Crimson Desert - Biggest Combat Update Yet: They Expanded the Ranged Cancels to an Absurd Degree

So, apparently in one of three "minor" patches after the big "Crimson Desert Enhanced" 2.0 story update, they significantly expanded how flexible ranged weapon cancels are to the point where we just have Devil's Third/Transformers Devastation/Wanted Dead style ranged combos now. It's the biggest combat update they've done by far and it was sneakily pushed in an update while I was briefly playing other things lol. This change affects all the grounded ranged attacks like evasive shot, focus shot, focused evasive shot, slide focus shots, and explosive evasive shot. They can all transition into melee without engaging a holstering animation that disrupts flow. For reference, previously the only way to seamlessly go from ranged to melee on the ground without engaging the holstering animation was via dodge roll attacks or holding sprint to enter the sprint state (the non-full speed sprint you get from just holding the button) and letting go of the ranged weapon button. Sprint attacks done this way would swap to your melee seamlessly without engaging the holstering animation. There were some minor exceptions to this since characters like Oongka can’t enter sprint state when aiming, but by and large this was how it worked for all characters. Guns also had unique reload cancels that could be done by pressing the light attack button after firing a shot to cancel the reload animation and transition to melee. Now, they’ve effectively given the gun reload type cancels to everything and made all the cancels significantly faster than they were before. They’ve also made it so you can cancel with all the different light attack command moves and the heavy attack as well as opposed to only the basic light attack. The vast majority of attacks let you cancel into ranged weapon aiming directly after performing them and they made the cancel for this a lot quicker. It's also very good for stamina management, as aiming immediately causes stamina regeneration to kick off. You can now flow between melee and ranged in an unprecedented way. Genuinely incredible. Games that have systems that allow for seamless improvisational flow between melee and ranged gameplay are some of my absolute favorite games and yet they are also exceedingly rare in games (Devil's Third multiplayer forever remains the GOAT for this). Crimson Desert is in this pantheon now. This is absolutely the best implementation of such a system now too. The ranged gameplay mechanics were already incredibly layered and rich before, but now they're super charged and ridiculously free form. Can't express how sick it is to see one of my favorite obscure mechanics intuitively get implemented all on it's own just because the devs themselves are geniuses that are fantastic at coming up with incredible ideas to implement. No one is doing it like Pearl Abyss man. The only thing that could make it better is if they made the slide have full omni-directional ranged weapon aiming like in Vanquish, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, or Warframe. Additionally, they also made it so Damiane's pistol can now reload cancel like all the other guns. They also fixed the removal of evasive shot properties from Oongka's cannon based abilities, like recoil shot and scatter shot, which had hugely detrimental effects to his gameplay flow if you knew how they could be used (the beginning of the Oongka section of my "Hordes of Demeniss" video show precisely what's possible with it working the way it did). Honestly thought it would be too obscure too fix and it would fall to the wayside since nobody knows about it, but they really came in clutch and fixed it. Amazing. As a sidenote they also fixed this gun related exploit:    • CRIMSON DESERT | HIDDEN SKILL | 붉은사막 히든 스킬   Don't mind it, as what they've given us in exchange is much better, still has lots of movement potential, is not severely busted, and also doesn't require changing your controls to do. I will miss the focused evasive shot into evasive shot tech that allowed you to make your evasive shots move really far that the exploit also facilitated though. But yeah, a game for the dreamers and true believers if there ever was one.