At a certain point, I had run out of stuff to do in Crimson Desert to the point where I was just riding around aimlessly on my horse, looking for tiny bandit pockets to fight or roadside civilians to help. I had reached “kill the map” mode where I’d cleared every major landmark and boss. I should have moved on, but I didn’t want to. And thanks to Crimson Desert’s new patch , now I don’t have to.

Just a couple weeks ago, Pearl Abyss laid out a Crimson Desert roadmap of sorts, one they said would add new updates, changes and fixes to the game through June. Well, it’s May 1 and they’re pretty much done with the thing, including today’s patch which repopulates the entire map with as many enemies and bosses as you want, among other things. Here’s what the deal is:

You can now re-fight 69 different bosses in the game by returning to their location and lighting a lantern.

In addition to the new easy/normal/hard difficulties from last time, you also have the option of fighting the boss as they were during your first encounter, or make them scale to match your current power (if your stats are higher).

Whatever consumables you use during the fight will be refunded and “no separate loot can be obtained.” From what I can tell doing a few fights so far, that means there are no rewards for these fights other than the challenge itself. Hm. But they said this mode would change in time.

One cool thing here is that you can use any character, including Oongka or Damiane, to fight these bosses, even if they were previously locked to Kliff content.

This feature is less separated out than boss rematches, it seems. You can choose a never/sometimes/often frequency of when enemy factions will return to recapture various forts, quarries or other locations.

For now, this is 13 factions in 23 locations, but they say that will expand, and they’re working on a way to make the enemies harder in later updates. Here, you will be able to farm both loot, and more importantly, XP so you can make progress toward more skill points for characters and gear. Alternate characters finally have a prayer of getting skill points thrown their way. I’m currently mowing through this with Damiane attempting to get her to Kliff-level.

Both the blockade and rematch systems are going to be improved and iterated on in time, they say, and I assume they want feedback from this initial run.

  • New legendary animals, Iron Eagle and Hyacinth Macaw, are pets.
  • A new creature, Mountain God Boar, now exists. Unclear how to find him, what he does, if he can be a mount, etc, given that this just released.
  • A new shop sells disguise items.
  • Some shops have new items, for instance, When wearing the Ring of Lightning after defeating the Titan, you can purchase the Lightning Bolt Plate Boots from Bari's shop.
  • And most importantly: “Added Carry, Lower, and Pet interactions for goose and duck pets.”

What a patch. I am off to try more of this boss and reblockade content now, and will report back my findings.

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