Crimson Desert players are skipping the main quest in favor of exploration
Only 22.1% of Steam players reached Chapter 7, while PS5 tracking sat near 20.09%, as Crimson Desert’s world pulled players off the main road.
Crimson Desert has become one of spring’s biggest action RPG conversation pieces, but its completion numbers tell a sharper story: only 22.1% of Steam players have unlocked the Protector of Pailune achievement tied to Chapter 7, roughly halfway through the main questline, and PSN Profiles shows an even lower figure of about 20.09% on PS5. That is not a shrug from players so much as a verdict on the game’s design. A huge share of the audience is clearly spending its time elsewhere, wandering Pywel, chasing combat, progression, and side distractions instead of pushing Kliff’s story forward.
Pearl Abyss set that expectation from the start. The studio describes Crimson Desert as an open-world action-adventure on the continent of Pywel and says there is “no single path to victory,” a line that reads less like a slogan than a blueprint for how people are actually playing. The official story centers on Kliff, who is trying to reunite the scattered Greymanes after a deadly ambush by the Black Bears, but the broader pitch has always leaned just as hard on freedom, weapons, skills, and player choice as it has on narrative urgency. When the game’s world is built to invite detours, some players are going to take them.
That split is showing up in the way the people around the game talk about it, too. Trevor McEwan, who did performance capture and the model work for Kliff, has said the game lacks narrative depth but makes up for it in other areas. Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young has also acknowledged that the story could have been better. Those comments do not read like a death sentence for Crimson Desert; they read like an admission that the game may be strongest where modern open-world action RPGs are often strongest, in systems, traversal, and sandbox momentum, not in the critical path.
The completion picture gets starker when you look at how big the game actually is. One recent achievement list counted 34 Steam achievements, and a trophy guide pegged platinum at 200 to 300-plus hours. Pearl Abyss unveiled Crimson Desert in late 2020, delayed it, and then set a worldwide launch for March 19, 2026 at 3:00 PM PDT on PC, PS5, Xbox Series, and Mac. After years of anticipation, the game is landing as a vast playground first and a story machine second, and the low quest-completion rate suggests that most players are perfectly happy with that arrangement.
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