Huggghh-puuuhhhhh. Hughhhhh-puhhhh. If you’ve decided to try pedalling away in attempt to master Crimson Desert‘s bike-like controls, Pearl Abyss’ latest patch – which also brings the likes of camp storage quicker tree felling – is good news. The developers have also acknowledged the fact they forgot to mention prior to release that the game wouldn’t run on Intel Arc GPUs, with support for those cards now in the works.
“This is not the end to our control improvements; we will continue to improve both controller and keyboard/mouse controls moving forward,” the studio wrote in the notes for patch 1.00.03, which went live in the early hours of March 23rd. Among the control tweaks they’ve made thus far are improving the responsiveness of jumps, interactions and character movement, while also making it easier to aim or stow your weapon. Some handy keyboard shortcuts (the usual press I to open your inventory stuff) have also been added to make pulling up menus more rapid.
Outside of that, storage boxes have been added to Kliff’s temp lodgings in Hernand and the Howling Hill camp, so you don’t have to lug around a tonne of auto-looted junk. The archery amd arm wrestling minigames have had their difficulty toned down, meaning less time spent gurning at a guardsman early doors. Destroying the likes of infirmaries and storage areas in enemy strongholds now actually makes a difference to how the fight’s going, with the former stopping wounded foes from returning to the fray. Plus, a bunch of unspecified bosses and general baddies have had their attacks and health bars trimmed back.
“Reduced the time required to acquire knowledge,” is another patch note here, one that feels like it should be translated into Latin and become the motto of a university. Finally, in the notes about missions, Pearl Abyss say they’ve given a telling off to a cat who sometimes stops leading you to a place. Why you’d trust a creature as notoriously capricious as a fuzzy feline to follow like a sat-nav during an important quest beats me, but Kliff’s clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Now, onto those Intel Arc graphics cards. Apologising for any confusion caused by their pretty dodgy call to only let folks know this hardware couldn’t run the game via an FAQ update on release, Pearl Abyss wrote in a tweet that they’re “currently working on compatibility and optimisation support” for these Intel GPUs. An update delivering it is set to arrive at some point down the line.
So, that’s further improvements to controls, Intel Arc support, and the swapping out of AI-generated paintings all on the studio’s to-do list as of right now. If nothing else, you can’t say the Black Desert Online devs are afraid of picking up tonnes of little quests to grind away at in fittingly MMO-ish fashion.
