Crimson Desert's weekly patches end after Charting the Unknown, and the DLC gives Damiane and Oongka their own epilogues

The weekly patch era is wrapping up. Pearl Abyss PR and marketing director Will Powers told the Dropped Frames podcast that Crimson Desert won’t keep getting updates every week once Charting the Unknown launches on Thursday, October 29 at 6 p.m. ET (3 p.m. PT), Wccftech reports. That isn’t the end of support: big free patches will keep coming, and Powers said most of what the weekly updates added was built from scratch off player feedback rather than cut content, according to EGW’s rundown.

Three epilogues, not one story. The DLC’s story content takes place after the main game, and Powers called it “effectively an epilogue for all three characters,” GamesRadar+ reports. Kliff, Damiane and Oongka each get their own storyline, the three aren’t traveling together, and the stories don’t connect. The goal is to treat Damiane and Oongka as full protagonists alongside Kliff, and Powers said Oongka’s epilogue is his favorite part. The same writer behind Crimson Desert Enhanced’s story rework wrote the DLC.

What you need to unlock it. You have to finish the main story to start the new storylines, which open from the Journal menu, per Pearl Abyss’s features overview. You don’t need to beat the game to explore the new areas, but shipbuilding, fleets, castles and settlements need the Greymane Camp set up at Howling Hill in Chapter 3.

Other new details. Powers said every NPC can now be interacted with, romance options come with their own quests instead of generic scripts, friends can visit your camp, the ocean has huge sea monsters, storms and ship boarding, and the whole coastline has been reworked for underwater exploration, according to EGW.

PPR take: Weekly patches for a single-player game were never going to last forever, and Pearl Abyss earned a lot of goodwill with them. Moving to bigger free updates makes sense. The bigger news for story fans is that Damiane and Oongka finally get real arcs instead of riding in Kliff’s shadow.