Nearly three full months into 2026 a handful of the year’s most anticipated titles are starting to arrive and compete for early game of the year contender potential. Although the latest AAA release has quickly become a commercial success, it’s having a hard time shaking some negative discourse in the zeitgeist.
Crimson Desert’s Commercial and Critical Success So far
There’s no denying that Crimson Desert is one of the most gorgeous and ambitious current-gen games to arrive in a long time. The title looks particularly stunning on the PS5 Pro and high-end PCs, but even on the Series X and base PS5 it is still a graphically impressive title.
The open-world single-player adventure game quickly picked up more than 2 million sales in its opening days and critic reviews have been generally positive. The game currently sits at a 78 Metascore and our VICE review found it to be the most impressive open-world game since Red Dead Redemption 2.
That said, the game does have plenty of rough edges and a bit of awkwardness for players to navigate as they work through its dozens of hours of content.
The Current Crimson Desert Discourse
When a game sets out to allow players to do just about anything, it is going to be very hard to nail all of those systems perfectly. That seems to be part of the problem when it comes to the community reaction to Crimson Desert.
The game does hold a user score of 7.7 on Metacritic, which is pretty strong, but a bit shy of what you might usually see from game of the year contenders. Part of the problem comes from the game’s user experience and interface. The controller is jam-packed with button mappings and the title definitely requires a bit of a learning curve to adjust to the inventory system for players coming from other RPGs.
Pearl Abyss is listening closely to the community’s complaints and feedback and has already promised to provide frequent patches and updates to address bugs, frustrating pain points, and user experience issues. The developer is known for its experience in the world of MMOs, so frequent patches and constant improvements should be something the team has a lot of experience with.
It will be very interesting to see how much the game changes in the coming months and whether it is still a big part of the conversation later in 2026 as the end of the year awards conversations begin to happen.
Crimson Desert is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles.
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