Revival, also takes aim at crashes and UI problems

Stare for too long into the Abyss, and you'll get frame-rate drops
Pearl Abyss have released the first proper update for their grand and obfuscatory open world RPG Crimson Desert , introducing a slew of tweaks for the game's many, many systems.

The developers have added new finishing blows or follow-up attacks and skills for certain moves, and a new tutorial quest for a particular section in chapter 3, but the most important changes, I think, are the bug fixes and general attempts to make Crimson Desert less "like a product exploding at the waist with far too much stuff and an irritating tendency to avoid communicating anything to the player", as one critic put it .

In particular, you may be relieved to hear that bosses can no longer beat you up while you're reviving.

Crimson Desert launched this week to scattered applause, a Mexican wave of shrugs, and a lot of griping about the controls and overall design being an absolute dog's dinner.

There is a round of social media Discourse underway about whether it is OK to like bad things and whether 7/10 is a good score and whether critics are too critical.

I am not here to expand on that, beyond passive-aggressively summarising it and pretending that I have more class, even though I once wrote a whole article about how Metacritic is magic .

I am here to tell you that you'll no longer have to replay the puzzle section of the the Tenebrum battle in Chapter 4 if you perish during the fight.

I am here to tell you that they've fixed "various" issues with the UI, and that Crimson Desert won't crash so often now, whatever that awful James might tell you .

Here's the full patch notes .

The devs have also posted a list of Known Issues , which I am scoring 8/10 for its combination of eeriness and silliness.

For example, the Nietzschean bathos of the phrase: "in certain situations, the Abyss can be seen from the world below, resulting in slight drops in frame rate." Here's another line which gave Mark the giggles when he flagged the update for our attention: "when receiving damage while holding a tree, the character can become stuck to the tree."
If you're using FSR4 upscaling, you might notice that the rain vanishes in rainy environments, or the screen gets all blurry.

How am I supposed to distinguish the rain vanishing due to a bug, from the rain just, you know, ceasing to rain?

This is going to keep me up all night.

More severely: "an issue has been identified where the game cannot be launched properly on Xbox ROG Ally and Xbox PC." On the upside, Pearl Abyss have resolved "an issue where Steam pre-order purchasers are unable to claim their pre-order bonus and deluxe pack items".

Notwithstanding the mixed reception, Crimson Desert has attracted quite a big playerbase on Steam, with almost 230,000 concurrents at launch yesterday.

I'm not sure how long they'll stick around if they keep getting stuck to trees.