Crimson Desert is another game that I played when it first came out. They’ve released a lot since then, so I plan on playing it again in a couple of months, starting over from the beginning and going through everything again.
At this point, going back would mean more than just picking up the same game with a few bugs fixed. There are new ways to fight, more things to do with the camp, more animals and mounts, changes to the other playable characters, and an entire expansion coming up.
This covers the released updates through October 23, 2026. I'm grouping the smaller fixes together rather than copying hundreds of patch-note bullets, but I want to get into what actually changed and when. Some early patches may have overlapped with my original playthrough. I don't have an exact patch number for the day I finished.
March: the launch version and the first changes
Crimson Desert released March 19. The launch-period 1.00.02 update already adjusted boss encounters, added an Abyss Gear tutorial, changed the skill-learning presentation, and added follow-up attacks for the playable characters. It also stopped making you repeat the puzzle section of the Tenebrum encounter after dying during the fight. Bears lost their instant-kill damage, and several quest and character problems were addressed.
The first major post-launch changes came with 1.00.03 in the March 23–25 rollout. Private storage was added at the temporary Hernand lodgings and Howling Hill. More fast-travel points were added, learning through observation was simplified, and Force Palm became available earlier.
Logging took fewer hits, several minigames became less demanding, food restored more health, and blocking used less stamina. The patch also changed some early enemy and main-boss balancing. There were clearer puzzle clues and improvements to the keyboard, mouse, and gamepad controls.
Those are the sorts of changes you notice constantly throughout a game this size. Storage, movement, healing, gathering, and being able to understand what a puzzle wants all affect the hours between the big fights.
March 28: update 1.01.00
This added five summonable mounts: White Bear, Silver Fang, Snowwhite Deer, Rock Tusk Warthog, and Icicle Edge Alpine Ibex. Previously meeting the requirements for the legendary animals could qualify you for the corresponding rewards retroactively.
They added Refinement Tokens for upgrading equipment to stage four without spending the usual materials, a faster cooking and crafting option, bulk movement of selected items into storage, and wholesale grocers at farms.
Movement and flight were adjusted again. Flight used less stamina, turning was more responsive, and fast travel and revival loading were shortened. There were also map and notification improvements, clearer skill information, and more Photo Mode controls.
On the technical side, this was another round of rendering and stability work, including changes to upscaling and a fixed 4K output option on PS5. That setting shouldn't be confused with a promise that the game internally renders everything at native 4K.
April 4: update 1.02.00
Storage grew considerably. Private storage could now expand with the Greymane camp, starting at 240 slots and eventually reaching 1,000 across the camp upgrades.
They added headgear visibility options and a choice between Basic and Classic movement controls. So if you preferred holding the sprint input or preferred the older repeated-input approach, you had a setting for that rather than being stuck with one version.
There were more fast-travel improvements, better jump responsiveness, fixes for certain boss and weapon interactions, and repairs for quest progression problems. Cats also got an additional armor set and helmet.
I like including the little things in a rundown like this, because otherwise a game can receive months of additions and the conversation gets reduced to whether the frame rate changed.
April 11: update 1.03.00
Fast travel became usable while mounted, falling, swimming, or climbing. That's a substantial convenience change when you're moving around a world with this much verticality.
Kliff received Focused Aerial Roll. Damiane and Oongka received more of the abilities needed for exploration, including Axiom Force and Nature's Snare, while their existing skills gained functionality corresponding to Kliff's Force Palm.
The Pailune camp became easier to use, its farm and ranch areas expanded, and additional puzzle guidance was added. Standard dialogue could be fast-forwarded, with a speed setting. Minimum font size and weapon-display options arrived as well.
The changes to Damiane and Oongka are worth following through the later updates, because they kept getting more access to things that had previously been tied to Kliff.
April 23: update 1.04.00
This was a big one for difficulty and storage.
Easy, Normal, and Hard settings were added. Normal preserved the existing difficulty. Easy reduced several combat pressures and widened defensive timing windows. Hard increased the challenge, tightened those windows, changed food use so the animation had to finish, and added patterns for some bosses.
The new storage options included a 1,000-slot gatherables chest, food storage through the Kuku Cooler and its larger upgraded version, a 1,000-slot collectibles chest, and wardrobe storage that could grow to 1,000 slots. Materials and ingredients in the appropriate storage could be used for crafting or cooking without carrying them around.
There were also different house layouts to unlock, inventory categories, input presets, new skills and pets, and distant scenery improvements.
For a fresh playthrough, being able to choose the challenge level and organize the things you collect would change a lot of the routine from the outset.
May 2: update 1.05.00
Boss rematches and re-blockades arrived here.
