Pearl Abyss is sharing some new previews of Crimson Desert, and it’s leaving the press, and a lot of gamers, impressed and excited.
As posted by Shinobi602 on Twitter, several demo videos were uploaded on IGN’s YouTube channel. We’ll go ahead and share each video link below.
GPU based cloth and hair simulation
We will concede that these are not particularly unique for Pearl Abyss to do. What is impressive is that the Korean game studio spent substantial time and money on upgrading their proprietary game engine, BlackSpace, for the purpose of making their open world game the best it can be.
Last October, Pearl Abyss told investors and reporters that they were able to do a lot of things with BlackSpace that other game engines can’t do. For example, the engine is sophisticated enough to recognize changes in temperature and depict them accordingly. At the time, it certainly sounded like something that was too good to be true, but it’s that much easier to believe it.
And we are not just saying that because there’s these nice looking new videos. GameSpot’s Jordan Ramée shared a firsthand account of playing the game and being impressed with its insane engine-level amount of detail. Ramée was riding a horse in-game, and waded into the water. As he noticed, the horse did not get a generic water effect on its body. Instead, only the part of the horse that dipped into the water got wet, and stayed wet.
It’s certainly worth looking back over a decade ago, when Pearl Abyss first made an impact with their first global video game release, Black Desert Online. While it ultimately became more of a cult favorite than a mainstream hit, Pearl Abyss demonstrated they knew how to make visually impressive graphics even back then.
So, as they managed to maintain some level of success with Black Desert Online in Korea and around the world, they had the money and investment to keep iterating and improving on the engine and what it can do, and that’s how they were positioned to make this engine the way it is now.
We have yet to see if Pearl Abyss has mastered game design enough to make Crimson Desert as good to play as it looks. But these demos and claims are highlighting the need for game developers to make their own game engines to do more than what the most popular game engines out in the market can accomplish. It certainly seems like this is a level of game design that we’re missing out on, because nobody else wants to try it.
