Crimson Desert boss says reviewers did not get a fair chance to explore

Pearl Abyss's European boss says Crimson Desert's critics never got a fair run at the game.

Lybee Park, the publisher's European CEO, discussed the game's reception in an interview with The Game Business. The game holds a Metacritic score of 77, a weighted average drawn from published critic reviews, on a 0 to 100 scale. Park argued that number reflects the conditions of review, not the finished game.

Park said critics reviewed a build that was not the exact same version as the launch game, as reported by Video Games Chronicle. He said review time was limited. That left reviewers with little chance to explore the world beyond the main quest line.

That gap matters because player scores have run higher than critic scores. Crimson Desert was reviewed worse by critics than by players, according to GamesRadar. Park linked that split to time spent in the game. Critics pushed through the story. Players lingered.

Crimson Desert was released in March. Pearl Abyss has continued to change it since launch. Updates have added new difficulty levels, made storage changes and improved graphics.

The company is also looking beyond its launch platforms. In August, Pearl Abyss told shareholders it is working on a version for Switch 2, Nintendo's current console. The target is release in the first half of next year.

Pearl Abyss said that Switch 2 version has reached a playable baseline. It is now undergoing technical reviews for performance optimisation and quality standard compliance. That is the normal pass where engineers test frame rate, loading and stability on new hardware.

Pearl Abyss has separately detailed Crimson Desert Enhanced, a revamped edition with new story moments and expanded voice-over and language support. The company has not framed it as a sequel. It is a build on the March release.

For fans, this means two conversations are running at once. One is about what the game was at review. The other is about what it has become after patches, and what it could be on new hardware.