You may know Pearl Abyss from their long-running MMORPG Black Desert Online. Now, the South Korean game studio is getting ready to release Crimson Desert and, for the first time, showcased the proprietary engine used to make it, in a behind-closed-door session at GDC. The BlackSpace Engine offers depth to the development process. Yes, from a graphics standpoint, but also in decreasing the load that elements like ray tracing put on your computer’s GPU.
If you’d like a deep dive into Crimson Desert, check out our hands-on preview. But this, this piece is about highlighting the nooks and crannies of the BlackSpace Engine and how the studio is approaching development on the first new title since the studio released Black Desert on consoles in 2019, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary.
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Crimson Desert is an open-world action-adventure game developed by Pearl Abyss, aiming for a global release on console and PC platforms. Through vibrant storytelling and intense action, Crimson Desert depicts realistic characters and narratives that revolve around the Greymanes fighting to achieve their noble mission. Players will experience the beautiful yet brutal continent of Pywel and witness the conflicts and epic sagas surrounding Klif, the leader of the Greymanes, as his mission takes him on an unforgettable journey.
Throughout the presentation, Pearl Abyss developers highlighted come of the engine’s features as demonstrated within a build of Crimson Desert for engine highlighting purposes. The BlackSpace Engine offers high visual fidelity, detailed open-world graphics, and dynamic combat elements, focusing on both large and small details that add to the immersion of the game world.
By using the world of Crimson Desert, a medieval fantasy game, the developers were able to use townships to highlight the detailed examples of lighting, open fields to highlight the depth of weather systems, and, astoundingly, how detailed wind movement is captured. But where the world itself is gorgeous, so is Klif, the game’s protagonist. With him, the developers showcased their hair tech, fabric textures, and draping, and probably the coolest part was highlighting wet features on fabric, skin, and Klif’s horse.
To go further, here are the BlackSpace Engine’s features, as highlighted in the presentation.
BlackSpace Engine Creates Seamless Open-World Exploration
When we played Crimson Desert in November, the PR rep in the room mentioned that you could traverse everything you could see in the distance. Standing on the ledge, I could see mountains, bridges, trees, and ultimately an open world. During the GDC demo of the BlackSpace Engine, Pearl Abyss showed us that that wasn’t just a PR line.
To put it simply, the BlackSpace Engine renders vast, far-reaching open worlds in great detail and allows for a continuous exploration experience with its seamless loading. Using a hierarchical animation structure, the engine is able to load elements sequentially as you approach them without making every tree, rock, or patch of flowers look the same. With subtle variations, Pearl Abyss is able to build depth to its landscapes, which in Crimson Desert include forests, medieval cities, snowy mountains, and vast deserts, with the world around them rendering in real-time.
As you move through the world, there really is nothing off-limits. As the demoist brought the character to a mountain, he began scaling it. The first thing that immediately brought to mind is that in every game, no matter the genre, if I see a ridge, I try to climb it. Sure, it’s probably a sectioned-off zone within an environment, but I will try. As the developers explained, you can actually do that here.
The world that the BlackSpace Engine has created is one that begs you to explore and jump into. But a vast world is nothing without the many, and I do mean many, physics interactions.
Detailed Physics and Environmental Interactions Stand Out
While Bioware may still have the keys to the kingdom when it comes to hair tech, the BlackSpace Engine wins out for well, everything else. When it comes to environmental realism, the impact of wind and water on the world around you and your character is uncanny. The primary way that the developers highlighted the features was to show us an element, then turn it off, and then switch it back on again.
For wind, that meant that trees, grass, cloth on a line, and hair sway naturally, ramping up as the devs increased the intensity and switching direction when the wind switched. The immediate responsiveness was once again, something to marvel at, but it wasn’t the foreground elements that were being demoed that caught my attention. Instead, it was a lone clothesline in the distance hung in a house that wasn’t even the focus of the demo. No clipping, just believability.
This also extended to watching Klif ride on his horse. The horse’s mane and tail moved in the wind, and Klif’s cloak always laid in a realistic way that didn’t feel like a pretty lego popped on his back, static. The responsiveness of water as it wets clothes and animal fur was also something to point out. While a lot of animations will lock a character into either a wet or dry look based on whether they interact with the water, the realism brought through the BlackSpace Engine allows for partial wetness, and finding that one dry spot highlighted just how detailed environmental interactions are here.
Ultimately, the BlackSpace Engine can create a living world. Its destructible environments, real-time physics interactions, and details like volumetric fog create a dynamic world where objects and surroundings respond intuitively to the player’s actions.
