As a guide writer, I love it when a game has lots of locked doors. It’s fun tracking down keys, cracking them open, and discovering what treasures are being kept within—or at least it is to me. Crimson Desert has some really great puzzles, whether you’re out exploring the world, or trying to crack open a safe like the Hernand Castle Strongbox. One thing I don’t like, though: the way Crimson Desert uses its keys.

There are many, many locked doors on the continent of Pywel, and rather than having a key for each individual one, you can get generic ‘key’ items which you can use with any locked door, except named ones that are sometimes part of quests. That’s all fine and dandy. However, simply walking into a door will consume said key and unlock it.

Bear in mind, there’s no way to tell whether a door is locked or not in Crimson Desert without first walking into it. “No **cking way” is how I reacted when I first realised this, before proceeding to reload a save and try it on a controller to check it wasn’t a control scheme issue—you’ll run into this a lot in Crimson Desert, especially on mouse and keyboard.

It wasn’t. There’s no way to tell if a door is unlocked before pushing it, and pushing it uses any key item you have if it is locked. It’s also super sensitive. On at least two occasions I was walking down a corridor as Kliff, tilted to the side very slightly, and veered off course to unlock a door into some random pantry. Thanks buddy.

As far as I can tell, with almost 50 hours in the game as I write this, there isn’t any item storage in the game that isn’t on your person, either, so it’s not like you can stow the key items somewhere else, find a door you want to unlock, and then bring one along. You can’t store them on your horse either. It kind of makes sense when a portion of Crimson Desert’s quests are about doing favors for townsfolk, which gets you more inventory space.

You could just discard the keys on the floor somewhere, though I can’t guarantee they’d stay in the same place, and it’d be a big trek to get them each time. It’s also not that keys are super rare—you can buy a few in each town and loot them randomly from bandits. It’s more that when you actually need a key, you don’t have any left because you used them on random doors into sheds and storerooms when you were simply exploring.

It’s hard to believe such a system is intentional, but… maybe it is? Crimson Desert is full of Dragon’s Dogma 2-esque abrasive systems and mechanics, so maybe Pearl Abyss just thought it would be fun to make every door a gamble. This is a game about a gruff Scotsman who has to blank-facedly stare at bread in a store to “learn” what it is, after all. If this system is intentional, it’s perhaps the most rage-inducing tongue-in-cheek mechanic I’ve ever seen.

Crimson Desert characters: Unlock eachCrimson Desert respec: Swap your skillsHow to steal in Crimson Desert: Pilfer some lootHow to get pets in Crimson Desert: Furry friendsHow to tame horses in Crimson Desert: Mount upHow to fast travel in Crimson Desert: Going places

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