With Crimson Desert inching ever closer to its March 19th release date, director of marketing and PR for developer Pearl Abyss, Will Powers, has provided insight about the general response it has seen for the open-world title. In an interview with IGN, Powers spoke about the game’s marketing, and the studio’s need to balance a push for awareness of Crimson Desert while also making sure that it doesn’t over-promise on certain aspects that would lead to player disappointment.
He also acknowledged the level of expectations that Pearl Abyss is facing thanks to it having made an incredibly-popular MMORPG that takes place in the same setting. This same experience, however, and the fact that Crimson Desert was originally envisioned as a different kind of game are its unique strengths.
“That’s really where you need to achieve that balance, because you don’t want to let people down at launch by making them anticipate something to such a high level” said Powers. “So you have to strike a balance between awareness and not over-promising. This game and its heritage, both from when it was announced and from a studio that has made an MMORPG with over 55 million global players.”
“So that’s the benchmark that this company knows. Releasing your sophomore project after that, there’s probably higher internal expectations than there are external ones.”
While Crimson Desert will be a single-player open-world game, Powers made a note of Pearl Abyss’ experience in designing massive worlds “designed to serve the community.” This, along with the fact that the upcoming title will also make use of systems designed for a different kind of game, has led to many players talking about how “they haven’t seen a game like this before,” said Powers.
“This isn’t what this game was originally intended to be. This is an amalgamation of what it is morphed into, benefiting from where it came from.”
As for the long period of time between the initial announcement of Crimson Desert—which happened all the way back in 2019—and the release date finally coming up, Powers acknowledged that the development team ended up making “victims of ourselves” because the announcement was too early. However, all this time wasn’t wasted, since Pearl Abyss worked on several things, including building an engine and making progress on other technical fronts.
If given the choice to do it again, Powers admitted that “I don’t think anyone would say we should announce the game six-and-a-half-years in advance. That’s just not a thing that happens often. But as a result of this situation, what happened is it created this air of mystique around it where people didn’t really know what the game was, and that’s become fun from my perspective.”
With all of the mystique going for it, the studio’s recent push to reveal more details about Crimson Desert has also led to an interesting outcome, he noted. “In this situation, what if we revealed six hours of gameplay footage? So then it becomes less of a question of people not knowing what the game is and more of a question of, ‘Well, how can this be too good to be true?’ Or, ‘how can this not be real?’”
“We never want to be accused of hiding anything, because we have a lot of ground to make up. We initially revealed this as something else, so we needed to do more than a game traditionally would to course-correct for our own actions from five and six years ago.”
Crimson Desert is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. As you wait for its release, take a look at the discussions sparked by the open-world title’s fast-forwarding dialogue feature. Also take a look at our thoughts on its combat and open world.
