Crimson Desert dev says it ‘takes time’ to get used to the game’s notoriously clunky controls, but advises players to ‘think of it like riding a bike, it comes naturally after you learn it’

One of the more common complaints you’re likely to hear about Crimson Desert are to do with its controls, which some folks just don’t care for. Folks like, for instance, PC Gamer’s Rory Norris, who called the game’s control scheme “bafflingly convoluted.” Or Morgan Park, who said the game’s “true boss battle is wrangling its controls.” Or Mollie Taylor, our reviewer, who said you should use a controller instead of a keyboard because it sucks less (real ringing endorsement there), but warned that you’re probably going to end up accidentally punching your horse in the head a whole bunch anyway.

You’ll find much the same on Reddit, although without the editorial constraint, which means you get succinct analysis like “absolute dog shit” and “whoever made these controls needs to be fired.” Yeah, it’s rough out there.

One person who thinks the controls are just fine, though, is Will Powers, PR and marketing director for Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss.

“Think of it like riding a bike, it comes naturally after you learn it,” Powers wrote on X (via GamesRadar) in response to a user who said the game needs simpler controls. “Just takes a minute.”

In a follow-up, he clarified that he agrees about the controls, but was just “saying that it takes time to learn, but it comes naturally after you do.”

You’d expect Powers to defend Crimson Desert’s controls—he works on the game, after all—but he’s not entirely alone out there. Dinga Bakaba, the co-creative director at Arkane, didn’t mention Crimson Desert by name but said he likes learning new control schemes, calling it “a rewarding mental gymnastic.”

“Makes you pay attention to the game differently too,” Bakaba wrote. “I remember discovering Demon’s Souls and having to develop new coordination for it. I hope this doesn’t disappear in the profit of standardization.”

Crimson Desert is undeniably a hit, selling more than two million copies in less than 24 hours and blasting its way into the top five of the most-played games chart on Steam. But it’s also wearing a “mixed” user rating, and its control scheme is certainly one of the reasons why.

Pearl Abyss hasn’t commented on the complaints directly, but it did say today that it “will listen closely to the wide range of feedback shared by the community and work to make improvements quickly.” Hard to imagine that some kind of update to the controls aren’t going to be a part of that.