Crimson Desert continues to morph into newer and more unknowable forms with each patch developers Pearl Abyss put out. For example, the latest one turns it into a game in which you can ride one of many special animals to a claw machine that stocks some nice decor and accessories, then get a handy partial refund when upgrading your gear. Also, passengers will no longer enable your road rage by getting out and trying to duff up whichever unlucky person you’ve crashed your wagon into.
So declareth the notes for patch 1.06.00, deployed this morning. As ever with Red Pudding updates, there’s a smattering of new additions, with 12 new special mounts being one of them. Bears, boars, wolves, deer, mountain goats, kuku birds, iguanas, raptors, camels, lions, and tigers can all be tamed via approriate methods, saddled up in specific cities across Pywel, and rode off into the sunset. It’s the latest instance of Pearl Abyss leaning into the animal buddy collecting element of their action adventure, which has proven popular. The fact cats could get charmingly glued to your shoulder up until recently has probably helped in that regard.
Owning ten million pets isn’t enough, though. Crimson Desert must also be a Yakuza game that allows you to pop down to an arcade for a go at a claw machine. So, there’s now a claw machine at the Laughing Marionette. It stocks 12 types of light, a chair, a special hat, some abyss artifacts, and some abyss gears. No cuddly toys then, rather the sort of mix you might get at a certain Swedish department store if they were to go all in on having people fight the frustration of picking up items with a metal hand.
Alongside those, there’s a new “Extraction” feature which looks to give you the option of getting back some upgrade materials if you opt to roll gear you’ve previously refined back down to a previous level. The result, depending on how much you get back, should be that going down an upgrade path that proves ineffective or doesn’t suit your style is less costly. You could also just sic your pet dogs on enemies, provided you’ve got a new item dubbed the “Sigil of Valor”.
As for tweaks, unarmed fighting’s undergone some animation changes as Pearl Abyss also add new unarmed moves in for the game’s non-Kliff protagonists. There’s now a Night Tone graphical mode which makes “overall colors become softer, and darker” while “shaded areas appear slightly brighter” in the hopes of being easier on the eye.
In terms of bug fixes, the one which has stood out to me most is this: “Fixed an issue where, if the wagon the player was driving collided with an NPC, a passenger on the wagon would attack that NPC”. Oh, and “fixed an issue where NPCs would sit on the same chair as the player”. That’s right, no more cheekily perching yourself on someone’s lap during breaks between the 900 types of pastime Red Pudding offers at this point.