Crimson Desert couldn’t wait for Gamescom this year to drop a couple of tidbits.
First up — the bad news. Crimson Desert is delayed, slipping out of a ‘2025’ release date. But with the number of months remaining in the year steadily dwindling, and without any more specific news, I can’t say that this news shocked me.
The new release window is ‘Q1 2026’ (before April).
Still fairly open. Open enough that I guess we shouldn’t be surprised if it ends up moving again.
The second, perhaps as compensation for the first, is 13 minutes of gameplay.
If you prefer, here’s a commentated version from someone who has had hands on time previously.
The video could otherwise be best summed up as: Flying man goes on quest to murder-hobo through a castle, discovering the friends he made along the way- oh, and creating a new top-half-bottom-half gap in the torso of the traitor who kicked the whole mess off.
There is a lot going on here, I’m particularly a fan of the movement mechanics on display — not just the flight (well, ‘glide’, I guess), but also the grapple and climbing shown off nearer the end.
I’m all good with the extra wait if what we get ends up holding up to the hype.
This was posted during Blaugust 2025, the annual blogging event normally hosted by Belghast, with a twist this year of being hosted by Krikket. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in, year-round!
Is there much hype about it though?
I’m asking because I’ve played BDO for hundreds of hours, written a lot about it, and would still rank it among my favourite games of the last ten years, yet this one has yet to incite more than “Oh, I dunno, show it to me when it’s ready. Maybe I’ll play it, maybe not” from me. Granted, I’ve only skimmed through the video, but I still don’t see much that excites me.
I’ve seen basically no one else talk or write about it either – apart from you, obviously, and I don’t really count MOP because it’s their job – so I’m really wondering whether more than a few people are actually looking forward to this.
Maybe I’m just missing something though.
I think there has been, fair question on whether it’s still there now.
At least a couple of their trailers have made it just shy of 4m views on the official channel, and a 50 minute gameplay video of a year or two got up to 1.3m or so.
I think perhaps more than ‘hype’ in a general community sense, perhaps a better descriptor might be, ‘This looks a bit too good to be true’, particularly the gamescom trailer of a year or two (or three?) ago.
Every time they release anything though, most of the big YT channels (that I watch anyway) pick it up.
Tell you what, either way, I’m fairly hyped by it — but still in a semi-skeptical, ‘Oh God, please don’t let this be mid’ kinda way. xD
Isn’t “Crimson Desert Delayed” the official name for the game at this point?
I feel like I’ve been hearing about it for years now.
Hah, yeah — it definitely got announced quite some time ago. 2020 or ’21 maybe? I had thought the release window had only ever been set as ‘2025’ and somewhat recently at that, but a PCGamer article I saw suggested it had once been targeting 2021, so, shrug.