The rematch system initially covered 69 bosses. You could revisit an encounter through its memory fragment and fight with Kliff, Damiane, or Oongka. Reminisce retained the original boss stats, while Resonate could scale a boss upward to your progress. Used consumables were restored afterward, and the rematches didn't provide separate loot.
Re-blockades let enemy forces return to eligible liberated strongholds. You could turn that off, have it happen intermittently, or have it happen frequently. The initial version involved 13 factions and 23 forts and quarries, with later patches expanding and adjusting the system.
The update also added legendary pets, including the Iron Eagle and Hyacinth Macaw, and the Mountain God Boar creature. Legendary mount summoning and comrade trust problems were fixed.
Having the option to revisit combat after clearing an area matters when you've already beaten the story. Otherwise, eventually you're walking around with all these abilities and fewer places left to use them.
May 11: update 1.06.00
A much wider selection of animals became registerable special mounts. That included animals such as bears, wolves, deer, boars, lions, tigers, camels, raptors, and Kuku Birds, with taming requirements depending on the animal.
Equipment extraction was added at smithies. You could lower an item's refinement and recover some of the resources invested in it without destroying the equipment. Special materials were fully returned, while ordinary materials had a partial return.
Oongka received new unarmed skills. Sword sheaths and a sheath-display setting were added. Pet dogs could participate in combat with the Sigil of Valor, and a claw machine offered additional rewards. Night Tone Mode was another new option.
There is a lot here that gives you a reason to experiment with equipment or explore the animal systems rather than just keep following the next story marker.
May 15: update 1.07.00
More bosses became available for rematches, including Muskan, Corrupted Caliburn, Goyen, Draven, and Clockwork White Horn.
Damiane received unarmed combat skills, and both Damiane and Oongka received Aerial Stab. Kliff gained an unarmed Blinding Flash Finisher. There were additional wolf and bear mount types and more mountable animals in the world.
They also worked on attack chaining, unarmed combat, quest blockers, equipment problems, and mount behavior. An AMD-driver-related GPU crash was addressed.
May 22: update 1.08.00
The camp pond arrived, letting you keep fish and, for suitable species, increase their numbers over time. Legendary fish received special handling so they could remain in the pond rather than being treated like ordinary disposable inventory items.
Baby Wyverns and another 20 small animal species became available as pets. Wild wyverns could be subdued and ridden temporarily. Raising your own into a permanent mount came in the following updates.
Kliff gained access to muskets and shotguns. Tools got their own equipment slot instead of competing with a secondary weapon. Damiane and Oongka received an equivalent to Focused Aerial Roll.
There were additional crafting and refinement conveniences, more keyboard customization, improved fish traps, and expanded re-blockade coverage at bandit camps and ruins. Blackstar also received control and camera improvements.
May 29: update 1.09.00
Controller remapping was added, along with approximately 30 more small-animal pet species. Damiane and Oongka gained further skills, and seed planting became easier through quickslots.
There were fixes to pond management, gathering tools, dispatch information, and combat behavior. The dispatch screen also became more helpful about which comrades had the skills a mission needed.
That continued the pattern of adding features and then making the surrounding menus and interactions less awkward to use.
June 5: update 1.10.00
Baby Wyverns and Kuku Bird Chicks could now be raised into special mounts. There was new equipment for them, including a wyvern saddle.
Re-blockades gained battle and reconstruction stages. Major strongholds could receive protection through regional contribution assessors, and liberation rewards included contribution, provisions, trade goods, and other items.
Pinball and Orb Roll were added as minigames with reward exchanges. Blackstar gained a ground attack. Some choices made during a boss attempt, including selected elements and ammunition, would now persist when retrying.
This is where the post-launch additions really start piling up if you stopped playing in March. You're looking at flying mounts you can raise, more repeatable fighting, and additional little activities around the world.
June 12: update 1.11.00
Pet registration could expand to 100 through challenges, although the camp summon limit remained 50. Damiane and Oongka could equip the mining drill and chainsaw.
Lost rare equipment could be recovered by buying it from shops after it entered their stock, at an increased price. Pinball was adjusted, pets retained their names as they grew, and more controller shortcuts became assignable.
There were also fixes for mount summoning, feeding, and certain combat and equipment interactions.
June 19: update 1.12.00
Housing expanded outside the house. You could decorate the outdoor area, use new workstations and looms, and make use of 58 new home items covering facilities, lighting, decorations, and pet furniture.
Damiane and Oongka could equip Visiones, read memories, and ride Blackstar. Sliding chain attacks were added across weapon types. There were new equipment pieces, a Greymane accessory, additional knowledge entries, and more ways to acquire certain previously missable knowledge.
