else, though.
So far, in terms of updates, it appears that Pearl Abyss is already treating this as a sort of live-service rollout of content. We’ve got big quality of life changes, sure, but we’ve also seen the addition of new mounts, pets, and items. None of this has really been expected, and it's always fun reading the patch notes to see what sort of surprises are being added. If this cadence of updates continues over the next few months, Crimson Desert will be unrecognisable compared to its launch state by the end of the year.
There has been a lot of speculation about the future of the game, since the rumours of a multiplayer mode started circulating a couple of years ago - rumours I reported on at the time. That mode has since been removed from the game, but in March’s Pearl Abyss earnings call, the CEO stated that the studio had already begun to reconsider adding multiplayer at a later date due to the success of the title.
I’d love to see DLC bosses added, additional secrets to discover while exploring, ocean content, more animals, development of the trading system and housing system, and more story content. The studio has built up so much goodwill with its audience that I have no doubt that Crimson Desert will become a premium platform for Pearl Abyss in the coming years.
Crimson Desert
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 78/100 Critics Rec: 73%
- Released
- March 19, 2026
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
- Pearl Abyss
- Publisher(s)
- Pearl Abyss
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Action, Adventure, Open-World, Exploration
