Matt Firor calls Crimson Desert a single-player MMO without a tutorial

Matt Firor, former lead of The Elder Scrolls Online and former head of ZeniMax Online, wrote that Crimson Desert feels like a single-player MMO. He considers online infrastructure one of the hardest parts of development, so an MMO’s scale without a required network is, for him, almost a way around that difficulty.

He has spent dozens of hours and still has not unpacked every mechanic. There is no hard tutorial, and he counts that as a plus, next to classics where possibilities were found by the player. He compares exploration to Breath of the Wild.

A large world with MMO depth and no required online, he thinks, could be a new trend. This is an impression after dozens of hours, not a scored review.