Has the word-of-mouth for "Red Desert" recovered, only for the revelations to hit even harder?

Compared with many new open-world releases, the most awkward thing about Crimson Desert right now isn’t that its visuals aren’t strong enough, but that its finished quality and overall presentation are clearly not on the same level. On the surface, it scored 78 on Metacritic after launch, and its Steam reviews also recovered from “Mixed” to “Mostly Positive”; but if you compare it with more complete works in terms of systems and narrative, such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or God of War, the problems it exposes feel more like the aftereffects of a development process that spun out of control.

What overseas outlet thegamer compiled this time was not an official postmortem, but two employee leaks from Blind, an anonymous Korean community. The platform is limited to verified game industry professionals, so the barrier to discussion is relatively high; but the information chain also passed through machine translation by Reddit users, so the core premise needs to be made clear first: for now, this content remains unverified rumor and cannot be treated as a definitive conclusion.

One former developer, who claimed to have already moved to Nexon, mentioned that Crimson Desert’s “story wasn’t finalized until right before launch.” If that is true, then player criticism of the hollow main storyline and the weak connection between the title and the plot suddenly has an explanation that fits. More importantly, the leak also mentioned that the project was originally centered on the young, usurped king Macduff, but after the original director left due to an internal power struggle, the new management overturned the original plan.

By comparison, the more alarming claim is that the team kept “adding things at the last minute whenever they saw a hit game.” According to the leak, after management saw Tears of the Kingdom become a smash hit, they hastily stuffed “sky island” elements into the game; the problem wasn’t the act of taking inspiration itself, but that they copied only the surface without understanding the underlying design logic. The result was that multiple sets of mechanics were forcibly stitched together, and what players ultimately felt was not system richness, but a confusing button layout, obscure puzzles, and awkward controls. PC players can at least try to readjust with keyboard and mouse; but on a controller, this kind of input burden is often only magnified further.

Another employee, who claimed to still be working there, pointed the blame at management culture, saying that the company not only engaged in blind imitation, but also suppressed dissenting voices, and that some people had long believed the project was “doomed to be a disaster.” Claims like these sound serious, but they at least line up with several of the most common negative points currently seen in the player community: a thin story, convoluted puzzle design, and counterintuitive controls.

From a broader comparison, Crimson Desert is not entirely without merits. At the very least, its market reception has not completely collapsed, and its Steam reputation still has room to improve; but right now it feels more like a game whose audiovisual production values are holding up the floor, while its core design still hasn’t been properly straightened out. For players who haven’t bought it yet, my advice is simple: if you care more about open-world exploration and flashy combat presentation, you can keep watching and wait for future updates; but if you are already particularly sensitive to main-story narrative and gameplay feel, then at this stage it may not be a priority pick within its genre. In the end, a game’s reputation can be repaired over time, but these development rumors point to something else entirely—a game’s biggest fear has never been a lack of ideas, but having too many of them and no clear direction.