Crimson Desert Marketing Director Responds to Control Complaints: “Think of It Like Riding a Bike”

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The game Crimson Desert has launched to strong sales, with Pearl Abyss reporting two million copies sold in under a day. While reviews have been generally positive, they haven’t been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

A major criticism of the game is its complicated control scheme. It involves numerous button combinations – using shoulder buttons, triggers, face buttons, and even pressing the thumbsticks. The user interface adds to the frustration; even something basic like reading a note requires a specific, cumbersome process of pulling it up and holding a button.

It can seem overwhelming at first, but PR and marketing director Will Powers compares learning the system to riding a bike – it feels natural once you get the hang of it. He acknowledged it takes some time to learn, but that it becomes intuitive with practice.

Honestly, one of the biggest frustrations right now is that you can’t remap the controls, and the developers, Pearl Abyss, haven’t said if they’ll add that option anytime soon, though they haven’t ruled it out completely. The good news is they are actively working on improvements, and we saw a ton of fixes in the day-one patch! They’ve squashed bugs in some of the content that wasn’t working right, and they’ve also made some nice quality-of-life changes – like improvements to Housing mode, making those quick-time events a bit more manageable when you’re grappling, and letting you skip cutscenes much faster if you’ve already seen them.

We’ll share more information and updates about future improvements soon. Crimson Desert is now available on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC. You can read our review of the PC version here.

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2026-03-21 00:41