Crimson Desert / 红色沙漠

刚到第三章做了采石场砍两百个小兵的任务，给我干力竭了。

这游戏战斗分两种情况，一是打小兵，只需要按住重击即可。二是打boss，只需要边吃药边按住重击。个人对割草类型的游戏并没有太大兴趣，刚开始觉得爽，之后就没意思了。而且至少在我这个进度还没有aoe技能，明明是割草类型的战斗，却在几乎杀死每个小兵的时候都要触发处决动画，显得非常拖沓。

除了战斗，还有几点让我比较难受。一是探索。这十个小时在地图上逛，除了清据点没有遇到什么有趣的支线或者地点，目前我做的所有任务都缺乏趣味性或者深度。当然我只是探索了地图的很小一部分，发言没有权威性，但对比我玩过的其他开放世界比如大表哥天国拯救，闲逛时总能遇到些有意思的彩蛋。当然目前我玩下来，逛图的时候也能看到一些有趣的地方，比如一个被陨石砸的房子，还有一个地方地面上有很多类似热气球的物体。我非常期待这些地方能有一些交互，哪怕是像亚瑟一样只是用笔画下来呢。但是很遗憾的是，对于这些地点游戏没有任何的可互动的地方，就算是询问附近的npc，也只能收到千篇一律的自我介绍，非常可惜。任务设置也是相当平淡，除了通马桶就是清据点，玩着非常无聊。

二是人物，我看了一下知识，光是灰鬃就有大几十号人物，如此多的角色就不可能做到将每个人的形象塑造得能让玩家记住，更不用说城里那几百号有名有姓的人。人物虽然多，但都很空洞，只存在重复的对话。我还是倾向于人物不在于多在于精。

三是一些其他设计，比如没有寻路路线指引，明暗光影切换，对焦（？真的有这个功能吗）问题等等。

总而言之，虽然在很多人看来，这是开放世界标杆游戏，但至少它不是一款对我胃口的开放世界游戏。

I just got to Chapter 3 and did the quarry quest where you have to kill 200 trash mobs, and it completely wore me out.

The combat in this game basically comes down to two situations. One is fighting regular enemies, where all you need to do is hold down the heavy attack button. The other is fighting bosses, where all you need to do is hold down the heavy attack button while chugging potions. Personally, I am not that into hack-and-slash games. It feels good at first, but after a while it just stops being interesting. And at least at my current point in the game, I still do not have any real AoE skills. So even though the combat is clearly built around mowing down hordes of enemies, the game still triggers an execution animation for almost every single kill, which makes everything feel very slow and dragged out.

Aside from the combat, there are several other things that really bothered me.

The first is exploration. Over these ten hours of wandering around the map, I have not come across any particularly interesting side quests or locations apart from clearing enemy camps. Every quest I have done so far has lacked either fun or depth. Of course, I have only explored a small part of the map, so I cannot claim to be authoritative here. But compared with other open-world games I have played, like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where you can always stumble across some interesting Easter egg while roaming around, this game feels much flatter. To be fair, I have seen some places that looked intriguing while exploring, like a house struck by a meteor, or an area covered with things that looked like hot-air balloons. I was really hoping those places would have some kind of interaction, even if it were something as simple as Arthur sketching them in his journal. But unfortunately, there is nothing you can actually do at those locations. Even if you ask nearby NPCs, all you get are the same generic self-introductions over and over again. That is a real shame. The quest design is also extremely bland: it is basically either unclogging the toilet or clearing out enemy camps, which gets boring very quickly.

The second issue is the characters. I checked the lore, and the Gray-Manes alone seem to have dozens of characters listed. With that many roles, there is no way the game can give each one enough characterization for players to actually remember them, let alone the hundreds of named NPCs in the city. There may be a lot of characters, but most of them feel hollow and exist only to repeat the same dialogue. I have always preferred quality over quantity when it comes to characters.

The third issue is some of the other design choices, such as the lack of route guidance, the abrupt shifts in lighting and shadows, and the focusing problem—or whatever that feature is even supposed to be.

All in all, I understand that for many people this is a benchmark open-world game, but at least for me, it is not the kind of open-world game that suits my taste.