During the 2020 Game Awards, Pearl Abyss announced Crimson Desert, an exciting action-adventure game set in a medieval fantasy world. With a release window set for later this year on PC, macOS, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, now is the perfect time to learn more about one of this year’s most anticipated games.
During GDC 2025, I attended an insightful BlackSpace Engine presentation highlighting the visually impressive gameplay details that fans can expect from Crimson Desert and future Pearl Abyss titles. Before sharing my overall impressions, here is a quick reminder of what was featured during this preview demonstration.
The Highlighted Features
Seamless Loading (Abyss, Skydiving)
Crafted with an emphasis on rendering and seamless loading, the world heightens immersion by optimizing draw distance and ensuring smooth gameplay. This is especially noticeable during high-speed skydiving, where players can experience the immersion of real-world dynamics.
Dynamic Combat (Realism and Impact of Battles)
Powered by the BlackSpace Engine, the game’s combat is designed to convey the weight and impact of hits, providing an almost visceral experience when characters are attacked and attacking. The engine enhances combat through intricate details, including the weight and feel of attacks, physical effects, detailed action, and visuals
All physics are rendered with realism, such as the varying levels of debris according to the force applied to objects. Realistic interactions are showcased as enemies collide during combat, for example, into sharp barricades and taking damage, or even with each other, inflicting damage and affecting others during combat. This makes every fight feel authentic and immersive.
Graphical Transition Based on Environmental Changes
Characters in Crimson Desert are brought to life with detail with the engine’s GPU-based Cloth and Hair simulation. Every aspect is realistically portrayed. The natural movement of trees and grass in the wind, strands of hair for human characters and animals, and cloth fluttering on village lines are all depicted with realism
The vibrant water movement enriches the world of Crimson Desert. FFT Ocean Simulation and Shallow Water Simulation features dynamically illustrate waves and tides.
Fluid and Froxel Raymarching make realistic fog effects possible, intricately showcasing how fog swirls as Kliff moves. As the natural lighting changes over time, it affects the density and fog color, reflecting real-world phenomena.
Lighting (Dynamic Weather)
Dynamic weather and lighting are vital components that amplify the game’s realism and graphical quality. Activating the engine’s Raytracing depicts light pathways influenced by weather, overlapping objects, lights streaming through windows, and diverse lighting effects from household lamps and fireplaces.
All lighting is calculated in real time, ensuring natural lighting effects by synchronizing the movement of particle elements with the lights, such as fire. The weather is also dynamically rendered in real time, creating realistic conditions like heavy rain, wind, and snow. Utilizing Unified Atmospheric Scattering with Volumetric Cloud, atmospheric scattering effects and clouds are depicted naturally and in real time.
A variety of tree shapes adds vibrancy to Crimson Desert’s vast world. Typically, there is a limitation on the types of trees available that results in many duplicates of the same tree shapes. However, by incorporating the shape variation feature in the BlackSpace Engine, it is possible to place trees of various shapes with simple manipulation.
My Takeaways
After seeing this engine in all its glory during my session, I walked away absolutely stunned. Having reviewed Assassin’s Creed Shadows earlier this month, I thought things like draw distance and physics were great in that game, but the BlackSpace engine certainly elevates these features to the next level.
The approach to realism on all fronts feels incredible and pulls you deeper into the overall experience. I’m curious to check out the first hands-on demo for the game that will take place at PAX East 2025. Stay tuned for more details on Crimson Desert in the weeks and months ahead.
Crimson Desert will launch in late 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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