Jason Schreier

To play it and be like, man, this main character sucks.

This writing is pretty mid.

It wastes a lot of your time.

And to just be like, whatever, 7 out of 10.

I don't really like this.

And then for a lot of players to be like, I wanted exactly this.

I wanted a just massive, infinite sort of cornucopia of content that I can experience.

So, yeah, basically some people just want like a game with just a ton to do in it that it just lets them play and it's pretty fun and it's beautiful looking.

And like that's what a lot of people who play video games just kind of want.

And that's also the kind of thing that a lot of critics are, I think, more likely to kind of dismiss because because of like the specific things that the game does well versus the things it doesn't do well.

Right, but the specific weaknesses are part of it.

The Crimson Desert has this total nothing-burger story and main character, and then you have to actually really dig into it to start to understand where the cool stuff is.

I don't know, like it's a specific type of game that winds up having this reaction, right?

Like there is a reason that Crimson Desert is having this like this sort of split thing between people who really like playing it and critics and not games in other styles or with like that other games, I guess, that have gotten a 77 on Metacritic.

It's like particular to this to some things about Crimson Desert.

Yeah, I think it's something related to the size of the game for sure.

I'm thinking of that old Mad Max game that came out in the 2010s.

It's the quintessential example of this kind of game where it gets its high 70s maybe or low 80s on Metacritic.

and critics kind of dismiss it as like, ah, it's sort of a mid, you know, check-the-boxes open-world game.

And then a lot of people are like, yeah, but I love check-the-boxes open-world games, and it's really pretty, and it's set in Mad Max, and it's cool, and it's great.