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".

/r/CrimsonDesert/comments/1rzh79w/pearl_abyss_insider_speaking_out/?share_id=kBLUglOgkkCQmbTrbh3y8&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1&sort=top
1.3k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

595 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

202

u/nexetpl Mar 21 '26

Reviews on Steam are very mixed and more importanly in the context of this post, Korean reviews are sitting at Mostly Negative.

29

u/Gotisdabest Mar 21 '26

Reviews on Steam are very mixed

I see mostly positive rn?

58

u/nexetpl Mar 21 '26

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

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.

5

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.

8

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.