Crimson Desert has been delayed, pushing its release date out of 2025. The medieval open-world RPG was announced all the way back in 2019, but has remained just out of reach since then, thanks to several release date pushbacks. While Crimson Desert seems closer to its long-awaited launch than ever, hopeful fans will still need to wait a little longer.
Pearl Abyss originally intended Crimson Desert to be a prequel MMO to its earlier work Black Desert Online. Since then, however, it has undergone several changes, morphing into a single-player RPG with elements drawing comparisons to Dragon's Dogma and Tears of the Kingdom. Over the course of those shifts, it has also seen multiple delays, something that has remained unfortunately consistent across the game's development timeline.
In Pearl Abyss' Q2 2025 earnings call, the developer announced that the game has been delayed again and is now aiming for a release date sometime in the first quarter of 2026. In December 2024, the studio said Crimson Desert would come out in late 2025, so this latest delay is not a massive shift but an unfortunate update for fans nonetheless. According to Pearl Abyss, working with external partners on...
