Crimson Desert patch stops bosses attacking you mid-revival, also takes aim at crashes and UI problems

Stare for too long into the Abyss, and you'll get frame-rate drops

Pearl Abyss have released the first proper update for their grand and obfuscatory open world RPG Crimson Desert, introducing a slew of tweaks for the game's many, many systems. The developers have added new finishing blows or follow-up attacks and skills for certain moves, and a new tutorial quest for a particular section in chapter 3, but the most important changes, I think, are the bug fixes and general attempts to make Crimson Desert less "like a product exploding at the waist with far too much stuff and an irritating tendency to avoid communicating anything to the player", as one critic put it. In particular, you may be relieved to hear that bosses can no longer beat you up while you're reviving.

Crimson Desert launched this week to scattered applause, a Mexican wave of shrugs, and a lot of griping about the controls and overall design being an absolute dog's dinner. There is a round of social media Discourse underway about whether it is OK to like bad things and whether 7/10 is a good score and whether critics are too critical.

I am not here to expand on that, beyond passive-aggressively summarising it and pretending that I have more class, even though I once wrote a whole article about how Metacritic is magic. I am here to tell you that you'll no longer have to replay the puzzle section of the the Tenebrum battle in Chapter 4 if you perish during the fight. I am here to tell you that they've fixed "various" issues with the UI, and that Crimson Desert won't crash so often now, whatever that awful James might tell you. Here's the full patch notes.

Quests
   •  A tutorial quest has been added at the start of Chapter 3 to help players learn more about Abyss Gears.
   •  Fixed an issue where certain quests would not progress properly.
Content
   •  Improved usability for certain systems and content, including Housing mode. 
   •  Fixed issues where certain content did not function as intended or incorrectly. 
   •  Adjusted QTE difficulty when captured by enemies to gradually increase based on the number of times captured. 
   •  Removed the bear’s instant-kill damage and adjusted its overall damage. 
   •  Fixed an issue where the number of Greymane comrades owned may be displayed as lower than what the actual count is, or some comrades sometimes do not appear on the list.
   •  Recently viewed cutscenes can now be fast forwarded more quickly. *
  Skills
   •  Improved the usability of the skill-learning feature "Watch and Learn" 
   •  Improved the Skills menu so that skill names and descriptions are separated by weapon type, and descriptions and videos for certain skills have been updated. 
   •  Added a finishing blow to Kliff’s Flurry of Blows. 
   •  Added a follow-up skill to Damiane’s greatsword stab and uppercut. 
   •  Added a follow-up attack to Oongka’s dual-wield stab. 
  Boss Fights
   •  Improved the Tenebrum battle in Chapter 4 so that the puzzle section no longer has to be replayed after dying during the fight. *
   •  Adjusted the combat balance of certain bosses, including Reed Devil. 
   •  Fixed an issue where bosses could attack the player while the player is in the motion of reviving. 
   •  Fixed abnormal movement and fight progression issues for certain bosses.  
   •  Improved the combat behavior and animation of Walker-type monsters. 
  NPC & NPC Dialogue
   •  Various improvements and fixes were made to animations, movements, lip-sync, visual clipping, visual effects, and voice acting for NPCs and animals. 
   •  Improved the dialogue, voice, and reactions of some NPCs to feel more natural and better fit their situations. 
   •  Fixed an issue where voice dialogue and subtitles did not match when greeting NPCs. 
   •  Fixed issues related to abnormal interactions with some NPCs and animals. 
Localization
   •  Fixed various localization errors and improved localization quality across all languages.
UI
   •  Fixed UI related issues, including issues with some text display, functionality, sound effects, etc.
Performance
   •  Made various performance and stability optimizations across PC and console, as well as crash issues.

The devs have also posted a list of Known Issues, which I am scoring 8/10 for its combination of eeriness and silliness. For example, the Nietzschean bathos of the phrase: "in certain situations, the Abyss can be seen from the world below, resulting in slight drops in frame rate." Here's another line which gave Mark the giggles when he flagged the update for our attention: "when receiving damage while holding a tree, the character can become stuck to the tree."

If you're using FSR4 upscaling, you might notice that the rain vanishes in rainy environments, or the screen gets all blurry. How am I supposed to distinguish the rain vanishing due to a bug, from the rain just, you know, ceasing to rain? This is going to keep me up all night. More severely: "an issue has been identified where the game cannot be launched properly on Xbox ROG Ally and Xbox PC." On the upside, Pearl Abyss have resolved "an issue where Steam pre-order purchasers are unable to claim their pre-order bonus and deluxe pack items".

Notwithstanding the mixed reception, Crimson Desert has attracted quite a big playerbase on Steam, with almost 230,000 concurrents at launch yesterday. I'm not sure how long they'll stick around if they keep getting stuck to trees.