TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 1,971
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
It's been a long road.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
According to our Harvey's Crimson Desert preview, Pearl Abyss' upcoming action-sorta-RPG is quite good indeed. It's also late. It should have been here, let me check, five years ago?
Yep. Crimson Desert was first revealed at 2020's Game Awards with a proposed release year of 2021. After, ah, whiffing that slightly, it's now due out two weeks from today. In a chat with IGN, the studio copped to the fact that, yeah, it might have pulled the cover off this thing a little too early.
"In a sense, we're kind of victims of ourselves," said studio head of PR and marketing Will Powers. "We announced the game too early, and, honestly, that's just inarguable." Indeed, consult the ancient tomes of business administration and you won't find many gurus suggesting you do what Pearl Abyss did: "I don't think anyone would say we should announce the game six-and-a-half years in advance."
Yeah, but what do they know? I say live your truth.
Powers does point out that it's not like the studio's spent the last half-decade tightening up the graphics on level three. "Things happened that way for multiple reasons; the game changed, and we built an engine, and not just for this game, but an additional engine altogether." That's a lot of work! The kind that takes more time than you have between a Game Awards reveal and your original release date.
The long wait has had its upsides, too. For years, people have idly wondered just what the heck this game is gonna be (in fact, we have a whole bit of our website dedicated to answering that question), and Powers thinks that was probably good marketing, when it all shakes out. "But as a result of this situation, what happened is it created this air of mystique around it where people didn't really know what the game was, and that's become fun from my perspective," he says.
The early stumble is why Pearl Abyss is so keen on showing off oodles of the game now—it has several years of speculation to put to bed. "So now we just let people play the game for hours and do hours of interviews as well," says Powers. "We never want to be accused of hiding anything, because we have a lot of ground to make up. We initially revealed this as something else, so we needed to do more than a game traditionally would to course-correct for our own actions from five and six years ago."
Keep up to date with the most importan...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
According to our Harvey's Crimson Desert preview, Pearl Abyss' upcoming action-sorta-RPG is quite good indeed. It's also late. It should have been here, let me check, five years ago?
Yep. Crimson Desert was first revealed at 2020's Game Awards with a proposed release year of 2021. After, ah, whiffing that slightly, it's now due out two weeks from today. In a chat with IGN, the studio copped to the fact that, yeah, it might have pulled the cover off this thing a little too early.
"In a sense, we're kind of victims of ourselves," said studio head of PR and marketing Will Powers. "We announced the game too early, and, honestly, that's just inarguable." Indeed, consult the ancient tomes of business administration and you won't find many gurus suggesting you do what Pearl Abyss did: "I don't think anyone would say we should announce the game six-and-a-half years in advance."
Yeah, but what do they know? I say live your truth.
Powers does point out that it's not like the studio's spent the last half-decade tightening up the graphics on level three. "Things happened that way for multiple reasons; the game changed, and we built an engine, and not just for this game, but an additional engine altogether." That's a lot of work! The kind that takes more time than you have between a Game Awards reveal and your original release date.
The long wait has had its upsides, too. For years, people have idly wondered just what the heck this game is gonna be (in fact, we have a whole bit of our website dedicated to answering that question), and Powers thinks that was probably good marketing, when it all shakes out. "But as a result of this situation, what happened is it created this air of mystique around it where people didn't really know what the game was, and that's become fun from my perspective," he says.
The early stumble is why Pearl Abyss is so keen on showing off oodles of the game now—it has several years of speculation to put to bed. "So now we just let people play the game for hours and do hours of interviews as well," says Powers. "We never want to be accused of hiding anything, because we have a lot of ground to make up. We initially revealed this as something else, so we needed to do more than a game traditionally would to course-correct for our own actions from five and six years ago."
Keep up to date with the most importan...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?