Crimson Desert is a massive game. It contains bits of Red Dead Redemption, The Witcher, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. With that comes a huge open world, main and side quests to complete, as well as plenty of outdoor shenanigans to get yourself lost in.
I’ve been playing Crimson Desert for the past week, and though the game does a good job of teaching you the basics, here are a few things that would be useful for someone starting out their journey into Pywell.
How to increase your inventory space in Crimson Desert
If, like me, you pick up every mysterious item that you come across, you’ll quickly run out of inventory space. You start the game with 50 inventory slots, but by picking up every oat, grasshopper and dagger, you’ll go through these quickly.
The way to increase your inventory space is pretty simple – complete missions. These can be story missions for the Greymanes, or completing side-quests for people around town.
Once you gain access to the Howling Hill, where the Greymanes make their camp, you’ll get a proper space to store your unused items. Unlocking the camp happens between 7-10 hours, depending on how much time you spend on side quests.
Reading the Battlefield
The fights you join in Crimson Desert can be huge at times; it’s not uncommon to be fighting ten enemies at once. With everything going on in combat, it can be hard to see when your attack knocks an enemy down and when they die from the attack. Worse yet, if you move on before finishing one guy off, he’ll just stab you in the back.
So, here’s a trick for you – watch for the green flash. When you finish off an enemy, whether by an ability, a finishing move or a flashy spell, Kliff always gets a green flash of magic.
So when you’re surrounded by enemies, firing off magic and throwing bad guys – watch for the flash. When you see that little burst of magic, you can move on.
Complete Abyss Challenges
As you set out across Pywell, you’ll see all manner of icons, quests and NPCs pop up on your map. Keep an eye out for Purple markers, though. These are often important. The first type of purple icon you’ll see is Bounty Posters, which are scattered throughout towns and outposts.
Take these to get the location of bounties to kill or capture throughout the world. But keep an eye out for little purple cubes of Abyss stone on your map. These are most often found at road markers between settlements.
When you collect the Sealed Abyss Artifact, you’ll get given a simple task to complete. I’ve seen a range of these from combat to exploration. But the first one I found was simple enough – defeat three enemies without taking damage. Completing these rewards you with an additional skill point to spend, which is awesome.
Watch your Footing
Though Crimson Desert is undoubtedly a gorgeous game, its controls can be a little difficult at times. This is no more obvious than in the Abyss (sky islands), or when you’re trying to climb around the world.
Thankfully, there is a mechanic that gives you a bit more fine motor control over your jumps and interactions. On a controller, hold L1 / LB, and you’ll get a handy reticle and notice Kliff slows to a slow walk. If you then press your Jump button, Kliff will leap to the spot you’re pointing at. This makes platforming significantly easier, and you won’t have to fall all the way to land from one of the Abyss islands.
If you’re holding an item like an axe or pickaxe, this is how you can target specific mineral nodes or trees for chopping.
Picking and Pocketing
If you’re wandering around Pywell, seeing items strewn around or displayed on walls and wondering, “Why can’t I just grab that?” — it’s because you need a mask. Thieving requires a bandit mask, akin to the identity-hiding masks from Red Dead Redemption 2.
You can find a mask on bandits or in bandit camps. But if you haven’t come across one, you can purchase one at the Alley Shop just Southeast of Hernand. You can also buy disguise kits to help you go unnoticed and sell some of your stolen goods here.
One thing to watch out for: you can still get a bounty for stealing, even if there’s no one to see it and you’re wearing a mask. So be prepared before you help yourself to that shiny sword hung on someone’s wall.
Learning your ABCs
Learning is a massive part of Crimson Desert. When you first hit the road near Hernand, you’ll see items all labelled ‘???’. The same will happen when you first enter any shop. You have to study these items to understand what they are. You do this by hovering over them with your cursor.
But learning goes deeper than that. There are abilities in the Skill Tree that you can learn out-of-order by copying them from enemies. Conveniently, you can also buy them with skill points, and your skill point is refunded if you then learn it organically.
The same is true of cooking and crafting recipes, notes and bounties. Pick up anything and everything you come across, and study it to gain useful information about the world, then you can sell the object if it isn’t useful to you — win win!
Wrestling is great for crowds
When you kick off your adventure, unarmed combat and wrestling moves might take a back-seat to swords, shields and other deadly tools of the trade. However, don’t overlook a Stone Cold Stunner as a great way to clear a group.
The thing that I realised early on, by pressing Circle+Triangle / B+Y together, you grab an enemy and can throw them in any direction. This is great for tossing them into a crowd of bandits or putting gravity to use by tossing them off cliffs.
You’ll unlock spin moves, new throws and slams (the Dropkick and Clothesline are really great starters). But most of these do some form of radius damage to the guy you attack, as well as anyone in close proximity. So give it a go!
Be ready for Bosses
For many other similar open-world games, bosses can be just beefed-up ordinary dudes. But in Crimson Desert, bosses are each unique and at times incredible opportunities to test your abilities. From the outset, you’ll have to learn the Pump Kick ability from a knight in town who challenges you to a duel.
The Reed Devil can teleport around and attack from any direction, needing combos and counters to set him off balance. There’s even a massive moving mountain called the Stoneback Crab, which you have to climb like a boss out of Shadow of the Colossus.
My tip for these bosses: bring healing items, take the time to learn the mechanics of the fight, and don’t be scared to come back later. There’s no shame in taking on some side quests and levelling up a bit before tackling the big challenges.
Get Crafty
Early on in Crimson Desert, you will be strapped for cash. There are plenty of shops in Hernand, from the Blacksmith to the butcher, trade shops, fences for stolen goods and others. But without the cash to splash, you aren’t going to get far.
This is where crafting really comes in handy. In Hernand, the Blacksmith and Armoursmith both have basic crafting books for sale. As does the Inkeeper for cooking. By spending your early cash on these, you’ll be able to craft new weapons and armour, and upgrade your existing gear. If you keep an eye out for a pickaxe and axe around the early camps, you can even head into the wilderness to chop trees and bust stones for your own upgrade materials.
Last point on crafting – don’t throw something away just because it doesn’t have an obvious benefit. Even mundane items can give stat boosts if you upgrade them. I found this by taking an ordinary signet ring to the blacksmith and upgrading it, which gave me an attack speed buff when equipped! There are also slottable passive items that you’ll find for more advanced gear.
Making the most of Crimson Desert: Experiment!
Playing through Crimson Desert, I keep being surprised by little things that the game didn’t expressly tell me about. Most of these are things I either worked out through experimentation or saw enemies do.
Many smaller buildings are destructible. So when you’re attacking bandit camps, you can throw bad guys into buildings or attack through buildings. Because this is all physics-based, you can also drop trees onto enemies, hurl boulders at them, and generally cause a bit of chaos. Another cool point, in an early tutorial, you learn to reflect light from your sword to power a technological item in one of the Abyss sky islands. Yes, you can use that reflection to blind enemies, and follow up with a finishing move. There are also great interactions with elemental things; the most basic is probably lighting your arrows on fire, to then burn plants or light enemies on fire.
When you unlock new abilities, the Grapple Hook, elemental imbuements, and other gadgets make great new tools to experiment with. So get out there and try something weird!
These are just a few tips from the first 20 or so hours of Crimso Desert. Hopefully, they’ve helped you gear up for your journey into Pywell. Keep an eye out for more on Crimson Desert after launch, because there’s a lot more this game has in store. Not the least of which is dragon riding!
Gamers can ride into Pywel when Crimson Desert comes to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam on March 19th. It retails for about AUD $110.
Early access to Crimson Desert was provided by the publisher.