Boss retries retained more of your setup, including weapons, selected elements, and quickslot choices. Loading was also optimized, and there was a large batch of fixes involving quests, pets, housing, mounts, and camp systems.
July 3: update 1.13.00
Damiane and Oongka could finally enter the Abyss. Between this and the earlier exploration changes, the other characters had become much more usable across the wider game.
Kliff and Oongka received 39 equipment additions, while Damiane received eight. Equipment compatibility expanded too: Oongka could wear most Kliff outfits, and Damiane gained access to specified boss equipment.
More weapons and outfits became dyeable. Bird pets received the Hunter's Sigil for retrieving appropriate prey and gatherables. There were additional crafting recipes, attacks for certain enemies, and options for hiding more of the HUD.
July 16: update 1.14.00
Cross-save was introduced for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and Epic Games Store, so supported platforms could continue from a shared save. Mac support was added later, in September.
The patch also fixed particular quests and interactions, adjusted Damiane's Skystep controls, and addressed several mounted movement and audio problems.
July 24: update 1.15.00
This was more of a repair pass. It addressed crops that stopped growing or couldn't be harvested, problems with equipped gear locks on Damiane and Oongka, cross-save loading crashes, and wyvern summoning in midair.
There were additional fixes for camera behavior, HDR interface rendering, mounts, wagons, and movement skills.
August 1: update 1.16.00
Trading received a major expansion: 133 new trading posts, 24 high-value trade goods, four regular trade goods, and seven wagon workshops.
The system became more practical to use. You could transfer goods between horses and wagons, sell individual goods, check more market information from the map, and follow wagon routes on the minimap. Prices could respond when you sold too much at one location, and more difficult routes could offer better returns.
There were changes to profits, stacking, royal trading posts, and banking, including bonds and a bond shop. Quest and challenge fixes accompanied all of that.
For somebody returning after launch, this is a whole part of the game worth checking again instead of assuming it works the way it did the first time.
August 7: update 1.17.00
This addressed challenge tracking, food quickslots, special headgear effects, movement animation and sound, and inaccurate map information for chests and trade routes.
August 15: update 1.18.00
The knowledge system gained a quest category with eight subcategories, including main quests, faction quests, investigations, research, daily life, guides, archive records, and constellations. Some completed-quest knowledge was awarded retroactively.
Research costs switched from silver to camp funds. Some animal knowledge could be obtained by picking animals up rather than killing them. Horse gear could be equipped at stables, and lock-on camera rotation gained manual, semi-auto, and automatic settings.
The map also distinguished areas revealed by bells from places you had explored directly. Further fixes addressed trade goods, workers, quests, lighting, and frame-generation problems.
August 25: update 2.00.00, Crimson Desert Enhanced
This is probably the update I would pay the most attention to before another full playthrough.
Enhanced was a free update for existing owners. It included the previous updates and added new cutscenes and story moments throughout the main questline, with additional dialogue and background material around bosses.
German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese voice-over support was added, along with Arabic interface text and subtitles.
The skill system gained Abyss Links. Spending Abyss Artifacts to learn skills on one character awarded a corresponding resource to the other playable characters. Skill resets became individual to each character, and existing invested resources were refunded when the new system first applied.
Kliff received eight new skills. After finishing the main quests, a new game could carry over Abyss Links and other in-game currency from an existing save. That wording matters: I wouldn't assume it carries absolutely every item and every bit of progress like some other games' New Game Plus modes.
Flying mounts gained a choice of camera-led or manual controls. The update also adjusted certain encounters and traversal rewards, alongside another batch of fixes.
September: updates 2.01.00 through 2.03.02
September 4's 2.01.00 added a gold-bar investment dispatch mission, increased the camp funds gained from silver donations, improved horse health recovery when retrying relevant quests, and added camera tilt in Photo Mode. It fixed issues involving housing, skills, mounts, quest completion, and the interface.
September 11's 2.02.00 brought cross-save to Mac. It also addressed missing trade-storage items, blocked progression in certain quests, housing availability, and a crash when starting a new game with DLSS Frame Generation enabled.
September 18's 2.03.00 added finer Photo Mode camera movement, improved how larger silver amounts carry into a new game, expanded Water Stride movement, and updated DLSS Ray Reconstruction support. Horse racing, dispatch persistence, quest guidance, and several movement problems were also addressed.
September 21's 2.03.01 fixed remapped lantern aiming, missing Duo opponents in Tommaso, and an NPC-interaction crash.
