Crimson Desert secures a March release date as the ambitious Frankenstein’s monster of open world fantasy games goes gold

Five and a half years after its 2020 Game Awards reveal, Crimson Desert has remained something of a mystery. Developer Pearl Abyss has promised a growing collection of mechanics and playstyles so bafflingly dense that it’s still hard to picture how exactly it’s all meant to fit together. Thanks to a freshly announced release date, however, we now at least know when we’ll see the full picture—and launch day is just two months away.

In a Steam news post, Pearl Abyss has confirmed that Crimson Desert has gone gold: The game’s primary development is, for all intents and purposes, complete and distribution-ready—aside from whatever tweaks might arrive in a day one patch. The announcement also brought us a release date: Crimson Desert will launch on March 19.

That means we’ve got just over eight weeks before we get our full and proper introductions to protagonist Kliff and the fantasy world of Pavel, and see just how well Pearl Abyss has managed to cram so many kinds of gameplay into one Kliff-shaped package. Kliff can seemingly do so many things that our Harvey Randall wrote last April after a hands-on preview that Crimson Desert is a kind of “action RPG tesseract” that’s barely contained by its seemingly -generic medieval fantasy trappings.

In the gameplay videos on Crimson Desert’s Steam page and YouTube channel, you can watch its gruff protagonist:

Swing a swordSwing a spearSwing an axeShoot a bowDo kung fuGrapple and throw enemies with pro wrestling techniquesPerform combat geomancySummon an artillery barrageExecute stealth killsEat toastSolve Breath of the Wild shrine-esque puzzlesMine for oreCook a steakGlide through the air using a cloak of writhing, animate shadow tendrilsTriple jump with a combination of lightning and nature magicsEnter a mysterious cubespace portal to traverse dimensionsSkydiveSwing Spider-Man-style with a wristmounted energy cordInitiate goblin regime changePerform fire rescueRide a horseRide a bearRide a dragonPilot a dwarven combat mech armed with heatseeking cluster missilesAnd more!

In other words, Crimson Desert seems like a prime example of the rarely seen Witcher-Dragon’s-Dogma-Red-Dead-Shadow-of-Mordor-Zelda-Assassin’s-Creed-Spider-Man-like. As for whether or not it can fit all those pieces together in any coherent form, we’ll have to wait until March to find out.

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