Crimson Desert might have had you fooled into thinking it was a Soulslike title thanks to some excellent boss designs and a combat system that rewards a strategic use of everything at your disposal. However, in an interview on the Dropped Frames podcast, Will Powers, the game’s marketing and PR director at developer Pearl Abyss America, has insisted that it doesn’t feature the often-deterrent difficulty associated with the genre, instead being more combo-focused in its execution.
“You can just leave, you can do something else, you can upgrade your weapon, you can do side questing, you can find different things to make that fight easier for you…Does that mean the game’s easy? Hell no.”
Powers further elaborated on that aspect of the game, saying that you could always choose to farm out useful items that resurrect you in battle, or go out on quests to level up and come back to any boss battle that troubles you stronger and more skilled than the last time you fought them. Although that sounds a lot like level farming in a Soulslike, we’re just glad to know that the game is balancing its difficulty against its open-world, giving us the freedom to take on skill checks at a pace we’re comfortable with.
And with no microtransactions in the game, Crimson Desert is shaping up to be quite the addition to 2026’s excellent lineup of games. And that’s saying something considering we’re meeting Wolverine and, of course, getting to play Grand Theft Auto 6 later this year.
