{"id":72810,"date":"2026-04-01T12:16:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T12:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/?p=72810"},"modified":"2026-04-01T12:15:57","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T12:15:57","slug":"crimson-desert-future-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/news\/72810-crimson-desert-future-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00ab A cynical amalgamation of borrowed mechanics \u00bb Crimson Desert Could Be the Future of Video Games, According to This Baldur&#8217;s Gate 3 Developer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A new phenomenon has taken hold of the gaming world. Fans of open-world adventures and fantasy settings have been swept up in the recent release of <a href=\"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/news\/72675-crimson-desert-update\/\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/news\/72675-crimson-desert-update\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Crimson Desert<\/a>. Pearl Abyss&#8217;s latest production promises dozens upon dozens of hours of adventure, drawing inspiration from a remarkably wide range of genres. That breadth hasn&#8217;t gone unnoticed, and one member of Larian Studios, the GOTY 2023 powerhouse behind Baldur&#8217;s Gate 3, has reacted with a pointed dose of irony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">At Larian Studios, Crimson Desert raises an eyebrow<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Michael Douse, known online as Cromwelp, has never been one to hold back his opinions, and Crimson Desert is no exception. While he&#8217;s been enjoying the game, he can&#8217;t help but see it as a kind of boundless mechanical melting pot:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><svg aria-hidden=\"true\" focusable=\"false\" class=\"icon icon-quote\" width=\"48\" height=\"48\"><use xlink:href=\"#icon-quote\"><\/use><\/svg>\n<p>Crimson Desert is fun to play, but it is such a cynical amalgamation of borrowed mechanics. It is Now That&#8217;s What I Call Gaming plucked off a gas station shelf, for better &amp; worse. Expect a lot more of this in premium &amp; F2P. There is less risk in it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>As Larian&#8217;s publishing director, Douse&#8217;s &#8220;gas station game&#8221; label is a striking one, and deliberately so. Without dismissing the fact that the game delivers an enjoyable experience, he sees it as something closer to the premium or free-to-play model, where that kind of genre-blending is commercially viable in a way that traditional AAA development rarely allows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Crimson Desert is fun to play, but it is such a cynical amalgamation of borrowed mechanics. It is Now That&#39;s What I Call Gaming plucked off a gas station shelf, for better &amp; worse. Expect a lot more of this in premium &amp; F2P. There is less risk in it.<\/p>&mdash; Very AFK (@Cromwelp) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Cromwelp\/status\/2038028667515736278?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" rel=\"noopener\">March 28, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">More mechanics, more genres, the future of gaming?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>As tends to happen on social media, Douse&#8217;s comments drew swift backlash from players who took exception to any criticism of a game they love. Some called him &#8220;uncharitable and salty,&#8221; while others pointed out that borrowing from other games is hardly unusual, asking, reasonably enough, how Crimson Desert is really any different from Baldur&#8217;s Gate 3 in that regard. Douse&#8217;s response was fairly direct:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><svg aria-hidden=\"true\" focusable=\"false\" class=\"icon icon-quote\" width=\"48\" height=\"48\"><use xlink:href=\"#icon-quote\"><\/use><\/svg>\n<p>This is often true but I can&#8217;t remember the last time I saw the Greatest Hits of game mechanics in one pot<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>One comment in the thread described Crimson Desert as the &#8220;Marvelization of video games&#8221;, a reference to the MCU and the everything-in-one-place spectacle of the Avengers films. And that&#8217;s probably close to what genuinely surprises Douse. Free-to-play titles can afford to offer multiple experiences under one roof \u2014 their entire business model depends on keeping players engaged over the long term. Fortnite is the ultimate proof of concept, having reinvented itself as a battle royale, a racing game, a Guitar Hero-like, a Minecraft-like, and more, until, more recently, that same sprawl began to work against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That kind of genre condensation is far rarer in other development models, particularly in traditional AAA, where the economic stakes are simply different. A game like Baldur&#8217;s Gate 3 draws heavily from other C-RPGs, but doesn&#8217;t reach into wildly unrelated genres, coherence is part of the product. When paragliding and surface-climbing mechanics spread across open-world games after Zelda: Breath of the Wild popularized them, it worked because they felt contextually appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Crimson Desert throws that concern for harmony out the window. In doing so, it becomes less a focused narrative solo experience and more a sandbox of layered, loosely connected mechanics, a design philosophy that has long defined the premium and free-to-play space. By transplanting that approach into the AAA landscape, it may well be pointing toward something new, a shift in how big-budget games are conceived and built. For better or for worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size\">Source : <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Cromwelp\/status\/2038050554702614684\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Cromwelp\/status\/2038050554702614684\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">X<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":72640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-33"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72810"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72815,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72810\/revisions\/72815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gameblog.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}