Crimson Desert got a huge update this week, and among the many changes it brought, it added new difficulty settings. Now, Pearl Abyss’ single-player open world action adventure has easy, normal, and hard difficulties for players to work through.
Hard difficulty makes it so food item effects won’t be applied immediately, and will only take effect after the consumption animation is complete. This makes it impossible to recover health by spamming food, as so many players had been doing, especially in boss fights. In hard difficulty you also take more damage, and the maximum health, aggressiveness, and overall speed of opponents is increased. You also get a reduced timing window for parry and dodge, reduced invincibility duration for roll, and increased frequency of bosses attempting to counterattack or escape when hit.
Easy difficulty, on the other hand, reduces the damage taken by the player, reduces the maximum health, aggressiveness, and overall speed of opponents, and extends the timing windows for parry and dodge. Normal is the difficulty we’ve all been playing so far.
After the patch went live, players began to express their delight at being able to drop Crimson Desert down to easy mode. “Honestly, easy mode is great!” said one player. “As someone who doesn’t have hours to play and so wants to breeze through seamlessly I just beat a boss without having to have any food. Some might not like the ‘less of a challenge’ but I think it’s great for us that wanna get through the bosses and just explore more.”
Another player, primemn, said that with easy mode, Crimson Desert “finally feels good for lesser abled folks like me.” primemn explained that he suffers from carpal tunnel, trigger finger, an elbow injury and a shoulder injury “that all impact gaming for me,” and had struggled with the game up to this point. But now, “the easy mode is perfect for someone like myself.”
“The parry timing is much more forgiving, which is huge for me as my reflexes aren’t what they were,” primemn continued. “While still challenging, the reduced damage greatly helped for someone like me to have an easier time to heal with food, which has to be a quick reaction while dodging, attacking. That’s not always easy for someone whose hands don’t work as great as they’d like.
“One of the many reasons I’d struggle to keep going in the game was the feeling that as I progressed, I was never going to have the reflexes or skill to keep fighting escalating levels of bosses and enemies. I don’t feel that way anymore. For the first time, I feel like I am able be relaxed about being able to move forward, because the game can now be so much more forgiving. This is a fantastic feeling, and I’m so grateful for this change, and to see the game become more accessible, while also introducing higher levels of challenge for those who enjoy that type of play.”
Unfortunately, there are some within the Crimson Desert community who take issue with those who are enjoying easy mode, and it became enough of a problem for the wider community to step in. “It’s 2026 and we’re still doing the superiority complex bulls**t about what other players want to do with their single-player games?” asked one player. “Really? People playing on easy has no bearing on your gameplay. They even added hard mode for y’all, go play that and let people play on easy if they want to. So many of y’all treating single-player games like a pissing contest. Why do you care what difficulty someone else plays on when it has zero effect on you? Trying to gatekeep people like “no! You must play your game how I want you to play.” Asinine nonsense by childish people. Y’all must have sad lives if you need to gatekeep game difficulty to lord it over people to feed your ego and false sense of superiority.
“It’s utterly pathetic. Some of y’all treat games like they’re your entire existence or something. Grow up. Get some help. Touch some grass. Worry about your damn self.
“This is not a fromsoft game/soulslike.”
“I saw what seemed to be an older women talk about how she really enjoyed just exploring and farming in the game and was avoiding fighting and people were ragging on her hard,” another player said. “I love myself a challenging experience but she paid the same $70 we all did and can enjoy the game however she wants and luckily for her the devs are giving her the mode she needs to enjoy the game how she wants and that should be celebrated.”
“The only people who talk s**t about playing easy mode are people who have nothing else to do than play video games,” another fan added. “If you have limited time to game and you just want to relax and have fun, easy mode is so much better and lets you play the game and keep up with it. Personally I’m playing hard, but I have a lot of free time at the moment and I’m practically done everything in the game. Everyone deserves to play in a way that’s fun.”
This isn’t the first time a video game community has rallied against gatekeeping, of course. The communities for FromSoftware’s infamously hard action games often deal with gatekeeping around how the likes of Dark Souls and Elden Ring are “meant to be played.” Even Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has its own community rally against gatekeepers over a virtual helmet.
We’ve got plenty more on Crimson Desert, including praise from the director of The Witcher 3, a hidden food consequence system that a modder has restored, and an impressive character creator mod. We recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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