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Legend of Zelda, believe it or not, does not have individual good stories.
Great games, love me some LoZ — stories are consistently weak across all entries. Robust lore, poor individual narratives— see Dark Souls if you want another example.
That all being said: the game (Crimson Desert) very strictly establishes rules regarding the Abyss. Kliff is the only one who’s allowed to go up there — because reasons! He’s the hero!
I spoil something here so be warned - >!To reiterate, the game is very strict about letting anyone but Kliff up into the Abyss throughout the entire game. You’d think there’d be some overarching reason for it, right? No, Oongka practically instant transmissions to save you at the end of the game. No explanation for why he’s there, no explanation for why he couldn’t go there before — nope he just pops in and saves you from… it’s still not clear.!<
Like I’ve beaten the game. The bit I mentioned up above literally made me burst out laughing. If it weren’t for how cool and alternative the unarmed system is, I’d have put the game down right then out of boredom.
Bottom line: you’re allowed to like whatever you want, but Crimson Desert would have been a better experience with a custom character and less narrative. I mean for fucks sake, Kliff literally has a canned goofy ass ‘Yes’ response for random NPC dialogue — it literally would have been better if they just made him not speak.
Edit: oh, that’s to say nothing of fucking Yann. When one of the only memorable characters in your story (because yes, everyone involved in the narrative is simply forgettable) is only memorable because the character routinely pisses you off — I’m sorry but your story is cheeks.
Again, that’s largely my point. You can’t market a game and just sell 5 million units. Marathon sold 1.2 million units because a) it’s a Bungie game so people would be paying attention to it and b) it had heavy marketing behind it. It would’ve sold even less without those two things, but that’s besides the point. The idea that you can just sell 5 million units through marketing is simply not true and Marathon proves it.
Let’s put this into perspective here.
Pearl Abyss is a relatively unknown dev, Black Desert is not an unknown IP. Pearl Abyss has been pushing BDO for years, roping in larger streamers to play their game over time. BDO is a game that does not respect your time however, and player retention is pretty low as a result. Actually, the BDO community itself is known for helping newbies through some awful grinds — mainly because they recognize that most newbies simply won’t withstand it. This has created a pretty committed community towards the game, and Pearl Abyss hasn’t been actively shitting on them. I can’t think of a better word of mouth machine, especially one already entrenched in social media platforms like Twitch.
Meanwhile, Bungie has spent the better part of the last 5 years making it clear to anyone with a brain that Destiny 2 is simply a cash cow for developing other IPs. Bungies content creator network has seemed like paid actors for years, I know because I played Destiny 2. If Pearl Abyss has been generating their community, Bungie has been actively destroying theirs.
Bottom line, Pearl Abyss has set themselves up for people to give them a chance and the recent success of Crimson Desert is the culmination of years planting seeds. Meanwhile Bungie has been resting on their laurels, actively destroying their community, creating people like me who will simply never purchase a Bungie IP again — and the game still sold over 1.2 million copies.
If anything, Marathon’s success is a testament to the power of marketing pushes.
And my point is that if you asked your normie gamer, which really didn’t exist in the same form, in 2005 who Bungie is — you’d mostly get question marks.
The comparison to Marathon was explicitly to debunk the idea that you can sell 5 million units simply by doing marketing.
This would be relevant except that Marathon only sold as well as it did because of the heavy marketing push. If you’ve been following what Bungie has done with Destiny 2 then you should know it’s fucking amazing anyone bought into that soulless trash. They have burned so many bridges with their community. Had they released Marathon before Bungie was sold to Sony it would undoubtedly have sold better. They literally needed the marketing push.
Yet if you’d said Elite Dangerous it would be much more recognizeable, just like BDO is with Pearl Abyss.
Plus, Pearl Abyss has been working to get people to play their mmo for quite some time — Shroud played it for a bit and I know some other popular mmo streamers played it. All of this to say, Crimson Desert’s success is not wild — and using Marathon as a metric is just the worst thing you could do because Pearl Abyss hasn’t been shitting themselves reputation-wise.
Well, Marathon is a supremely bad example as Bungie has been doing everything they can to make the people who have supported them throughout Destiny hate them. Pearl Abyss might have scummy mtx but they’re honest about it and ultimately make a pretty good game. For Korean devs. Who develop games for Koreans. Who are born with a third invisible spirit arm that they use for extra inputs.
This game has no business being as good as it is, like some aspects are real bad (game controls are very poorly thought out/implemented, story doesn’t exist, etc), some aspects are real good (the movement, the combat, the options, the exploration).
Idk, if you like Assassin’s Creed you should play this game. This feels like what every AC starting from Odyssey should have felt like.
Edit: oh, and you can suplex people. You can go full WWE in your Korean single player RPG. What more need I say?
I think if you examine the quality of the dialogue itself — yes it was rather boring. However, the reactive aspect was neat — a character remembering the thing you last said and using it to justify their position is good. Even if that position ends up being boring due to poor writing, it seems more dynamic and real — cuz people typically remember what you say.
I think that romance in video games is… well it’s just like romance in any other medium. It exists to paint a picture in your head of what love looks like, because that’s something they can sell to you.
If you want a game with natural feeling, organic romance then that’s going to be the game. Full stop, simply having a cast of 10 characters already makes this very complicated.
I don’t disagree that comparing DMC and the old GOW games is fair — they occupy the same space. Reducing a soulslike to dodging and parrying is just wrong, though. Actually reducing a hack and slash to aggression and dodging is also wrong, see Royal Guard.
Freedom of movement, build options (you are free to turn yourself into the heaviest thing in existence compared to a gymnast, and that’s only discussing equip load), map design, the robust lore as opposed to a traditional narrative, these are staples of soulsbourne games. DMC3 has a harder parry than any soulslike in Royal Guard — does that make parrying a staple of the series? Yes, it does — Royal Guard is cool as shit.
I can go on for a while about why new GOW is more of a movie than it is a game.
Uh, while comparing DMC and GOW is wrong, calling GOW an over the shoulder soulslike is… almost more wrong.
That being said, Ragnarok was a step down from the first GOW reboot, with GOW being a great starting point with the promise of Ragnarok (which was just disappointing imo).
And the story… Jesus christ I would have preferred an absent soulslike story.
My feelings on the Last of Us are complicated. Last of Us in isolation is good, TLoU and TLoU2 together are bad. Way better story than Crimson Desert’s, though.
Mass Effect… I’m sorry but everything past 1 was bad, and 1’s story was good because of the expectations set up for future games. Like Kliff, Shephard is a nothing character — only there’s an actual narrative driven by him/her and the rest of the cast + the events from the previous game.
We’ve discussed Zelda and Dark Souls, but I think Valheim is actually a point against what you’re saying — yes you’re reacting to the world but Valheim has next to no story (I’d say no story but I haven’t played it in a while).
Kliff could have been anyone. You could replace Kliff as the main character with Damiane and the story literally wouldn’t change (only you can’t because the Abyss can only be accessed by Kliff).
Only for >!this to mean absolutely fucking nothing because Oognka goes where he pleases.!<
I think the world is beautiful and you could subtract the entire beginning of the story and filled the game with only side quests and side stuff in the world — it would have been a better experience. Simply deleting the dogshit Yann and Naira quests would make it a better experience. If a game’s story would be strictly better with half of it deleted, I’m sorry but the story is just bad.
Edit: not a huge spoiler but I’m sorry, I meant to be spoiler free.
Edit: Forgot Shephard is unisex.