Gaming News

Crimson Desert Might Have One Of The Worst Video Game Characters Of All Time

On Apr 09, 2026 5:20 pm, by NuclearCoffee

Crimson Desert’s story is, at its best, a somewhat interesting romp through a massive medieval fantasy world. Even the Pearl Abyss CEO admits that the studio probably could have made the narrative more interesting, but instead chose to focus on making the gameplay as good as it possibly could be – which seems to have worked, as it’s now climbed up to a Very Positive rating on Steam following a bunch of quality-of-life patches that, at the time of writing, are still coming thick and fast.

At its core, the story is one of reunion and redemption as protagonist Kliff has to rebuild his scattered group of mercenaries known as the Greymanes. Despite some stellar voice acting, most of the characters in Crimson Desert are forgettable – including Kliff himself, who is so beige and uninteresting that he has earned the moniker ‘John Desert’ for being so run-of-the-mill it’s laughable.

Most of the side characters that join Kliff on his journey are caricatures of common medieval fantasy tropes too, though one stands out above the rest as an annoying, snivelling, drunken, useless oaf, the sort of person that I’d boot out of my own mercenary group as fast as you could say ‘ale.’ I am, of course, talking about Yann.

Yann Is Everything Wrong With Crimson Desert In One Annoying Package

I’ve enjoyed Crimson Desert a lot in my 200 hours, and I wrote as much in my review. However, even with lots of quality-of-life changes arriving in the form of post-launch patches, I still can’t shake the feeling that sometimes Crimson Desert really wastes your time. Whether it’s pointless follow quests or finicky puzzles, some of the game design choices are peculiar to say the least. Yann is emblematic of this jarring experience.

Yann is a useless character. In the entire 100-hour story arc, I think he only does one meaningful good action as he drags a captured Black Bear to the newly established Greymane Camp. Other than that, he seems written purely to waste your time. In one quest, he asks you to help him cut down some trees, so you have to follow him a good distance from the camp at a snail’s pace, and when you get there he tells you that he has left his axe at the camp and leaves you to cut down the trees on your own. What was the point?!

In another quest, possibly my least favourite in the entire game, Yann asks you to help him transport some trade goods from the Gold Leaf camp in Howling Hills to a trading post in Delesyia. This journey is over 2000m, and if the wagon comes in contact with almost anything, it will instantly explode. I took a slightly wrong turn and tried to turn around in a crop field, but the crops made the wagon blow up, and when I then did complete the quest, the wagon was empty of trade goods because the explosion had reset the inventory. I left Yann with the empty wagon and said I’m not going to bother with him ever again. I still haven’t. The perfect platinum will forever elude me because of this drunken idiot.

You could argue that despite Yann dragging you across Pywel on pointless missions, at least he has some personality, which is not what you can say for the rest of the Greymane cast. He does have a personality: he swears a lot, gets drunk, and seems to have a love-hate relationship with everyone. It’s just a shame that he’s actually quite annoying, especially because you have to spend several minutes with him on each quest as he just chats absolute nonsense the entire time. I am not a Yann enjoyer.