September 23's 2.03.02 fixed Grimnir failing to appear during The Mysterious Pot, missing map icons, and a power-core detection issue blocking Ether Rest.
That last hotfix is the latest released patch listed as I'm putting this together. And to fill in the smaller updates between those bigger releases:
- 1.00.04, March 23–24: separate PlayStation and Mac Steam fixes for character-switch interactions and crashes.
- 1.01.01, March 30: mount controls, mount death behavior, equipment refinement, horse-following, and Constellation Helm interaction fixes.
- 1.01.02, March 30: Steam-side DLSS and Ray Reconstruction image improvements, including blur and flicker.
- 1.01.03, March 31: bosses getting stuck during fights.
- 1.03.01, April 12: Nature's Snare projectiles and Xbox controls, plus liberation loot failing to reach storage.
- 1.04.01, April 23: missing mount quickslots, housing placement, customization crashes, combat and input problems, and pets eating gathered wood or ore.
- 1.04.02, April 24: incorrect difficulty when starting another save, font-size application, horse-gear dyeing, several interface problems, and PS5 Pro brightness stability.
- 1.05.01, May 3: canceled dispatches and missing resource refunds, plus pet summoning.
- 1.06.01, May 12: blocked progress at Vault of Vengeance.
- 1.10.01, June 6: crashes during fast travel, combat, and wyvern-egg hatching, alongside animal spawning, movement obstruction, and dispatch filter fixes.
- 1.12.01, June 20: disappearing outdoor furniture, climbing onto moving objects, glass lighting, floating terrain, and Skunky disappearing at camp.
- 1.12.02, June 24: AMD RX 5000-series crashes at 1080p, a Photo Mode/HDR crash, and incorrectly restricted ocean fishing areas.
- 1.13.01, July 8: bear-riding crashes, rendering and performance problems, missing challenge rewards, Hoenmark Ruins liberation, and ranch-feed behavior.
- 1.16.01, August 2: camp storage incorrectly displaying as wagon cargo after trading.
- 1.16.02, August 3: stuck loading or black screens, AMD and Mac graphics problems, and unavailable indoor housing features.
- 1.16.03, August 4: shields disappearing after switching to dual weapons and reloading.
- 1.16.04, August 5: equipment quantities becoming incorrect after saving and reloading.
- 1.18.01, August 16: delayed NPC interaction, missing older housing objects, startup crashes, and incorrect map display.
- 1.18.02, August 16: camp comrade counts, silver resetting after A Secret Deal, movement animation, and controls becoming unresponsive after shops.
- 2.00.01 and 2.00.02, August 28: Arabic text, cutscene lip-sync, frame-rate drops, some Mac launch failures, the Karin Quarry crane, and unwanted dismounting when colliding with a traveling merchant.
A lot of those sound small until you encounter one of them yourself. A missing shield, a stalled quest, or a save that won't load can matter much more than a new cosmetic item. That's why I wanted the repair work included alongside the additions.
What I'm waiting for next: Charting the Unknown
The expansion is currently scheduled for October 29, at 6 p.m. Eastern. It was originally due October 15, but Pearl Abyss moved it back two weeks for additional development and polish.
The announced content includes separate new storylines for Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane after the main story, plus an ocean-focused storyline available earlier after Howling Hill.
There's underwater exploration, shipbuilding and sailing, romance that can progress to marriage, a more flexible housing system, three castles you can claim, business management, and Garden of Trials, a sequence of boss battles with rewards.
The ocean portion extends exploration to islands and underwater ruins. The story preview mentions political conflict, a threat in the desert, a journey beyond time, and a secret beneath the sea. Those are announced premises, not things I've played yet.
Some activities have progression requirements. The character stories and Garden of Trials require completing the main questline. Ships, housing, businesses, and castles have their own camp, quest, or liberation requirements. Diving itself doesn't require a special unlock, although breath and equipment affect how long you can stay underwater.
The official listings have it coming to PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and Epic. The Mac App Store isn't included at launch, and there are regional availability restrictions, so anyone buying it should check their own store rather than assume every version has the same availability.
I haven't seen a confirmed date when Pearl Abyss will be finished adding everything it intends to add. So I'm not treating this expansion as proof that the game will be complete forever after October 29.
But this is exactly why I want another playthrough eventually. I played and beat the launch-era game, and there is already a lot here that I haven't experienced in its current form. I want to give them time to put out the things they're going to put out, let the additions settle in, and then come back for another big run through the whole thing.
I can't wait to play it again. I'm just trying to wait long enough that I can really dig into everything when I do.
Crimson Desert is another game that I played when it first came out. They’ve released a lot since then, so I plan on playing it again in a couple of months, starting over from t…
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