Pearl Abyss marketing director says Crimson Desert's rapid 'live service' patch cadence is business as usual for an MMO studio: 'That is not normal in the industry. That is normal here'

Crimson Desert is a solo RPG, but you'd be forgiven if you mistook it for a live service MMO just based on the headlines it generates. It's morphed and added features rapidly in response to player feedback—as PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor put it, "the playerbase says jump, and Pearl Abyss says how high." While developer Pearl Abyss has received kudos for cleverly nailing the "singleplayer MMO," the studio's director of marketing and public relations, Will Powers, told The Washington Post this approach is the team's norm.

“There was no official communicated roadmap with set-in-stone dates,” he told the Post. "Everything, patch-wise, content-wise, has been iterated in real time based on feedback, based on response … If you bake in a roadmap, you’re presuming. We are not baking in presumptions around what the players want."

Powers drove home that the studio's work on Black Desert prepared it for the rapid, feedback-driven support it now gives Crimson Desert. “That is not normal in the industry. That is normal here," he said.

While there's a lot to be said for executing a distinct vision, Crimson Desert has certainly made popular moves by rendering itself beholden to players' wishes. The people wanted a 'hide helmet' button, so they got one. Movement controls were a bit awkward on launch, and just a few weeks later they were overhauled with a "classic" option retained for purists. Game too hard? Too easy? Don't worry about it either way, because here comes a slew of new difficulty options.

Whatever the vision for Crimson Desert is, it's clear that the game's playerbase has been invited to place a hand on the wheel and get to steerin'. That might be the norm for live-service games and MMOs, and there are perhaps more radically democratic implementations (such as Old School RuneScape's player polls, which determine if new stuff is allowed to go into the game), it's still novel to see a singleplayer RPG operate on this scale and with this intent.

Perhaps it's a sense of partial ownership that drives the game's community to be so passionate about it. PC Gamer online editor Fraser Brown called the online fandom forming around the game "pretty dang wholesome" and perhaps "critical to the game's success"—I imagine that knowing the developer is building a roadmap on the fly in response to players' feature wishlists only makes people more inclined to discuss the game and spread their enthusiasm on social media.

"We’re not onerous about, if an idea didn’t come from us, then it can't be in the game," Powers told The Washington Post. "I think that's something that [other companies are] too ego-driven a lot of the time to be able to accept other people's ideas. It's almost Silicon Valley-esque. A good idea can come from anywhere."