I have killed an entire map. I’m not sure I’ve ever said that before in a video game, but not many video games have permadeath for most of their enemies. Enter Crimson Desert.

Outside of extremely small pockets of respawning bandits or bounty hunters, the map is vacant. I haven’t even seen a wolf in 30 hours. And yet I cannot help myself from logging in almost every day to just…exist in the world, and accomplish the most minor of things left to do. Or simply do nothing at all.

I have a “project” in Crimson Desert right now, and that’s souping up Damiane, a character that you should invest roughly zero skill points into as you play the game, given that you’ll need to sink everything into Kliff and his gear, given that he’s locked into the main story and a number of sidequests. But I’m slowly, very slowly, getting skill points for her tree and gear. What am I even doing these days?

  • Hunting a few of the rare animals, even though most of them are just giving me little house trophies now.
  • Clearing every question mark on the map, even though all of them are just random shops
  • Doing remaining vendor contracts, which can be as simple as buying something and delivering to someone across the street
  • Fighting random pockets of surviving, respawning enemies with 20% bonus XP on Damiane to level up slowly through combat
  • Pickpocketing Scholars to occasionally get a skill point
  • Picking what appears to be a blank spot on the map and going to see if there’s anything there (I’ve gotten a lot of Abyss skill point pillars doing that)
  • Doing some of the lingering Abyss box challenges for points. I recently did the “ride from one corner of the map to the other in under 40 minutes” one. Some of these are absurd.

My favorite, totally “doing nothing” activity is simply riding around on random roads I’m not sure I’ve explored (I think “bell clearing” the map was actually a bad thing, because you can’t see where you haven’t been). This allows me to find random Abyss challenges I haven’t picked up or occasionally run into little yellow dot mini-missions I’ve missed that count toward regional totals. But yes, I am literally running around on my horse randomly.

I am nearing 300 hours in Crimson Desert and I probably haven’t done anything all that important for 50 hours or so. But I cannot stop playing unless I have to. Recently, that’s been taking a break for Pragmata and now Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred. But as soon as they insert promised updates like respawning enemy forts and bosses, I’m there. And I still have Oongka to upgrade after Damiane. I haven’t been this hooked on a single-player game since Cyberpunk 2077, and that’s saying something. It really scratches an itch in a way I haven’t felt for a long time.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .