Crimson Desert's release date trailer bravely makes it through 1 minute of serious fantasy exposition before showing you its cool clockwork dragon and mech, and I love it for that

A golem's eye in Pearl Abyss' upcoming Crimson Desert.

(Image credit: Pearl Abyss)

Crimson Desert finally has a proper release date, as announced during PlayStation's State of Play—and I could not be more excited to finally get my mitts on Kliff's bag of action-hero tricks come March of next year, lemme tell you.

Crimson Desert - Release Date Reveal Trailer | PS5 Games - YouTube

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I've played Crimson Desert twice now—once at GamesCom, and another in April of last year—and both times I've come away unsatisfied. Not because I didn't like what I saw, but because I really wanted to properly cut my teeth on Kliff's moveset, which is about as expansive as any fighting game character's armory.

Crimson Desert is the first singleplayer effort by Pearl Abyss, creators of Black Desert online, and while it has a Game-of-Thronesy aesthetic to it, that's just a thin veneer for the borderline Wuxia martial arts brawling going on under the surface.

We see a little of that in the trailer. Somber, gruffly voiced monologuing barely holds together for a few minutes of sword-clanging before it throws a clockwork dragon getting chased by a real dragon and a goddamn mech-suit at you.

From what I've played, that energy carries onto the boss fights—Kliff spends most of his time getting flung around, suplexed, swamped by hordes of undead enemies and ravens, or just being hurled into pillars. But he can give as good as he gets, which is where my real excitement lies.

I'm delighted to see that almost manic, irreverent energy is preserved in this trailer. Crimson Desert continues to look like a game constructed out of everything a 13-year-old Harvey thought was cool as hell, and I mean that as a complete and unalloyed compliment.

It's Devil May Cry in a thinly hewn George RR Martin skinsuit, with some Breath of the Wild bow-play chucked in there for funsies, and I frankly cannot wait to see how that plays out for more than a couple hours at a time. Crimson Desert releases March 19, 2026.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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