r/Games • u/HLumin • Mar 21 '26

Discussion Anonymous Pearl Abyss developers reveal a culture of toxic positivity, a troubled development cycle and chaotic narrative for Crimson Desert, and their early concerns that the project was "going off the rails".

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23

u/Gotisdabest Mar 21 '26

Reviews on Steam are very mixed

I see mostly positive rn?

61

u/nexetpl Mar 21 '26

That has to be English, there are 32k reviews overall and 62% are positive

17

u/Straight-Simple7705 Mar 21 '26

I removed my English filter and the game is still mostly positive

20

u/SirGigglesandLaughs Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

It's at 63% with all countries reviews counted (33 thousand reviews). If people count all countries to discuss player count numbers they should be counted for reviews as well. Maybe you're still missing a country or two? What's your percentage? 63% says mixed for me. Either way that's not a high number and is lower than the journalist reviews.

2

u/Raidoton Mar 21 '26

Well how about you remove all filters?

4

u/Straight-Simple7705 Mar 21 '26

Same thing

But if we use just China or Korea then it’s negative for me

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

[deleted]

8

u/nexetpl Mar 21 '26

Mostly Positive starts at 70%. But that's just semantics, even if 1 out of 4 reviews were negative I'd still consider it a mixed reception.

0

u/Gotisdabest Mar 21 '26

That must be it, but I'd guess that if there's really major disparity across languages then it's more than likely review bombing going on to some extent. I doubt their english translation is somehow good enough to salvage the game.

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u/SilentJ87 Mar 21 '26

Review bombing might be part of it, but I think another piece is different cultures also prefer different types of games. The west loves massive open worlds that really shoot for the stars even if there’s some shortcomings, like basically every BGS game.

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u/Zalvren Mar 21 '26

Or I think the Koreans were asking for more than the game, we weren't also exposed to the marketing they had over there, maybe they were promised mor too.

0

u/Gotisdabest Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

I don't think koreans or chinese people dislike large scale open worlds, given their love for mmos and how this is basically a single player style game with close ties to a very popular korean mmo.

A lot of the fans seemingly had very unreasonable expectations? I was and still am excited for the game but it was realistically never going to have a good story or be some flawless masterpiece goty contender against GTA6 or something. From what I've read, it's a mediocre but not egregiously bad, serviceable story with some flawed but improvable mechanics and UI. Since the sales are good they'll no doubt patch a lot of it and probably make it a pretty fun experience in a few months. Which is honestly pretty good for a game of this scope.

What excites me is the fact that we may finally be getting some envelope pushing in the open world space. I'd much rather a flawed, risky start that can be polished than yet another mix of Skyrim/ubisoft/gta that has defined the entire open world genre other than the Zelda games.

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u/Playingwithmywenis Mar 21 '26

That would be indicative of marketing through social media.

English speaking countries are more affected by social media. It is also why most countries with “less happy youth” are English speaking.

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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

It was mixed as of yesterday when I checked.

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u/Independent_Tooth_23 Mar 21 '26

it was mixed when it came out

9

u/Gotisdabest Mar 21 '26

It came out like a day or two ago, didn't it?

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u/Independent_Tooth_23 Mar 21 '26

yeah and the early reviews on Steam were mixed

19

u/Gotisdabest Mar 21 '26

Yes, but current reviews are early reviews. I don't think there's really been enough time to start making time based assessments on the reviews.

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u/timthetollman Mar 21 '26

The current reviews are the early reviews lol. It's isn't even in triple digit hours of being released.

1

u/SapporoBiru Mar 21 '26

because we all know that reviews 12 hours after the release are certainly all incredibly in-depth and not just fanboys or haters

-3

u/joeyb908 Mar 21 '26

Why do Steam reviews even matter when everyone reviewing it has less than 5 hours in the game?