Crimson Desert's pseudo-viking protagonist is the God Of Bore

But it’s Kliff who my mind revolves around, locked in an orbit of irritated, listless disgust. Presenting an appearance not un-akin to a Vasoline-slathered Viking Clint Eastwood (with blue fingerpaint on his face), the last of the Greymanes—Nice Vikings, in contrast to the Bad Vikings, who he hates—exhibits a personality largely indistinguishable, in its blandness, from the landscapes around him. Don’t get me wrong: Crimson Desert has terrible writing in any case. (I’ve never been more paradoxically grateful to, and irritated by, a developer as when I realized every cutscene here gives you the ability to run the whole thing in ridiculous looking-and-sounding fast-forward.) But Kliff is the magnificent absence at its center, reacting to everything, from being attacked by bandits, to being raptured up into the sky so that he can soar (very, obnoxiously slowly) on magical wings, with the exact same expression of dull surprise. 

Crimson Desert is a game that makes you think about other games a lot; partly because it’s so aggressively derivative, and partly because it just makes for a nice change of pace from watching your camera once again shrug uncomfortably instead of actually locking on to an opponent. And the one I kept coming back to during my time with it, even more than Nintendo’s modern Zeldas, was Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. That game, too, had a Viking protagonist roaming a countryside that was often bigger than it was interesting; that game, too, was often content to throw “more” at the player when “better” would have been preferred. And yet, when I think back on Valhalla, it’s not the repetition or the fetch quests that my mind gravitates to, but its protagonist, kickass Norse partygirl Eivor Varinsdottir. Throughout the 50 or so hours I spent with Valhalla, I was always excited to roll into a cutscene to see how Eivor would react to the latest dose of proto-Templar silliness or beleaguered homeowner nonsense, for the simple reason that Eivor had a personality. Amused, enthusiastic, and only occasionally mad with blood lust, she was my playable buddy as I toured ninth century England, and while I’d never call her the deepest character, she was still a welcome presence that made our hours together a richer experience.

Pearl Abyss got its start making massively multiplayer games, so it’s possible, with Crimson Desert, that they failed to grasp a key aspect of these big, lonely sorts of single-player experiences: When you’re out there in the wilderness, your player character is the only friend you’ve got. (This is not, to be clear, a call for protagonists to start quipping to themselves at every turn—one Horizon series is enough for anybody.) But that vital sense of camaraderie, of just basically liking the guy or gal or Geralt on the other end of the controller, is what makes getting saddled with a dud like Kliff such a bummer, in a game that often feels like it’s nearly on the verge of getting interesting. When something cool does happen, I want to experience it with a character capable of saying more than “Has anybody seen any other Greymanes?” You can patch out AI art and ineffective control schemes, but I’ve never seen a developer manage to patch a personality in.