Crimson Desert's critic reviews may have been harsher than its user reviews because normal players not working on a deadline had more time to venture off the golden path and enjoy the game's rich world and systems, according to Lybee Park, CEO of developer Pearl Abyss' Europe branch.
Park spoke to The Game Business about Crimson Desert's reception, focusing on the launch period back when it was a different, meaningfully worse game that has since received approximately eight bazillion updates.
Interviewer Christopher Dring says "the critical reception was a little bit more mixed, right? It wasn't terrible, but it was a little bit lower." Crimson Desert's critical reception was, indeed, not terrible: it sits at 77 on Metacritic against an 8.7 user score. On Steam, Crimson Desert Enhanced, an improved version of the game that's replaced the old one less than a year after launch, has 83% positive lifetime user reviews and, as it happens, 77% positive recent reviews. (Our Crimson Desert Review awarded the game 4 out of 5 stars.)
It's not unusual for critical and user reviews to differ, and this is far from the biggest gap I've seen for a game. If you look at some of the best-rated releases of 2026, a lot of them have slightly lower user scores than critic scores, with exceptions like Resident Evil Requiem, which just has even more glowing user scores. Fewer still show score gaps larger than one point – one being Mixtape, a game which was trendy to hate online but still found a very receptive audience of confirmed buyers on stores like Steam, where reviews put it at 87% positive to Metacritic's 5.9 user score, or on the PlayStation Store, where it has 4.6 out of 5 stars.
When a critic may play dozens of times more games per year than the average gamer (who, surveys have found, only buys two or three new games annually), it's easy for tastes and expectations to shift and vary. Park speculates on where Crimson Desert's review gap may have come from.
"I can have my personal opinion, right?" she begins. "I do believe both parties have fair points, especially for critics. They had to play the build that is not the exact same version of the launched game. And, also, they had limited time, and usually the classical approach when they review the game is following the main quest line."
The main quest is not where Crimson Desert is at its strongest, Park implies. The other folks at Pearl Abyss clearly agree: the central story was deemed so erratic that it was actually directly patched with the release of the Enhanced version. We regularly see post-launch updates targeting game balance, resource economies, quality-of-life issues, UI navigation, performance, bugs, and many other elements, but games rarely rewrite their stories in this way.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/open-world/crimson-desert-reviewed-worse-with-critics-than-players-because-critics-didnt-have-enough-time-to-play-the-game-suggests-ceo-at-the-company-that-gave-critics-less-time
