Has Crimson Desert sold 2 million copies, while Dragon Riding cooldowns are turning players away?

Every time I enter an open world, my first instinct is never to rush the main quest, but to find a high place and survey the terrain. Games like Crimson Desert are exactly the kind that can get me hooked most easily—especially when what looks like just a ridgeline at first turns out, once you cross it, to hide the ability to ride a dragon and sweep over an enemy camp. That feeling is like suddenly discovering an unmarked aerial route at the edge of the map.

And that’s exactly where the problem lies. According to IGN, the game’s late-game dragon-riding mechanic really does let players briefly become a dragon rider for about 15 minutes, with the ability to fly and directly wipe out entire enemy camps. This should have been a perfect expression of “sandbox freedom,” but it gets dragged back down by a very heavy restriction: once you use it, you have to wait 50 minutes, and it’s an unskippable real-time cooldown.

That’s also why discussion around Crimson Desert has become so divided lately. On one side, sales have already surpassed 2 million copies, and plenty of players on social media are posting screenshots in support of it; on the other, complaints about non-horse mounts keep piling up. Dragon riding in particular was heavily promoted, yet in practice it feels more like a sightseeing shuttle in a tourist area—you only get to ride it for a short stretch each day, and spend the rest of the time standing outside the fence, staring helplessly.

Seen from this angle, the controversy isn’t really just about the cooldown itself, but about the gap between promise and delivery. The game previously marketed itself on “complete freedom,” but when its most imaginative form of movement is locked behind a timer, the urge to explore an open world gets cut off abruptly. Some players think this is for balance, but in a single-player sandbox, many people care more about sheer fun and room for experimentation. A long-CD mechanic like this feels more like a raid skill in an MMO than something that belongs in a huge map that’s supposed to let you run wild.

What makes things more troublesome is that Crimson Desert currently has more than just this one weak spot. The first round of fixes and adjustments has mainly focused on common issues like heavy controls and inventory and storage limitations; as for a more streamlined control scheme, along with the controversy over the generative AI assets mentioned in the original report, those probably won’t be fully resolved anytime soon. In other words, it currently feels like a region with spectacular landscapes, but road signs and transportation systems that still haven’t been properly built—you can see the potential, and you can also clearly feel how awkward it is to use.

Step back a bit further and you’ll see that the community’s sentiment is actually quite consistent: people don’t hate that the dragon is too powerful—they hate being “given a taste, then having it forcibly taken away.” Some players have even said outright that what they want is for all mounts to be fully tameable, ideally with permanent ownership of other creature mounts as well. That kind of demand is perfectly normal, because one of the most appealing parts of an open world is turning the means of traversal itself into an exploration reward, rather than a one-time trial ticket.

If you’re thinking about picking it up now, my advice is simple: if you can live with the controversy and are mainly here for the vast world and the action-adventure content, it may be better to wait for a few patches before buying; if you especially value free flight, mount progression, and unrestricted exploration, it’s best to hold off for now. After all, for a sandbox game, how big the map is only the starting point—what really determines whether it’s worth wandering through is whether, when you want to head somewhere, the system suddenly reaches out and yanks you back.