Name: Crimson Desert (console) - Before You Buy
Uploaded: 2026-03-22T21:41:09.000Z
Duration: 11 min 47 s
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Hey, and we're back with another episode of before youe Buy.

That show where we give you some straight up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games releasing.

It's me, Jake Baldino, and today we're talking about Crimson Desert.

Again, you hopefully caught our before youe Buy video that we already did on Crimson Desert from the other day.

That's like our full thoughts on the content of the game.

Answering the question, is the game actually good and fun?

Long story short, Crimson Desert is a really fun time.

It is definitely not perfect, it's got some flaws, it is not for everybody, but it's cool.

The thing with that video though is that we played for review on PC and we weren't able to get our hands on console versions of the game until launch.

The experience might vary, so we figured we'd check it out here in this video.

We all learned our lesson from Cyberpunk 2077.

A game looks absolutely incredible and ambitious and it kind of is on PC and then not on consoles.

So in this video I got some crispy gameplay running for you to look at on base PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox Series S, and

Xbox Series X for you, along with some thoughts.

Because look, on PC, the game does look incredible.

I've had some bugs and glitches and some pop in, but

other than that, in terms of detail, draw distances, amount of things on screen, particle effects, Crimson Desert on PC feels like a generational leap.

Graphically that's all well and good to experience, but

a lot of people play on consoles, so let's dig into it.

The platform footage on screen will be labeled, but

just keep in mind we are not tech experts or frame counters like a digital foundry or something like that.

All of us tried out different console versions and the visual quality might be a little different due to brightness settings and stuff.

Ripping the band aid off from the start with the lowest Xbox Series S.

The Series S has two modes, Quality mode and Performance mode.

Now quality runs at 1070p 30fps while performance runs at 720p 40fps.

So on quality mode the Series S is stable enough.

If you are playing on a lower end console like this and you're used to some 30fps games, you're getting a solid 30fps here.

It seemed we haven't encountered a section that that really drops frames too frequently.

However, the visual presentation does suffer.

Specifically at night or in caves, shadows look pretty ugly.

The blocks of pixels covering the scenery like they tend to flicker.

But again, quality mode, it seems like it's fine enough for the hardware.

You just have to be aware of the series s limitations and chances are if you are on this console you already understand that.

But performance mode, you might be asking is it worth to change the resolution, sacrifice the resolution for an extra 10 frames here?

You can really tell that this isn't really running at 720p but a lower resolution with a really aggressive level of fsr.

I guess maybe something like super performance or performance.

You could tell it struggles with the reconstruction of the image here.

Like unfortunately the result is it just gives you really really blurry visuals.

At night or in caves it's worse here it was hard to tell what you're doing.

Sometimes you can't even see your enemies or your character.

It's not a good experience, even if the performance technically doesn't feel that bad.

But no, the extra 10fps here for this mode doesn't seem like it's worth it.

Just stick with quality mode and you'll be fine enough.

Now the Meat and potatoes base PS5 regular old PS5.

This is a big one because a lot of people own this console.

The game feels very much like they took the PC game and just cranked down the settings.

For consoles that can be incredibly good looking sometimes, but

in general it just looks a little compromised on PS5.

You know, this just doesn't look like it was the system the game was designed for because parts of it look very rough while other parts look fantastic.

Dark areas stand out as kind of being rough in balanced and performance mode because of the lower ray tracing settings.

There's a ton of ghosting and haloing and visual noise.

Balanced and performance has noticeably ugly trees that just kind of look very jaggy against the sky and they just look patchy and low quality with stuff like vines and other textures.

A lot of jagginess is around character models, but it holds up better than it could have.

This isn't some like Cyberpunk base model PS4 level disaster or anything like that, but

it does look like they took a normally gorgeous game and just dialed everything down to a generally very impressive one.

The graphics stuff is understandable other than the bugs because the game is a huge open world game with these massive view distances and tons of NPCs populating.

it is a shame that we do see some FPS drops in performance mode.

It is not a rock solid 60fps performance mode.

The rough frame rates during the big battle segments are pretty egregious.

Fights with a lot of enemies is what a lot of this game does.

And that stuff is kind of choppy and not as pleasant.

Look, it's not unplayable, but it's certainly not ideal.

Now, the biggest problem is that there doesn't seem to be like a definitive mode.

Balanced and quality feel a little sluggish.

And this is already a game with controller response issues that these modes just kind of exacerbate.

even with V Sync enabled, which is an option on consoles, crazy enough, it's not quite that 60fps consistent when there's a lot going on.

The FPS is higher here, like much better in general, but

the big drops make this mode feel kind of rough at times.

Performance is also where we saw the most graphics bugs like the windmill disappearing and reappearing.

This is a problem they'll hopefully address soon with a patch.

But overall, in our experience, the PS5 version of Crimson Desert is not a disaster.

The game can look a little rough around the edges.

On quality mode, it looks a whole lot better, but

the lower FPS and less responsive controls aren't really ideal.

I know other people can play games at 30fps, no problems.

The sharper visuals cause less eye strain and the more consistent but lower FPS was.

I guess maybe if Pearl Abyss patches the game cleans up performance mode, that'll be the way to go.

But the FPS drops in combat are a little bothersome.

Now, for all of our complaints, this is overall a pretty impressive port of the game.

It's just hard to compare this to the PC version and not find issues.

If it was able to at least hit a consistent FPS on performance mode, then we'd be a lot more positive about this version of the game overall.

But the frame rate at times can just be all over the place and it ends up being a little distracting.

Now, over on Xbox Series X you also have the choice of performance balance and quality.