Crimson Desert Enhanced

Controls come up in 29% of negative reviews, and in 36% of negative reviews written in the first ten hours. Players describe a scheme where one button does five things, where jump and interact share a key so you hop instead of picking things up, where actions need two- or three-button combinations and hold-versus-tap timing, and where movement has heavy RDR2-style inertia with noticeable input delay. On PC, the inability to rebind WASD is a deal-breaker for left-handed and disabled players, some of whom refunded within minutes. Playing with a controller doesn't fully help: players report missed inputs, a d-pad radial menu that is hard to use in combat, and no PlayStation prompt option. Some positive reviews complain about the controls too ("great game, terrible controls").

Story and writing come up in a third of negative reviews, and in 38% of negative reviews from players past 50 hours. The complaints are that the plot is disjointed, quest chains jump in without setup, NPC dialogue feels generic, and Kliff reacts to almost nothing ("Aye"). Some also point to translation and lip-sync problems. Players resent being moved to Oongka or Damiane for long chapters and then having those characters locked out elsewhere, and a few ask for a character creator. Positive reviews that judge the story call it bad more often than good, and a few advise "Don't play it for the story." The Enhanced rewrite softened this for some players, but the story still draws complaints from players far into the campaign.

Reviewers on both sides, positive and negative alike, say they had to look up solutions on YouTube ("I've had to YouTube every quest," one writes). Abyss puzzles, sky-island platforming, statue repairs, eavesdropping and investigation quests, and some required story steps give few or no hints. Players describe blocks that must sit a pixel from the right spot, objectives that only trigger at a certain time of day, and final-boss mechanics the game never explains. Puzzle complaints cluster among players deep into the game (21% of negative reviews past 50 hours). Some ask for more in-game hints, and one suggests an asynchronous message system like the one in the Dark Souls games and Elden Ring.

This is a technical problem rather than a design one, and it turned some previously happy players negative. Close to one in ten negative reviews describes crashes. Reports include crashes when opening the map, inventory or pause menu, crashes on loading screens, an error that reads "There may be a problem with the game installation. Please reinstall.", and crashes after updating Nvidia drivers. Some reviewers with 100 to 600 hours say the game "ran fine at launch" and became unplayable after the Enhanced update, and some report whole-PC lockups. Mac, AMD and Intel GPU players describe their own separate problems. The 2.0 update also reset skill trees, and a few veterans say that was when they uninstalled.

Dozens of reviews complain about quests that have you follow an NPC on horseback at walking pace while they talk, escort someone who gets stuck behind slow carts, carry sacks across a camp, or cross the map to turn in a bounty that can be lost to one stray hit. Cutscenes can only be fast-forwarded, not skipped. A handful of reviewers sum it up as a game that "doesn't respect your time," and some say they installed speed-up and skip mods just to keep going.

Separate from praise for the art, a steady group of PC players say they could not make the game look like its trailers. They report heavy blur, shimmer and ghosting unless Ray Reconstruction is on, which they say costs too much performance. They also mention forced TAA, pop-in a few meters away, flickering shadows, near-black interiors and washed-out nights, HDR problems, and foliage that "acts like it's in a hurricane." Some report headaches or motion sickness. Some players say they spent hours on settings, and some fixed the problem only with community mods such as RenoDX.

Longer-playing critics say gear barely matters because weapons in a class share movesets and near-identical stats, abyss artifacts are spent on upgrades that change little, and bosses drop nothing worth having. Inventory space and stack sizes are tight enough that leveling items themselves eat slots. A few players report items or storage vanishing.

Some of the same players who praise the patch pace also say it wears them down. They describe frequent patches that require tens of gigabytes or a full redownload, graphics settings reverting after updates, and PC mods (which many use to fix visuals or skip padding) breaking every week. Several ask for fewer, larger patches or an option to stay on a stable version.

A handful of required minigames draw outsized anger: horse taming, the arm-wrestling button-mash (which players with motor or hand conditions say they cannot complete or skip), the card game, archery contests, timed rope and parkour trials, and the dragon-mounting quest.

The camera zooms and re-centers on its own even after players adjust the settings, lock-on picks the wrong targets, and in tight spaces the view clips or loses the character.

A small group objects that a single-player game with Denuvo will not start without an internet connection. This mainly affects players with unreliable connections and Linux users.

A few players who remember earlier statements that expansions would be free were unhappy about the announced paid DLC. Many other reviews that mention the upcoming expansion say they are looking forward to it.