Crimson Desert and DLSS 5 sent the race for next-gen graphics off a cliff

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Isn’t it nice when a new blockbuster launches and it makes everyone happy? The general audience, the critics, the nitpickiest of hardcore fans, the aesthetes and the hobbyists — everybody is roundly satisfied, and united in their appreciation of a new four-quadrant entertainment, a new pillar of the monoculture.

I’m speaking, of course, of Project Hail Mary, which hit theaters this weekend. A sweet, funny, hopeful, exciting, and science-forward new space movie starring Ryan Gosling, the great Sandra Hüller, and a cute alien? Who could resist?

The gaming world should be so lucky. Buckle up: It’s discourse time again!

Crimson Desert is out. Pearl Abyss’ gargantuan open-world role-playing game has been much hyped by the developer, a phalanx of influencers, and an activated army of hopeful fans. The pitch was all-encompassing but simple. Crimson Desert was positioned as the ultimate megagame: The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, and an offline Final Fantasy 14 all at once.

Culturally, Crimson Desert appears to be a total generalist, trying to be all things to all people. But it’s not quite so straightforward. Korea’s Pearl Abyss is part of a new generation of “outsider AAA” studios attempting to break into the highest echelon of the industry from outside the perceived development mainstream (which translates as American, Japanese, and Western European studios underwritten by big publishers and platform holders). Other examples are Shift Up from Korea (Stellar Blade), Game Science from China (Black Myth: Wukong), and Warhorse from the Czech Republic (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2). The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, from Poland, is the model of this kind of studio; it has now entered the heart of the mainstream, mostly under its own steam and on its own terms.

Image: Pearl Abyss via Polygon

Gamers rally around these studios and their ambitious projects for a few different reasons. There’s the honest desire for a fresh perspective on blockbuster games. There’s a sense that these studios can claim an authenticity that would be stamped out within the industry’s traditional structures. Sometimes it’s a justified rejection of the corporate monetization and franchising that has crept into many of the biggest productions. Sometimes there’s a political dimension to it; culture wars have been fought over Shift Up’s unapologetic objectification of Stellar Blade’s main character, or Warhorse’s insistence on a whites-only medieval Europe in the original Kingdom Come.

I’m not sure that Pearl Abyss has a stance on any of these issues, but I can see why fans respond to its naked ambition and refusal to bow to any other masters. Critics, on balance, did not. Crimson Desert is divisive, but by many accounts, it’s by turns wildly impressive and hopelessly undercooked. The stage is set for another clash of the cultural media elites versus the True Gamers. But there might end up being a surprising consensus here, too. As of this writing, less than 24 hours after launch, Crimson Desert’s Steam reviews are “mixed” (both in English and across all languages).

There are questions to be asked about how Crimson Desert’s hype got so out of control — if it was a media strategy on Pearl Abyss’ part, then it’s hard to fault the developers’ belief in their own work, but it might not work out in their favor in the long run. But players clearly wanted to be convinced by it.

At the same time, the gaming community rejected another ambitious tech project out of hand this week. Nvidia spectacularly misjudged the reveal of DLSS5, the new generation of its AI graphics-improving tech. With this new iteration, DLSS apparently graduates from filling in pixels and frames to improve image quality and performance to deciding that a game’s characters might look prettier if they just put a bit of lippy on. The pushback was instant, mocking, and severe. Inadvisably, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doubled down and said players were “completely wrong.”

This is a clear moment of rupture between one of gaming’s tech leaders and its audience — even the most tech-fetishistic portion of that audience. It’s fascinating that it happened in the week of release of Crimson Desert, a game premised on its developers’ technical ability to brute force a giant world into existence, but perhaps not their artistic ability to imbue that world with a soul. An inflection point is coming. It sounds fascinating, worrying, and exciting in equal measure. But for now, I’m off to the movies.

P.S. It’s funny that the unanimously loved Project Hail Mary and the divisive Crimson Desert have identical Metacritic ratings: 78. What’s in a number, indeed.