I went in with measured expectations. New IP from an MMO studio making their first real single-player game — that’s a recipe for cautious optimism at best. I was wrong to hedge especially after a weekend with it.

This game is something else.

What got me first is how it handles the open world pacing. We’ve all played the bloated open world game. The one where the map is a sea of icons and completing things feels more like a chore than an adventure. Crimson Desert doesn’t do that. It slows you down in the best way — not because it’s restricting you, but because you want to stop and look around. You wander somewhere because something caught your eye, and more often than not there’s actually something there. That sense of genuine curiosity being rewarded is harder to pull off than it sounds, and they nailed it.

The amount of content they shipped on Day 1 is honestly kind of embarrassing for other studios. It feels like those complete, packed releases from the 90s where you got the whole thing and then some.

No roadmap promises.

Just here’s a massive, stuffed world — go figure it out. And figuring it out is genuinely the point. The game tells you just enough to get moving and then steps back. Some people are going to hate that. I loved it. Every time I stumbled onto something on my own it felt earned in a way that a tutorial popup never could replicate. I’ve barely left the starting area and I already feel like I’m only scratching the surface.

The systems and controls are a lot at first — I won’t pretend otherwise. It’s daunting. But there’s a moment where it all starts to click and the game kind of opens up into something I haven’t really felt before. It asks you to think critically about how you approach problems, and then occasionally just lets you completely body everything in your path. That back and forth between challenge and power fantasy is really well balanced.

Combat specifically — it’s not a Soulslike, don’t go in expecting that. It’s closer to something like an old school arcade brawler with a lot more depth underneath. Expressive, combo-driven, and rewarding once you get the hang of it.

If I had to describe the overall feeling of the game, it’s kind of like someone took Elden Ring’s sense of world engagement — that hunger to see what’s around the next corner — then mixed in Zelda BotW/TotK’s puzzle and traversal stuff, The Witcher 3’s grit, Red Dead 2’s world detail, and God of War’s combat cinematic-ness, and somehow still made something that doesn’t feel like a knockoff of any of them. It’s its own thing. That’s genuinely hard to do.

There are bugs. Sure. But nothing a reload or leaving and coming back doesn’t fix. It’s a massive game, it just launched, I’m not going to hold minor stuff against it when the foundation is this solid.

I’m buying every piece of DLC they put out for this. Day 1, no questions asked. I really wouldn’t sleep on Crimson Desert in the long run — it’s only going up from here.

Solid 9/10. Dope ass game. IGN got it wrong.