Ahead of the March 19th release date of Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss has showcased gameplay from the open-world action adventure title through PlayStation’s Japanese Play! Play! Play! video series. The video features project manager Kim Min-young and host Taiga Kishi as they explore the world of Crimson Desert and figure out all of the options it offers players.
The video comes in at 20 minutes of length, and does a great job of showcasing the various aspects of Crimson Desert, from its story, to open-world exploration, and plenty of combat, all while it runs on a PS5. Sony has noted that this is the first of two planned videos featuring Crimson Desert. While this one focuses on the action gameplay, the second video, planned for release later, will focus on dragon riding, side quests, and more exploration.
Along the way, we also get to see some environmental puzzles, with one focusing on using magical abilities to turn some tiles around to ensure the smooth transfer of energy between two objects. Solving this puzzle results in the door of a wizard’s tower opening, which will likely also serve as the home for many other side quests. Min-young and Kishi both also discuss the differences between the two worlds in Crimson Desert—the main continent of Pywel, as well as the mysterious Abyss. While the former offers more standard gameplay and exploration, the latter seems to throw physics out of the window, opting for more fantastical scenery.
It is worth noting that Sony hasn’t confirmed whether the gameplay shown off in this video involved running Crimson Desert on a base PS5 or a PS5 Pro. However, a recent report courtesy of Digital Foundry has indicated that players with the more powerful console will be in for quite a treat, with it being noted as “putting up a good fight” in its attempts to maintain the 60 FPS frame rate target when the game is set to Performance mode.
The PS5 Pro version will also have access to Balanced and Quality modes. The former targets 40 FPS while outputting 1440p video up to 4K. The mode requires a 120 FPS display, however, and players with a variable refresh rate monitor can also get 48 FPS. Quality, on the other hand, will lock the frame rate at 30 FPS and render at the full 4K resolution instead of upscaling it.
However, the report did note that the build of Crimson Desert that was tested on the PS5 Pro was making use of an older version of PSSR. Pearl Abyss has noted that the final release will make use of the more modern “PSSR 2”. In the meantime, PSSR-related artifacting was said to be quite noticeable.
“Apparently PSSR 2 is planned for launch, but in its current state, I can’t really judge image quality yet, aside to say that the usual PSSR artifacts are indeed visible with smearing around foliage and some raytracing noise being the most obvious,” explained Digital Foundry’s John Linneman. “It’ll be very interesting to see how this changes with the upgraded PSSR.”
Crimson Desert is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
