Pearl Abyss has warned players that the game is not compatible with Intel Arc graphics cards and is advising affected users to request a refund.

The day has finally arrived and Crimson Desert is now out, with thousands of players already jumping into Pearl Abyss’s fantasy world and filling social media with screenshots, gameplay clips, and first impressions. However, there is a group of PC users who have not really been able to join in at all, and the reason comes down to a very specific piece of hardware: their GPU.

The studio behind Black Desert Online has revealed that its latest major release is not compatible with Intel Arc graphics cards. In plain terms, Crimson Desert does not run on systems using an Intel Arc GPU. At the moment there is no viable workaround either, as Pearl Abyss’s own official FAQ explicitly tells affected users to check the refund policy of the platform where they bought the game and request their money back. According to the company, the title is currently not supported on Intel Arc hardware, and that is being treated as a known limitation rather than something players can fix themselves.

Intel Arc cards are not the most popular products on the market, since most PC players still lean toward more established brands such as NVIDIA and AMD. Even so, a number of users have clearly been caught off guard by the incompatibility and now have little choice beyond requesting a refund or trying the game elsewhere. What makes the situation worse is that Pearl Abyss has not said anything yet about whether future patches will restore compatibility, so affected players are left in limbo.

The irony is that this problem has not stopped Crimson Desert from posting a commercially strong launch. Pearl Abyss is already claiming that the game has sold two million copies worldwide, and on Steam it quickly hit a peak of 239,045 concurrent players. That is a very strong opening. The reception, however, is more mixed than the sales figures suggest. On Valve’s platform, user reviews have not been nearly as enthusiastic, with the positive rating sitting around 56%.

The studio says it will continue listening closely to community feedback and will work quickly on improvements to make the journey through Pywel more enjoyable. That promise, however, will not mean much to Intel Arc owners as long as the game does not run for them at all. So the immediate takeaway is pretty straightforward: if you were planning to buy Crimson Desert on PC with an Intel Arc card, you should think twice, because right now that setup is effectively a dead end.

Source: 3DJuegos