New Crimson Desert patch brings a huge storage upgrade, but waves goodbye to its best flight trick

I'm fully immersed in the world of Crimson Desert, and things only keep getting better as developer Pearl Abyss rolls out continued updates targeting specific community complaints and other issues with the open-world game. It's always pleasing to see a team so responsive to its player base, and this fresh set of Crimson Desert patch notes proves that the studio is prepared to consider both sides of the coin. Update 1.02.00 introduces the option for anyone who preferred the old movement controls to flip back to them, dramatically expands your private storage, and adds one of my favorite roleplaying features, a helmet toggle.

It takes no more than a couple of hours in Crimson Desert to run into one of its biggest frustrations: inventory limits. While you can mitigate this with the introduction of a private storage chest at the Greymane camp, it's still quick to fill up, and increasing your inventory in Crimson Desert can be quite the grind. Fortunately, that camp storage is about to get up to four times bigger, growing in size with each of the five expansions you can build. By the end, it'll have been raised from 240 slots up to an impressive 1,000. I'd still take more, but perhaps I'm being greedy. The mouse cursor should also now correctly work while in storage.

Head into the movement controls menu and you can toggle between the new 'basic' style and the old 'classic' settings. This also impacts the way sprint is activated, and how stamina is consumed while running. You can now fast travel to an Abyss Nexus while moving, which doesn't sound like a big deal until you've tried to do it, and then had to back out and ensure Kliff is at a complete stop. Pearl Abyss notes that it plans to improve this "in the near future" to allow the protagonists to fast travel even while on certain mounts. There's also a new Abyss Nexus to be found in Pailune.

A headgear visibility toggle has been added to the 'language and gameplay' menu in the settings. You're able to switch this between 'always show,' 'show in combat,' 'hide in cutscenes,' or 'always hide.' As someone who loves seeing my character's face (and hopping into photo mode to capture the glorious grimaces they pull in combat), this means I no longer need to sacrifice protection for fashion. Even better, Pearl Abyss promises that the ability to hide weapons while they're on your back is planned for "the near future."

It's not all good news, with a nerf to one of the most popular flight tricks - Pearl Abyss has "fixed an issue where the Focus state would not be canceled when using Aerial Roll during flight." This essentially made you zoom around like Superman, and it was a lot of fun, but sometimes you have to let these treats go for the long-term health of the experience. On the flip side, the developer has made it so that holding the jump key in mid-air still allows flight to be activated, and has also improved the responsiveness of trying to jump directly after an attack.

There's still plenty more. Not to be outdone by our fresh fashion options, cats get a new armor set and helmet. Explosive barrels will now be more clearly highlighted when using the 'light reflection' skill or shining your lantern over them. Equipping certain tools should no longer block you from performing some actions, and the camera won't drag towards nearby characters while you're trying to use said tools. When taking on combat missions, your comrades should now correctly return upon completion rather than sometimes waiting until the full mission time runs down.

The save and load menu has been separated out into two distinct pages, which takes the weight off my mind that I would accidentally boot up an old state when trying to record my progress. Sellable items will now be prioritized in the shop UI. Activating the item use notification in the bottom-right corner will now select that item directly. The control guide has been reorganized, with new displays for stowing your weapon while mounted in combat, and escaping from elemental status effects.

Pearl Abyss has tweaked the graphics a little as well, with improvements to FSR Frame Generation, fixes for some foliage not displaying properly when using the high-end FSR-RR and DLSS-RR ray tracing options, and a stop to the screen flickering while using DLAA with HDR. There are also more fixes for crash issues, localization errors, and other smaller bugs and glitches, which should hopefully lead to a better experience across the board.

Crimson Desert patch 1.02.00 is live now on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Mac App Store. It's clear that the team is far from done listening to feedback and implementing improvements, and that's great news for us all. If you're already playing, you'll be able to enjoy these immediately, but if you've decided to wait then you'll have an even better game to look forward to down the line.