You know a game is going to be massive when it dominates the online discourse in the gaming community before it even releases. To say Crimson Desert has been doing that would be an understatement. Despite multiple games releasing of late, Crimson Desert is all anyone can talk about. However of late a lot of that talk has been a mix between hype and worry. The worry is about 1 thing, console performance.

Incase you have been living under a rock, or just not paying attention to Crimson Desert, it is a massive (and I do mean massive) open world game developed by Pearl Abyss. Pearl Abyss has developed one game in their 15+ year existent, Black Desert Online.

While Black Desert Online was a decent game, it wasn’t groundbreaking in anyway. It sits at a 73 on Metacritic on PC, and the console port that came years later sits around the same with a 75 on Xbox One and a 61 on PlayStation 4. So how does a developers go from a decent, but not game changing title to one of the most hyped games of all time? That level of hype is usually reserved for super established studios or IPs.

Well for starters, everything we’ve seen from Crimson Desert has look incredible. Pearl Abyss is pushing the envelope big time for an open world game. The world is massive, theirs seemingly a billion things to do, and oh yeah, you can fly a dragon around the map.

Since being announced all the way back in 2020 the game has been on players radars. In the last 6 month or so it has really seen the hype build as Pearl Abyss has done a fantastic job constantly dripping out information, trailers and adding to the hype. Will Powers, Pearl Abyss’s head of marketing PR has given a masterclass on how to engage with the community and help build the hype. Truly many marketing folks should look at what he’s done in the lead up to Crimson Desert on social media and learn from it.

And while a lot of the hype around Crimson Desert has been positive, there is a growing section of the community that is being cautious, and even saying there are red flags around the game. That giant red flag to these gamers is the lack of console footage.

The Lack Console Footage

Up until a week ago we had barely seen Crimson Desert run on console. It had become such a constant question thrown at Will Powers that even he had to make a statement saying he was sick of hearing about it. Console footage is coming he said, we have nothing to hide.

True to his word a few days later Pearl Abyss released the console specific performance metrics. It helped quell some of the doubters with its impressive benchmarks, however many said these are simply what they are aiming for, can they actually reach these lofty expectations?

Next came the lengthy Digital Foundry report. The company known for dissecting how a game runs from a technical standpoint was given access to the game to test out. To put things into perspective on just how big this game is and how many are asking about Crimson Desert console performance. Most Digital Foundry videos get around 150k views. Resident Evil Requim, by far the biggest game of 2026 so far, was nearly doubling that for their Youtube channel at around 300k. Crimson Desert console videos? Well this one is at nearly 750k in just 3 days.

Now as for the content itself, Digital Foundry was more or less super impressed with how the game ran on consoles. That should surely end the discussion about console performance right? In the first few hours it did, but then the narrative somewhat changed.

You see Digital Foundry only tested the PlayStation 5 Pro version because it was all they were given access to. Not only was that all they were given access to, Pearl Abyss literally sent a PlayStation 5 Pro loaded with Crimson Desert on it rather than just sending them a PlayStation 5 code, which is certainly odd.

Because of this the narrative has now shifted to the doubters saying that the base PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X versions of the game must run poorly because they are hiding that from even Digital Foundry. Pearl Abyss of course says otherwise and the reason they did this was because the console versions are locked until release day.

Adding fuel to this fire is the fact that no media outlets or influencers were given access to the game on anything other than PC. Those in the camp of detractors think that is the most worrying thing about all of this and the Digital Foundry video didn’t help that since it was only PlayStation 5 Pro footage. PlayStation 5 Pro consumers are a very small portion of the console community. Most are either on a base PlayStation 5 or on Xbox.

Why This Is All Complicated To Sort Out

Overall all of this is definitely tough to navigate. The studio constantly says not to worry things work great, but are throwing up multiple red flags. On the one hand I do think some of this is over blown. Games that get this much hype naturally get a bunch of naysayers.

And while yes I would love to see more console footage, and have spoken out on my social media about the lack of it, the one thing I will say is it is fairly common practice. Studios want to show off the best version of their game. It’s not like Xbox is out there showing Fable running on an Xbox Series S. The majority of the time we see a game being shown off it is either on PC or on the most powerful console, in this case the PlayStation 5 Pro.

Most want to point to Cyberpunk 2077 and its rocky release on consoles as reason for caution. And while I do understand that concern to a degree, you have to remember that Cyberpunk 2077 was trying to get things running on current gen as well as last gen which is where most of their problems occurred. Crimson Desert is only launching on current gen.

On the other hand, the fact that not a single person will have played this game on an Xbox Series S/X or base PlayStation 5 console before release is a yellow flag for me. While many in the community don’t trust the media or influencers, they play an integral role on getting the information out there. Consumers deserve to know if a product is good or not on the platform they use, and with Crimson Desert they will be going in blind.

The Wait Is Almost Over

However this plays out, we won’t have to wait too much longer. Crimson Desert embargo’s drop on Wednesday the 18th and we will get an idea of how good the game itself is. A day later the game releases and everyone on console will get a chance to see how it runs.

My hope is the game runs well and scores well and we’re talking about a Game of the Year contender and one of the best games of the generation. But if not there will likely be many questions that need to be answered going forward and talk about how we hype games.

Was PR being deceptive or were they just overly confident? PR’s job is to hype a game after all and if the developers don’t live up to that hype the overly vocal PR rep will be the one to fall in the sword.

If it does live up to the hype and runs smoothly everywhere, will more studios and publishers copy the formula? We already saw Bungie tell media to not put a review out of Marathon until post launch content comes. Will more studios start to limit what version of games are available to review?

However this ends up playing out we will likely be talking about it for awhile. Well, at least until the next overly hyped game releases anyway.