Tobold's Blog
Saturday, March 21, 2026
 
Bridgerton vs. Crimson Desert

Imagine you are a big fan of the Netflix series Bridgerton. So you decide to take a holiday in London, and visit the Mayfair district around Grosvenor Square, where much of the series plays. Probably that would be quite disappointing. Not only because Bridgerton is fictional, and plays over 200 years ago. But because if you visit Grosvenor Square, you can only look at the expensive houses from outside. You can't go in, and even if you could, there wouldn't be a drama going on like you can experience if you watch Bridgerton.

That is a common feature of any historical tourist spot. I used to live half an hour's drive away from Waterloo, and I can really recommend the museum they have there about the famous battle. But if you are outside the museum, and climb the commemorative Lion's Mound to see the actual battlefield, these look suspiciously like ordinary fields these days, and there is no battle going on. You need to use your own historical knowledge and imagination for that to have any sort of interest.

If you watch Bridgerton, you don't have any freedom to explore. You can only watch the linear story, episode by episode. If you found one side character particularly interesting, but the script doesn't have any further important role for him or her, you don't get the option to see how he / she is faring. If the script skips a week for dramatic purposes, you don't get to see what happened during that time, except for the bits the series chooses to show you. All that is in the dramatic interest of the narrative. Somebody wrote "only the good bits" into the part that is shown to the audience, and thus gets to choose what the good bits are.

This week the open world game Crimson Desert released, and I looked into some of the reviews to find out whether I wanted to play that. That resulted in me not wanting to play it, because of too hard action combat boss fights and too bad controls. But it also resulted in me watching a bunch of people complain that they had expected Bridgerton and got Grosvenor Square. Crimson Desert has a huge and beautiful open world, with many points of interests and opportunities to interact with the environment, up to picking up and cuddling with any cat running around. What it doesn't have is a tight dramatic story that hooks you early in the game and drives you through that world.

I would argue that to some degree the freedom to explore and the tight dramatic story are mutually incompatible. There are many games that try to do both, with more or less success. Games like The Witcher 3 or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom in my mind found a good balance between freedom and story. But even in those games there are moments where you basically have to decide between one or the other. When you are farming Korok seeds in Zelda to grow your inventory, you have to leave the story aside. There is never any urgency, you can take off a week to just explore, and the princess to save will still be there once you get around to her.

Crimson Desert is definitively leaning towards the freedom side of the balance. And there are people who enjoy that. There are also people who feel a bit lost due to the lack of handholding and story direction. That is neither new nor unique to the medium, I felt the same conflict between freedom and story when I was writing and/or running D&D adventures. Some people liked hex crawl adventures full of freedom, others hated them due to their lack of a strong story and sense of purpose.

I do like exploring, and I do like games like Valheim or Enshrouded. That is why I looked into Crimson Desert in the first place, it looked like something I would like to play. But Crimson Desert is also trying to be Elden Ring, Legend of Zelda, and a bunch of other games at the same time. With the finite number of buttons on a gamepad, wanting the player to be able to do too many things becomes a control problem. And I don't like souls-like boss combat in any version. So I am not going to spend money on this.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
The discourse around this game has been interesting. A lot of people, including some game reviewers, apparently were under the impression it was going to be a more traditional western style fantasy RPG. Instead it's very much a Korean style open ended, almost sandbox I'd dare say, action game with RPG elements. Knowing which the developer is and briefly dipping my toes into Black Desert Online it makes total sense why Crimson Desert is the way it is. Heck it did start off as an MMO sequel to BDO after all.

I havent seen such a divisive game in a long time. I also wont be getting the game, yet anyway. Im currently engrossed in the latestet WoW expansion and I think its better to let the game get some bug fixes and updates before jumping in.
# posted by Blogger Bigeye : 21/3/26 12:43
 
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