Gaming: Crimson Desert Secures A March Release Date As The Ambitious...

Better start practicing your swordfighting. And pro wrestling. And dragon riding. And mech piloting.

Five and a half years after its 2020 Game Awards reveal, Crimson Desert has remained something of a mystery. Developer Pearl Abyss has promised a growing collection of mechanics and playstyles so bafflingly dense that it's still hard to picture how exactly it's all meant to fit together. Thanks to a freshly announced release date, however, we now at least know when we'll see the full picture—and launch day is just two months away.

In a Steam news post, Pearl Abyss has confirmed that Crimson Desert has gone gold: The game's primary development is, for all intents and purposes, complete and distribution-ready—aside from whatever tweaks might arrive in a day one patch. The announcement also brought us a release date: Crimson Desert will launch on March 19.

That means we've got just over eight weeks before we get our full and proper introductions to protagonist Kliff and the fantasy world of Pavel, and see just how well Pearl Abyss has managed to cram so many kinds of gameplay into one Kliff-shaped package. Kliff can seemingly do so many things that our Harvey Randall wrote last April after a hands-on preview that Crimson Desert is a kind of "action RPG tesseract" that's barely contained by its seemingly -generic medieval fantasy trappings.

In the gameplay videos on Crimson Desert's Steam page and YouTube channel, you can watch its gruff protagonist:

In other words, Crimson Desert seems like a prime example of the rarely seen Witcher-Dragon's-Dogma-Red-Dead-Shadow-of-Mordor-Zelda-Assassin's-Creed-Spider-Man-like. As for whether or not it can fit all those pieces together in any coherent form, we'll have to wait until March to find out.

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Lincoln has been writing about games for 11 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bi

Source: PC Gamer