“They Kept Moving the Focus”: Crimson Desert’s Kliff Actor Confirms the Story Suffered Major Changes During Development

Alec Newman is an actor with over a decade of experience working in video games, though it appears his time as Kliff in the recently released Crimson Desert from developer Pearl Abyss was one of his oddest working experiences yet. Speaking in an interview on the Friends Per Second podcast, Newman dug into how the story suffered through major changes in the five years he spent in recording sessions for Kliff, describing the experience as a "roller coaster."

Newman said his experience with Crimson Desert was "very different" from his most previous video game project, Still Wakes the Deep (which he won a BAFTA for just last year), and spoke about how over the course of his five years recording for Kliff, which included "various periods of low and then very high intensity."

He also spoke about how he wasn't even made fully aware of the project's scope in the beginning of the recording process. "For the first year and a half or so, it was just a demo, as far as I knew...It was nearly two years into recording that they sort of said 'Well, we're going to start recording in earnest now,' and I went, what the hell do you mean?"

Actors being kept in the dark during the audition process is fairly common in the video game industry, as a means of preventing leaks from things that could be more easily discovered, like audition calls. Most are never directly referring to the project they are actually related to, but it seems incredibly rare that an actor would be left not knowing where the story of a project would be going two years into five years of recording. Though, perhaps referring to the fact that it was a consistent job he had for five years, Newman does say, "in terms of recording, it was the gift that really did keep on giving."

"The roller coaster of being involved in Crimson Desert is very different...writing is key. It doesn't really matter - games, telly, movies, certainly in theatre, songs - whatever. If the writing is there, you can really run with it," Newman said. "With this project it was interesting, because, I don't want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but, we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel. 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?'"

"When Kliff stopped being MacDuff, which was a considerable amount of time in to the recording of this - he was MacDuff originally - once they settled on Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could. And I have to be honest, I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer, with a certain type of game. I'm glad I fought for that stuff."

"Because you can tell when you read the reviews for the game that've come out, you can tell when I 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, I feel, with 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."

Newman adds that it's "not a secret" the game underwent many significant changes in its development, referring to the fact that it began as another multiplayer project before becoming a single-player adventure.

His comments also come after developer Pearl Abyss's chief executive officer Heo Jin-young admitted that he thinks "it would have been nice if we could have done a better job" with the game's story. They also follow and partially corroborate claims found on Blind, a platform for professionals to anonymously share their thoughts, and in many cases, grievances, about the places they work for.

You can't share your thoughts on Blind without verifying your employment with your work email, which adds significant weight to the comments allegedly from a Pearl Abyss developer who described the game's story as undecided until "right before release." They also call out that Kliff was initially named MacDuff, which Newman confirms here, and describes what the story was meant to be during at least one point of development, before it was changed.

"After a while, there's only so far you can go with him kind of being, not flat, but stoic...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 100 hours, they've found bits of Kliff that do speak of something more emotional, sometimes."

One example Newman provides is how the story's focus, at least at the beginning of the game, seems to be Kliff's relationship to his fellow Greymanes. "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. 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."

Crimson Desert's story is largely agreed to be one of the game's bigger cons, as it's one of the few negative points Wccftech's Francesco De Meo calls out in his review. With that said, as Newman points out, it's everything surrounding that ultimately lackluster story that makes Crimson Desert worth playing, as De Meo writes, "Pywell is a world that is very easy to get lost in. And for all the best reasons."

For more on Crimson Desert, you can check out our hub page, which captures all of our coverage in one place. You can also check out our complete walkthrough and guides hub, which is littered with guides to help you through the many, many elements of the game's expansive open world.

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