100 Pets in an Action RPG? Crimson Desert Says Why Not

When Crimson Desert launched in March, it was an open-world action RPG with deep combat and a sprawling fantasy setting. Three months and eleven patches later, it's also a pet collector, a pinball arcade, and apparently a Nintendogs rival. Patch 1.11, which dropped today across PC and consoles, pushes the maximum number of registerable pets from 30 all the way up to 100. You can only summon 50 of them at camp, but still: one hundred animals in an action RPG. Pearl Abyss is building this game like a kid with unlimited LEGO bricks and zero adult supervision, and I kind of love it.

The pet cap increase handed to you. According to the patch notes, players unlock additional registration slots by completing new in-game challenges tied to the pet system. If you already finished the earlier challenges that raised the cap, you'll receive the new reward items retroactively. The previous limit of 30 was already generous by genre standards, but the 1.09 update had added 30 new pet types, including hedgehogs, rabbits, and chipmunks, which made the old ceiling feel cramped. Bumping it to 100 gives collectors room to breathe, even if the mental image of someone herding a hundred pigeons through Pywel is deeply funny.

Pets aren't just cosmetic fluff, either. Your animal companions can follow you into combat and loot defeated enemies, which means a larger roster has real gameplay implications. Managing which 50 you bring to camp becomes its own layer of strategy, or at least its own layer of decision paralysis. Baby wyverns also get a dedicated map icon now, a small quality-of-life touch that should save players from squinting at the map trying to remember where they spotted one.

Lost Gear and Broken Pinball

The pet overhaul grabs the headline, but patch 1.11 has a couple of other changes that matter more to moment-to-moment play. Shopkeepers across Pywel will now collect rare equipment that players have lost and resell it within seven days, at a markup. Losing a rare drop from a treasure chest or quest reward used to mean it was gone for good. Now there's a safety net, even if it costs you extra gold. I wish more action RPGs did this. Permanent loss of rare gear because of a stray button press or an inventory management slip is one of those frustrations that feels like it exists by accident rather than design.

Then there's the pinball minigame, which Pearl Abyss added just one week ago in patch 1.10. It shipped with balls clipping through walls, getting stuck in corners, and generally behaving like pinball shouldn't. Patch 1.11 reworks the ball physics to feel heavier, adjusts pin layouts, and fixes the clipping issues. Turning around a broken minigame in seven days is the kind of responsiveness that earns goodwill, especially when plenty of studios would have left it broken for a month.

The patch also lets secondary protagonists Damiane and Oongka equip the Mining Drill and Chainsaw, fixes a bug preventing their Spirit stat from scaling with the Focus skill, and adds controller remapping for Inventory, Map, Skills, Journal, and Photo Mode. Wyvern mounts got attention too: players can now use Axiom Force to mount without learning Back Hang first, and a bug causing automatic remounting after a mid-air dismount has been fixed.

Pearl Abyss confirmed earlier this week that Crimson Desert has sold 6 million copies in under three months, and the studio's PR and marketing lead Will Powers told The Gamer that the constant free updates essentially function as the game's marketing program. He also teased that upcoming paid DLC will be "substantively different, whether it's in scope, scale, size" from the base game. The pace Pearl Abyss is setting here is remarkable. Most single-player games get a patch or two and then silence until DLC ships. Crimson Desert is getting weekly updates that add entire systems, and the 6 million sales number suggests players are responding to that cadence. Full DLC details haven't been revealed yet, but the Steam page has the complete 1.11 notes for anyone who wants every line item.