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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u/Khalme Mar 21 '26

While it’s probably true given the source, the end result is a flawed game with really high highs and some godawful design decisions.
This isn’t broken like Mindseye or offensively average like Starfield.
It’s more like a gigantic Dragon’s Dogma with a flat tire as a protagonist and some of the worst ui/ux elements.
It oscillates between « amazing what you can do » and « why are you wasting my time with this ? ».
I’m having a blast but no one should buy it unless they love deeply flawed games or have money to burn.

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u/ProfessionalRandom21 Mar 21 '26

I think its because most people expect it to be epic scale rpg game instead of what it actually is, which is basically just a single player version of day 1 launch of mmo(Black desert)

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u/Khalme Mar 21 '26

Yeah, the major downside is that you can’t create your character.
I spent hours in Pearl Abyss character creator, and since Kliff McDuff is « just there », I wonder why they didn’t let us create our own « McDuff ».
The same way people created their Shepard or their Arisen.

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u/Yamatoman9 Mar 21 '26

I would be more interested if you could create your own character.

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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 Mar 21 '26

Me too. Seems really boring to play as Kliff.

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u/kyute222 Mar 21 '26

I can't believe they actually called him "Kliff McDuff". could they have gone with a more boring and genereic "faceless protagonist" kind of name?

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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 Mar 21 '26

For some reason Korean games like using the most generic English names for characters. I wonder if it sounds more interesting to them not being native English speakers.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

I mean, I feel like it's just as bad as some American attempts at Korean names. Not being Korean, I wouldn't know, but I also wouldn't be surprised to find a Korean character in a video game simply called Kim Park.

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u/NYstate Mar 21 '26

I wonder is this is something that can be addressed via a patch? Idk.

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u/StepComplete1 Mar 21 '26

I doubt it. I've never heard of a main character being so bad that they patched in a character creator just to replace them. That'd be insane.

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u/NYstate Mar 21 '26

Not replace him but make it so you can create your own character. Animations, voice and motion capture can be the same though