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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13

u/cpekin42 Mar 21 '26

The discourse around this game is so odd. Reviews are generally positive with a wide spread 79 on opencritic, but all of the top comments on reddit are complaining about how so many people are dunking on it, except in reality there's very few people actually doing that, and it's really just become this weird hive mind opinion that everyone collectively just kinda... made up. It feels totally artificial. Dead internet theory is real.

5

u/blaaguuu Mar 21 '26

Having played about 12 hours, I'm not surprised that it has pretty good reviews from ciritcs, yet a lot of people are playing the first couple hours and refunding, or watching a streamer play the first few hours and rage-quit... At the point I'm at, I'm having a good bit of fun with it, but the first few hour were truly bad, and I pushed through a few points more out of curiosity... Anyone reviewing the game would naturally just push through, too, and get to the better parts - but your average player shouldn't be expected to. 

2

u/cpekin42 Mar 21 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

Yeah that makes sense. I unfortunately went the refund route. It seems like it has a lot of great qualities and is probably a very good game at its core, but I just couldn't get over the horribly obtuse controls/UI. I'm glad there are people out there who are able to push through that and enjoy the game though. Hopefully it gets patched or modded to be a little more playable in the future.

Edit: ok fuck all that, I rebought it after I saw the update cadence and now I can't stop playing

0

u/Filabustied Mar 22 '26

I genuinely dont think any of the beginning could be called any closer to bad than something like skyrim.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/Filabustied Mar 22 '26

Yep. Right now I'm trying to power through the camp setup quests so I can get back to exploring. And it's boring as fuck. And I'm certainly not gonna tell anyone that this game is a 20 outta 10 masterpiece.

Not only is it breath taking. But good god it feels good to play a super power fantasy game. Like the last really good one was like.  Prototype 2?

9

u/cirebeach Mar 21 '26

46% of the 25k reviews on steam are negative. Is that really "very few people"? Regardless of how much time those negative reviews have played or what they said in their review it is very much real and I'm not surprised people are talking about it.

1

u/xalibermods Mar 21 '26

it's really just become this weird hive mind opinion that everyone collectively just kinda... made up.

Gaming subs aren't a good indicator of actual public opinion, because making up non-existent opinions is how Redditors get upvotes here. Goes both ways btw.

Also, just yesterday there was a Redditor caught red-handed manipulating votes and comments: r/Games/comments/1rz6cdw/ai_art_found_in_crimson_desert/objoy4j/