Crimson Desert's open world wouldn't feel quite so bland if didn't also have the most boring lead character in recent video game history.
I’ve controlled a lot of dullards in video games. Even leaving aside the ranks of the silent protagonists—those psychotic, sword-swinging mimes of yesteryear—gaming is littered with main characters who would be laughed out of the worlds of TV, films, or books, capable of expressing no more robust an inner world than a solipsistic “It’s a-me,” or as much personality as can be expressed in a mid-combat “Need to reload!” bark.
And yet, I can’t remember the last time I was as outrightI should be fair: Technically, that’s not his last name. Kliff—the protagonist of Pearl Abyss’ new open-world wandering simulator—doesn’t have a last name, which dovetails nicely with his lack of a personality, a viewpoint, or an ability to grunt much beyond “Happy to help,” as he takes over the chore wheels of a whole fantasy kingdom’s worth of similarly milquetoast taskmasters. As has been well-documented in the week or so since it came out,has a lot of problems, ranging from a general surfeit of exciting shit to do while ambling across its massive landscapes, to one of the most deliberately obtuse control schemes I’ve ever come across in a game of this ilk. The game as a whole is a mess that’s only hot if you kind of squint: Otherwise, it blurs into a vast, uninteresting world of trees, rocky hillscapes, and ideas cribbed liberally from. But it’s Kliff who my mind revolves around, locked in an orbit of irritated, listless disgust. Presenting an appearance not un-akin to a Vasoline-slathered Viking Clint Eastwood , the last of the Greymanes—Nice Vikings, in contrast to the Bad Vikings, who he hates—exhibits a personality largely indistinguishable, in its blandness, from the landscapes around him. Don’t get me wrong:has terrible writing in any case. But Kliff is the magnificent absence at its center, reacting to everything, from being attacked by bandits, to being raptured up into the sky so that he can soar on magical wings, with the exact same expression of dull surprise. is a game that makes you think about other games a lot; partly because it’s so aggressively derivative, and partly because it just makes for a nice change of pace from watching your camera once again shrug uncomfortably instead of actually locking on to an opponent. And the one I kept coming back to during my time with it, even more than Nintendo’s modern. That game, too, had a Viking protagonist roaming a countryside that was often bigger than it was interesting; that game, too, was often content to throw “more” at the player when “better” would have been preferred. And yet, when I think back on, it’s not the repetition or the fetch quests that my mind gravitates to, but its protagonist, kickass Norse partygirl Eivor Varinsdottir. Throughout the 50 or so hours I spent with, I was always excited to roll into a cutscene to see how Eivor would react to the latest dose of proto-Templar silliness or beleaguered homeowner nonsense, for the simple reason that Eivor had a personality. Amused, enthusiastic, and onlymad with blood lust, she was my playable buddy as I toured ninth century England, and while I’d never call her thecharacter, she was still a welcome presence that made our hours together a richer experience., that they failed to grasp a key aspect of these big, lonely sorts of single-player experiences: When you’re out there in the wilderness, your player character is the only friend you’ve got. (This is not, to be clear, a call for protagonists to start quipping to themselves at every turn—oneliking the guy or gal or Geralt on the other end of the controller, is what makes getting saddled with a dud like Kliff such a bummer, in a game that often feels like it’shappen, I want to experience it with a character capable of saying more than “Has anybody seen any other Greymanes?” You can patch out AI art and ineffective control schemes, but I’ve never seen a developer manage to patch a personality
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