The Next Crimson Desert Patch Is a Big One — Here's What to Expect

The Crimson Desert patches continue, this time with a major update due out in the next few days.

Without providing detailed patch notes, developer Pearl Abyss said Crimson Desert’s next patch will add new special mounts and an extraction feature that will allow you to recover materials used in equipment refinement. Oh, and expect plenty more, too.

The addition of new special mounts is straightforward, but what’s this new extraction feature about? It sounds like a huge time saver, as it will let players get the materials they’ve used to refine their equipment back from the equipment itself. A lot of players who’ve reached the Crimson Desert endgame fuss over refining items to improve their stats, and at later levels, many of the materials required are hard to get. Based on the wording here, that grind towards maxing your gear will soon get a little less grindy.

Refining items in Crimson Desert is important because your character’s stats only really increase from your equipped gear. So, upgrading your equipment through the refinement system is a must as you take on tougher challenges, particularly the harder bosses.

But the wording here from Pearl Abyss is vague. Will players get their precious Abyss Cores back, for example, or just basic materials such as ores? Abyss Cores are essential for equipment customization, as opposed to refinement, and are socketed to equipment, but do they count as materials in this case? We’ll know more when the update and its patch notes are released.

The pace of these updates, which have arrived pretty much weekly since the game’s launch, is remarkable. Pearl Abyss had only just basically rewrote the entire endgame, adding the boss Rematch and Re-blockade features. In a recent interview, Pearl Abyss PR and marketing director Will Powers pointed to MMO Black Desert, which it has updated on a weekly basis for over a year, as informing its post-launch support for Crimson Desert. Crimson Desert began life as an MMO follow-up to Black Desert before it was re-jigged to become a single-player game, and you can see some of the MMO-ness in Crimson Desert’s design as well as its post-launch support.