I love that Crimson Desert’s latest updates have effectively transformed it into a birdwatching simulator

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Crimson Desert is a weird game. Though in some ways it grows ever less strange with each passing update, as Pearl Abyss retcons some of its more interesting and abrasive design decisions, in others, it’s still an oddball. Who could’ve predicted a mere month or so after release, we’d all be running around in a bird-taming frenzy?

With the recent addition of the Sotdae of Bond—a rather fancy name for a bird feeder—you can tame anything from mountain condors, to humble ducks, to tiny little sparrows, who are surprisingly effective at looting corpses let me tell you. There are even legendary birds, such as the flaming Phoenix, the clockwork Iron Eagle, and yes, most legendary of all, a BLUE PARROT. Funnily enough, that last one is genuinely the most annoying of the bunch to tame.

Still, it’s wonderful to see. If you peruse the Crimson Desert Reddit, you can spy all sorts of threads in recent weeks where people are taking joy in showing off birds they’ve found, or are sharing locations where they’ve spotted them, almost like real-life bird twitchers. No affiliation to actual Twitch, unless you stream your birdspotting I suppose…

Part of the enjoyment stems from the fact that you can place your bird feeder anywhere and stock it with all kinds of feed, making it the perfect little experiment in such a big wide world. You might hike to the top of a mountain, plant it down, and suddenly some rare hawk shows up to chow down. For such a simple feature, it’s got a huge amount of depth thanks to all the birds that already existed in the setting. It really makes me wonder how many more features like this Pearl Abyss has up its sleeve.

What’s more, the fact this addition has turned regular players into bird aficionados, acting like real bird watchers, says something about the immersive sim-esque qualities of Crimson Desert’s world. While the stats prove that only a fraction of players are engaging with its arguably lackluster narrative, there’s something quite special about the continent of Pywel. Its sheer enormity is overwhelming, but what’s more unique is its potential in terms of systems like this.

It makes me really excited to see what will come next, especially if Pearl Abyss keeps updating at this blistering pace. We don’t have a roadmap for the game, so it’s hard to imagine what it will come to look like, especially if DLC is on the cards, which I assume it is. But I’m eagerly anticipating loading up Crimson Desert a year from now to engage in some weird new obsession.

A part of me feels like Pearl Abyss will keep adding fun new features until it eventually just gets around to adding multiplayer, and all of us who’ve been scratching our heads over its position as a singleplayer MMO will suddenly realise it was a regular MMO all along (and our faces will proceed to melt Indiana Jones-style).

Crimson Desert’s greatest asset has always been its sandbox of a world, so it brings me great joy to see Pearl Abyss utilising it in such a fun way, adding new features that make us want to log in, play about, and experiment. Is it still a weird game? Sure, I have no idea what’s going on. Tell me why a singleplayer RPG is getting more updates than most live service games do? Not that I’m complaining. I think we can all agree: birds are good.