Crimson Desert Gets A Surprise Feature To Keep Fans Playing

Crimson Desert‘s developers are at it again, by which I mean rolling out another substantial update that meaningfully expands its endgame for all of those players too obsessed with its hyper-detailed medieval sandbox to give it a rest. Patch 1.05.00 is now live in the open-world game, just a week after its biggest update ever, and it adds a feature that essentially lets players refill the map with fresh strongholds to five over.

“We understand that as more regions of the continent were liberated, opportunities for combat naturally became less frequent,” Pearl Abyss wrote in the latest patch notes. “So to keep the sense of challenge alive, we’ve added the Rematch and Re-blockade content.” This lets players go back and fight up to 69 of the game’s already defeated bosses and even do so on the recently added higher difficulty if they choose. No new loot will be obtained, but you won’t lose any consumables used during the fights either.

Patch 1.05 also brings war back to the vast regions of Pywel. The “Re-blockade” toggle lets players revert an already cleared map to a state of conflict. By setting it to a state of “war,” 13 different factions within the game can carry out re-blockades across 23 different forts and quarries on the map. Players who don’t want to contend with this chaos can simply keep it set to “stable,” but everyone else will see the balance of power continue to shift and keep them and their Greymanes busy.

This only scratches the surface of another update full of bug fixes and gameplay tweaks, including ones that address long-standing issues like “Improved interaction with gold bars placed throughout the world that were previously unobtainable. Picking them up now yields a Crude Gold Bar worth 5 Silver.” Also, the legendary animals Iron Eagle and Hyacinth Macaw can now be kept as pets. There continue to be lots of UI improvements as well.

Once again, existing fans of Crimson Desert of been shocked by the pace and breadth of these post-launch updates which treat the single-player open-world adventure almost like the type of live service MMO Pearl Abyss normally upkeeps. “How exactly big is this dev team?” one fan asked on the subreddit. “Do they even sleep?” We do know they are at least getting bonuses. South Korean publication MTN recently reported that developers at the studio were getting $2.5 million in bonuses after the game recently hit 5 million copies sold.

“We are continuing to refine these features, and this update serves as the first step by implementing their core, foundational systems,” the team wrote in the latest patch notes. “Building upon this base in future patches, we plan to progressively refine the content and craft a deeper world, so we hope you’re looking forward to what we have in store.” Fans still aren’t done playing Crimson Desert, and the developers definitely aren’t done improving it.