This article was updated by Andrea Trama on March 14, 2026, with news regarding Crimson Desert's day-one update and cross-save. It was first published on March 13.
It seems that early copies of the highly anticipated action-adventure game Crimson Desert are already out in the wild ahead of its official March 19 launch, but attempts to launch the game ahead of time have revealed a rather unexpected limitation with the physical version. According to a report by PushSquare, players planning to buy a physical copy of the game will still need an internet connection to fully install it, as it can't run directly from the disc. Instead, a mandatory day-one update must be downloaded before Crimson Desert can be launched at all.
The reason, it appears, is that the game requires so much storage that the disc likely can't hold all of it. In fact, only a little over 60% of the game's data is reportedly copied from the disc itself, but players will still need to download an additional 48GB update at Crimson Desert's launch, bringing the total installation much closer to the roughly 150GB footprint expected for the PC version of the game....
