More details have emerged about Pearl Abyss’ upcoming open world game Crimson Desert.
Earlier this week, we reported on how the game company rejected a PlayStation 5 exclusivity offer from Sony. Since that time, Pearl Abyss shared an official response for the English-speaking side of the gaming industry.
They sent this statement to Eurogamer:
“In our last quarter earnings call, which is publicly available, we revealed that we would publish Crimson Desert independently. We of course honour and appreciate our business partners who we are constantly in touch with about our progress and plans, and we are discussing various forms of collaboration with them.
Additionally, we have not announced any release date yet, so any articles about the topic are only speculation at this point. We look forward to showcasing a playable Crimson Desert build to media this week in Paris and to the public at G-Star in November.”
Subsequently, Neha shared a new translation of the full notes of the Pearl Abyss investor’s meeting, as the blogger who broke this story chose to share their notes in full after the news went viral. We won’t go through everything discussed here. But we will share the details here that demonstrate that Crimson Desert is a game to look out for.
Pearl Abyss is not confident about their game in a vacuum. They received 80 to 90 % positive feedback from 700 gamers who played their demo at GamesCom. The feedback they have been getting has compelled them to raise their sales forecast from 3-4 million copies to 4-5 million copies.
They revealed they picked up inspirations from several AAA single player franchises, including The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, and of course, The Legend of Zelda. So their game is designed for fans of these sprawling open world games, and will feature elements from those games.
Surprisingly, Pearly Abyss confirmed that Crimson Desert has been in production for seven years now. They explained that the biggest reason for that delay was not the pandemic, but their decision to rebuild their game engine, Black Space, in 2018.
But this choice has paid off, as Black Space has allowed them to implement infinitesimal subtleties that wouldn’t be possible in standardized game engines like Unreal. And this is where we defer to Neha’s translations completely:
- “You might have noticed in combat scenes that reeds are cut down, or objects are destroyed. We’ve paid close attention to these small details.
- Our proprietary engine allows us to implement these intricate features, giving us a unique advantage.
- Commercial engines often limit the variety of actions and interactions with the environment in combat scenes. However, using our own engine, we’ve been able to explore how to implement a diverse range of actions, interactions with nature, and realistic physical effects.
- We’ve also put significant effort into realistic lighting and character reactions to temperature and time. For instance, as the temperature drops, a character’s movements may slow, and the same can happen at night. We’ve implemented detailed physical phenomena, like changes in behavior based on temperature and time.
- We’ve heavily utilized Al in our proprietary engine, not only for NPC decision-making but also to improve development efficiency. Around half of our development team consists of art designers, and by incorporating generative Al, their workload has been significantly reduced, Black Desert has been in service for over 10 years, and we’ve allocated around 250 developers to it for updates, In contrast, Crimson Desert was developed with a maximum of 250 developers, thanks to the increased efficiency of our new engine.”
That’s all we’ll share here for now, but it certainly sounds like we’ll be learning a lot more about Crimson Desert as Pearl Abyss is planning to announce a release date soon. It may come as soon as this year’s G-Star, but for now, we have additional reasons to be excited for this game.
