When Pearl Abyss released Crimson Desert on 19 March, the South Korean studio had every reason to celebrate. According to IGN, the ambitious open-world action RPG sold an impressive 2 million copies in its first 24 hours and peaked at 239,000 concurrent players on Steam. Yet within hours, something crucial became apparent: players hated how the game felt to control.
Less than 36 hours after launch, Pearl Abyss released a statement acknowledging the firestorm. In particular, we are aware of the discomfort many players have experienced with the controls, and we are currently preparing a patch to address this,
the developer said. The studio also apologised to keyboard and mouse players, noting they had not received a satisfactory gameplay experience.
Yet Pearl Abyss did not detail what the patch would contain. As of the day-one update, according to NotebookCheck, the company had not addressed specific fixes for control mapping or responsiveness, instead fixing quests, animations, and UI text. Players desperate for rebinding support and clearer input options were left guessing when relief might arrive.
The control scheme is genuinely strange. According to Kotaku, striking certain attacks requires hitting both a shoulder button and trigger simultaneously, a combination that feels unnatural even to veteran action game players. On PC, sprint is bound to Shift and requires mashing rather than holding. Pressing Shift repeatedly in a multi-hundred-hour RPG, as PC Gamer notes, will likely trigger Windows Sticky Keys and destroy your pinky.
Even basic interactions are baffling. Talking to an NPC in Crimson Desert requires pressing multiple buttons in sequence, a stark contrast to most modern games where a single key like E or F does the job. Picking up items involves lengthy button holds while a meter fills. According to NotebookCheck, sprint toggles by tapping run twice rather than holding it once, and many interactions demand extended presses before anything happens.
The result has been a credibility crisis that overshadows Pearl Abyss's technical achievement. Crimson Desert sits at 78 on Metacritic, a respectable score, but Steam tells a different story. According to SteamDB data reported by NotebookCheck, the game has gathered over 8,000 negative reviews representing more than 41 per cent of all user ratings. The game landed on Steam with a Mixed rating, with English-language reviews at 66 per cent positive but dropping to 58 per cent when factoring in other languages.
Korean players have been particularly unsparing. According to The Gamer, only 33 per cent of reviews in Korean are positive, a reflection of broader frustration with Pearl Abyss over its history with Black Desert Online, another game criticised for poor monetisation and opaque communication. One top-rated Korean review expressed exasperation with the control scheme in terms too colourful to repeat in full.
The company's response to the criticism has ranged from contrite to tone-deaf. While acknowledging player feedback, Pearl Abyss's marketing director Will Powers seemed to dismiss the concerns by comparing the controls to learning to ride a bike. Think of it like riding a bike, it comes naturally after you learn it. Just takes a minute,
he posted on X. Players noted this fundamentally misunderstands how that metaphor works; most people associate riding a bike with immediate recall, not an extended learning curve involving repeated failure and frustration.
For Pearl Abyss, the stakes are real. The company spent approximately seven years developing Crimson Desert at a cost of roughly 200 billion won, equivalent to around $133 million USD. Yet within days of launch, the company's stock price plummeted nearly 30 per cent, as reported by IGN. Additional losses followed as investor confidence collapsed.
Whether the promised patch arrives quickly enough to salvage Crimson Desert remains uncertain. The game clearly has technical merit and ambition; reviewers have praised its visuals and world design. But ambitious design means nothing if players cannot navigate the menus or execute the actions the game demands.
For now, Pearl Abyss is watching the reviews pile up and hoping to act before the mixed reception becomes actively negative. The developer's ability to rebuild trust depends on delivering controls that feel intuitive rather than requiring players to unlearn decades of muscle memory from every other game they have played.