Yet another Crimson Desert update is rolling out across each platform in what's become an almost weekly tradition for developer Pearl Abyss. New week, new patch. This one overhauls the open-world game's economy with 133 new trading posts and more ways to fatten your pockets with the weight of endless gold.

Those 133 trading posts will start popping up after progressing through quests, but what's more interesting is how players can now interact with the game's various traders. Harder-to-reach trading wagons will offer you higher prices for the same goods, for example, while royal posts offer you quadruple the price they used to for selling stuff.

Trading posts also stock a more diverse range of goods, wagons no longer disappear after delivering goods to a royal post, and "trade good prices change when too many are sold at a single location." The basics of supply and demand, now in Crimson Desert. Essentially, there's more ways than ever to get rich quick and make the stonks shoot up.

"Added 24 new types of high-value trade goods and 4 new types of regular trade goods," Pearl Abyss' patch notes explain. "Packaged trade goods can now be stacked up to a maximum of 10 or 100, depending on their price."

There's also now a 'Claim Bank Strongbox' feature. "Depositing 10 or more bonds allows you to start investing," the studio says. "Bonds can be exchanged for 10 Gold Bars." And you can buy rare items with your bonds, too.

With so many new trading outposts and ways to engage in Crimson Desert's economy, the map will also let you use filters to find posts, royal posts, wagon workshops, and wagon routes. Heck, you can even filter the map to only show you trading posts that sell the items you're looking for, which is really handy for a game that now has over a 100 vendors.

I'd recommend skimming the rest of the patch notes to get a gist of everything that's new, alongside all the bugs Pearl Abyss have squashed.

While Crimson Desert continues to receive near-constant updates with free content, Pearl Abyss is also working on paid DLC that's "substantively different" at the same time.

See what else is on the horizon with our new games of 2026 guide.

I have an experiment for you. Right now, as you stare at this article on a phone, monitor, PS Vita, whatever, spin your head around. Oh, probably don't do that in public or while walking. Or do. I don't know, I'm not your dad.

But you will probably spot that the entire world doesn't go blurry as you spin. Now, a second experiment: wave your hand in front of you and tell me if your hand goes blurry. As you'll likely deduce from that very scientific experiment, motion blur (ie the entire world going blurry around you as you wiggle your head) is not a 'realistic' game setting.

One of the first things I do when I play a game is turn motion blur off. Given you are reading this on PC Gamer dot com, the likelihood is that you do the same. Recently, while playing Halo: Campaign Evolved, I realised it has one of the worst implementations of motion blur I've ever seen, and it even has the audacity to be on by default.

Now, I do acknowledge that motion blur serves a purpose. Calling it a "cure worse than the disease" back in 2023, we noted that motion blur can not only add a sense of speed and realism but can reduce the perception of artifacts. As you might be able to guess, that means motion blur is effective at obscuring faults at lower frame rates too.

And as such, it makes sense that it largely came about in the early 2000s. As 3D games became more popular, and hardware ramped up to attempt to keep pace with that innovation, motion blur helped to obscure low frame rates.

There is another purpose for motion blur. As pointed out back in 1999, Kong looks a bit weird in the 1933 King Kong movie, because the background shots are shot on camera and the titular great ape was animated with still photos. Cameras introduce motion blur, and many games attempt to mimic film, rather than real life. Nowadays, stop motion animators add artificial blur to make their pictures feel more like a movie.

So, in big-budget cinematic games, there are two built-in reasons for motion blur: to feel closer to a movie than real life, and to make up for poor performance.

But it's 2026, and modern hardware, especially with innovations like upscaling and frame generation, can get the average fps up into the hundreds for even modern titles. So my question is, 'why is motion blur the default?' Why is it the native way we are supposed to play games?

Now, motion blur absolutely has its defenders, and I can see the argument for it in sequences that are played at high speeds (like racing games). But, a study from back in 2013 shows that, even in racing games, players could reliably detect motion blur but did not report it having a positive effect on the game. It concludes, "motion blur effects, while useful for reducing artifacts and achieving a realistic 'look', do not significantly enhance the player experience."

While playing Halo: Campaign Evolved, I realised game capture looked significantly worse with motion blur on, regardless of the fps of the game. The blur tends to be at its worst below 60 fps, but it's not exactly pretty at 100 fps either. The game ultimately feels less immersive to me with motion blur on.

The thing is, motion blur's benefits, aesthetically speaking, are subjective. I hate it, and wish I'd never have to see it in a game again, but others like it. And that's part of the problem here. It has become the default, I think, in part because it was the default, and there's no point fixing it if it ain't broke.

But we have tools that are much better at making up for lower frame rates now. I'd opt for a little upscaling pretty much any day over motion blur, but I also don't expect that to be the default. There's also a little part of my brain that doesn't like tools that are used to mask performance issues being the expected way to play games. I want my first taste of a game to be as untreated as possible, where I then season it with as much salt and pepper as I like. And motion blur is simply too spicy for a first bite.

Things haven't looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare's staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead.

Yet, while there's little hope of a new Dragon Age game anytime soon (if ever), might there be a chance EA revisits the old Dragon Age games? The original Mass Effect trilogy got a spruced-up rerelease in its Legendary Edition back in 2021, despite the fact that EA hasn't exactly been desperate to push out new games in that series either (though a new one is apparently in the works, with the devs being too busy making it to talk about it). Hence, could EA test players' appetite for Dragon Age with a similar remaster for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Sadly, the chances of this happening are slim too, at least according to former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah. In the same interview where he declared Dragon Age as probably dead, Darrah also pointed out that, while he had once envisioned a "Champion's Edition" equivalent to the Legendary Edition, EA is now unlikely to exhume the old games for a remaster due to the practical difficulties of doing so.

Basically, it all comes down to technology. Where all three Mass Effect games ran on Unreal Engine, which is a widely used technology, the three Dragon Age games were all built on different engines. Dragon Age used BioWare's Eclipse engine—an upgraded version of the Aurora Engine (which was also used by CD Projekt for The Witcher), Dragon Age 2 used the further enhanced Lycium Engine, while Dragon Age: Inquisition ran on DICE's Frostbite tech.

"There's basically no one at BioWare any more that understands the Aurora Engine," Darrah told FRVR. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So, unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."

On top of this, Darrah reckons that such a remaster effort would require a new team, but claims that "EA doesn't like having employees, so, if you're going to do that, you're going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else."

That said, Darrah does think that a remaster of the original Dragon Age would sell well, mainly due to how it's a bit crusty around the edges today. "Dragon Age: Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it a lot better looking."