Crimson Desert has been on a slow-rolling takeover of online gamer hype. Months of new footage and features trickling out, capped off by a recent glowing pre-release assessment by Digital Foundry, has players excited but also worried that the hyper-polished-looking, sprawling open-world adventure game from a studio known for MMOs might be too good to be true. Underlining that concern is the recent news that the review embargo for Crimson Desert is only 24 hours before launch, and outlets that have received code have been told they can only get code for the PC version. Is this another Cyberpunk 2077 situation?
That 2020 game ran notoriously poorly on consoles, especially the older PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware, but CD Projekt Red didn’t give anyone access to those versions of the game for review ahead of time. Glowing reviews aggregated on Metacritic at launch were all for the PC version, which ended up masking major deficiencies and shortcomings with the game at release.
There’s no reason yet to believe Crimson Desert is in a similar boat. Pearl Abyss has shown heavily edited footage of the game running on PS5 and impressions from a recent content creator preview event remained generally positive (though not everyone was impressed). But review codes went out for the game this week and the embargo is on March 18, just a day before the March 19 launch. Additionally, multiple sources told Kotaku they weren’t aware of any outlets receiving PS5 or Xbox Series X versions of the games to test ahead of release.
“We’re not hiding anything, and I’m sick of having to repeat myself,” Pearl Abyss Marketing Director Will Powers wrote on X last night. “I’ve repeated 100s of times that we’ll reveal things ahead of launch to give people adequate time to still preorder the game for themselves. We’re saying this openly…Let us cook? Please and thank you. /rant.”
Some are taking it as a sign that Pearl Abyss will release additional deep dives on Crimson Desert‘s console performance prior to release. Maybe another Digital Foundry audit? But others are writing it off as “bullshit PR spin.”
It’s unclear what the hold-up on console review codes might be. Games need to pass platform certification to come to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Any delay could signal that there are still last-minute issues being addressed before Pearl Abyss can get console versions into the hands of reviewers. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” wrote Rockstar and CD Projekt Red news account videotechuk. “CDPR did this and look what happened with Cyberpunk. I think being transparent and giving reviewers keys to the console version would show some confidence.”
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