- Crimson Desert actor Alec Newman says Pearl Abyss kept changing the game’s story throughout development
- Newman says he kept having to push “about story and character as much as I could”
- He suggests the studio “kept changing the goalpost” and even changed Kliff’s name
Alec Newman, the voice behind Crimson Desert‘s protagonist, Kliff, has revealed that he had to keep pushing Pearl Abyss for clarity on the game’s story and his character during the many years of development.
Speaking in an interview in the Friends Per Second Podcast, Newman discussed the game at length and said that he worked on it “on and off” for five years while “recording various iterations of this character at various stages of development.”
“Nearly two years into recording, they sort of said, ‘Well, we’re going to start recording in earnest now.’ And I went, ‘what the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!'” Newman exclaimed.
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Newman is an experienced actor in the industry and is also known for his role as Adam Smasher in Cyberpunk 2077, but he said Crimson Desert was very different because Pearl Abyss would continuously change things throughout development.
“I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel,” Newman said. “You know, various characters and, he’s from this faction and he’s from that faction. And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
The actor also revealed that Kliff was originally named Macduff during a good chunk of his recording process, but when Pearl Abyss changed his character’s name, Newman felt the need to push for clarity.
“When Kliff stopped being Macduff, which was a considerable amount of time into the recording of this, once they settled on Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could,” he said.
Newman also touched on the game’s open-world and the aspects of gameplay that drew players in, adding that there were stages in the game’s writing process where Pearl Abyss kept “moving the focus”.
“I have to be honest, I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer with a certain type of game,” he continued. “I’m glad I fought for that stuff because, you can tell when you read the reviews for the game that’s come out. You can tell when you speak to people. I spoke to some people today actually who are playing it and loving it. And whilst they love some of the voice acting and the characterization, the boon of this game is clearly the size of the open world. And the fact that you can pick up a cat.
“That is to do with, I feel, the preferences of the developers and the people who wrote the scripts for these games, which kept changing. So at various stages it felt very much like making a TV series where they kept moving the focus. And in fact it’s not a secret. If you look at the way that Crimson Desert came into being, they did move things around.”
Crimson Desert‘s story has also been criticised since release, because while the action and open world splendor have pulled players in for hours upon hours, the story-driven adventure lacks the depth some were expecting. Pearly Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young even agreed that the game’s story could have been better.
The Greymanes and the “idea of family and trying to bring something back together” were also not defined in early development, and there came a “bridge point”, two and a half years in, when Pearl Abyss wanted that story aspect to truly resonate.
“After a while, you know, there’s only so far you can go with him [Kliff] kind of being… not flat, but kind of stoic,” Newman said. “Now, I know that as a Scotsman myself, I know what that means. But it’s very, very hard to play 150 hours with somebody who doesn’t give anything away ever. So what’s been rewarding is that as people have played through over a 100 hours, they’ve found bits of Kliff that do speak of something more emotional sometimes.
“The whole Greymanes thing, after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate. This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. I think that’s the main story strand of the game, or the only story strand of the game when you begin it.
“And so that was the bridge point. I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to care about his comrades.’ And I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue.’ So we brought it in gradually and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out.
“But I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.”
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