Crimson Desert is an absolutely colossal game, and it’s one that Elder Scrolls Online creator Matt Firor is currently obsessed with. Firor, who left Zenimax last year, reveals that he can’t stop playing the new game as it’s the perfect “single-player MMO”.
Alongside discussing the cancellation of Fallout Online and the biggest misconception around the Elder Scrolls game, Firor praised the creation of Crimson Desert. “It’s fantastic,” he tells MinnMaxx in a new interview, explaining that the game can circumvent the most annoying parts of creating an MMO.
“There’s not a lot of handholding and not a lot of written material, and no one knows what’s going on. And you just learn for yourself.”
“For those game developers listening, or people who want to be game developers, the online tech side of MMOs are never discussed. And they should be because it’s the hardest part of the project,” he explains. While Pearl Abyss is comprised of award-winning MMORPG developers, making Crimson Desert as a single-player game meant that the team could avoid all of the most annoying parts of game developmet.
“Being able to make a single-player MMO is almost like cheating to me,” the veteran MMO developer jokes. “Like, why did nobody think of this before? And Crimson Desert, it’s awesome!”
While Firor has spent a lot of time exploring the world of Crimson Desert, the MMO developer admits he doesn’t quite know what’s going on in its world. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in the game,” he says. “It doesn’t handhold you at all. I’ve played dozens of hours at this point, and I’m still like, ‘Oh, I can do that. I can do that’”.
The Elder Scrolls Online veteran likens the game to Breath of the Wild, explaining that “they don’t really handhold you, but if you find dried somewhere you know there’s something you can do with it later”. Firor likened the game to titles of the past before heavy tutorials and handholding that drove players to specific systems.
“It reminds me a lot of the old days of gaming,” he says, “where there’s not a lot of handholding and not a lot of written material, and no one knows what’s going on. And you just learn for yourself. And I’m really trying to do that with Crimson Desert and now watch tutorials. And I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve trained like 15 horses, and they’re all the same.”
Firor explains that there are games like it, but not exactly. To him, Crimson Desert is “open world, cool things, discover”. And, boy, is there a lot to discover. While the game is feature-complete, developer Pearl Abyss is not done yet with future content and patches currently in the works.