Dynamic and Realistic Combat Are The Highlights of Crimson Desert
The BlackSpace Engine brings weight and impact to every combat encounter. When I went hands-on with the game, this was clear. The combat was hands-down some of the most detailed and weighty examples of it in an action RPG. As the devs broke down how the BlackSpace Engine constructs it, well, it came into the picture.
The destructible environments above aren’t just something cool to do. It’s not about setting off a red-colored barrel. Instead, when you interact with the environment and throw an enemy back against the wall, it takes damage from your attack and from hitting the wall. Everything has a utility in combat, and that’s beyond exciting.
Additionally, the physics-driven interactions create part of the foundation for Crimson Desert’s combat system, and that also means you’re never stuck in an animation. In combat, there is a lot of grappling or at least the opportunity to do so. With that, your character will hold a person down, and as shown in the demo and in my own experience with the hands-on demo last year, it’s not a guarantee that you won’t be uninterrupted when you do so. That means that you have to stay alert, understand your environment, and plan. That’s what dynamic combat is all about.
Real-Time Lighting and Atmospheric Effects Are Unmatched
The other area where the BlackSpace Engine excelled was with real-time lighting and atmospheric effects. By posting up in specific locations and then moving forward the day cycle, Pearl Abyss was able to highlight the effect that the moon in the night sky, clouds, and sunlight have on outdoor areas. Additionally, they were able to show us exactly how the lights of the town flickered and illuminated the streets realistically.
The engine calculates lighting in real-time, replicating detailed light behavior for increased realism, even with ray tracing disabled. Detailed atmospheric scattering effects, dynamic weather such as rain, snow, and fog, and the engine’s real-time lighting calculations all enhance the world’s graphical quality and immersion.
One of the things I appreciated from the Pearl Abyss developers during this demo was that for every element and action they showed, they peeled back the layers of polish to display the mesh and systems underneath. And it was no different for the lighting explanation. Here, we walked through a town, the light radius on display as we passed by lanterns, some flickering ever so softly. Instead of encasing your character in a bubble of light, the realism of the world impacts your vision, and what you can see is illuminated.
This also brings into account ray tracing. Up until this point, I knew “made a difference,” but it had never been explained to me how. Here, the developers broke down a dining room in a house. They looked at the shadows, the depth that the light created in the room, and the way that reflections of the environment outside were shown on shiny tiles.
Realistic Water and Fluid Simulation Makes Crimson Desert Unique
The BlackSpace Engine produces highly realistic water effects using FFT ocean simulation and shallow water simulation. The simulated water creates realistic waves, flow, and ripples, adding to the game’s immersive and graphical quality. You can see the waters break against even the smallest rocks, the tides hit and rebound, and ultimately, the impact that light has on the reflection of the surface. It’s beautiful tech that captures a world that is supposed to feel real.
For all of this, the most important thing that you have to know is that increasing the demand on your GPU won’t brick your computer. Having recently updated my computer for an MMORPG that launched a graphic update, I expected to once again find myself nearing the edge of capability. I mean, with a realistic experience like what we saw, who wouldn’t worry?
However, one of the Pearl Abyss team pulled up the specs for PC on their phone from the Steam page (listed below), driving home the fact that when you have a good engine, you don’t just make things look good, you make them accessible to people. And that’s been one of the key things that PC gaming has sorely missed. Always striving for more without taking into consideration of how many times someone will have to upgrade and the financial situation that causes just to play a game.
Minimum:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Ryzen 5 2600X / i5-8500
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 1060 / RX 6500 XT
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 100 GB available space
- Sound Card: Windows Compatible Audio Device
Recommended:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Ryzen 5 5600 / i5-11600K
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: RTX 2080 / RX 6700 XT
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 100 GB available space
- Sound Card: Windows Compatible Audio Device
Here, though, you can head to the continent of Pywel with a minimum of a GTX 1060 / RX 6500 XT and running at recommended RTX 2080 / RX 6700 XT. Yes, those numbers are far below the top of market releases. That’s the winning element right there, especially when it comes to expanding who can play the game. In fact, Crimson Desert will also run on Mac. Let that sink in.
To put it in the simplest of terms, BlackSpace Engine is something to marvel at and it just might be Pearl Abyss’s winning number as they set to release Crimson Desert.
Crimson Desert will be available on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Mac in late 2025.
I Beat 4 Crimson Desert Bosses – And I’m Hooked
Developed by Pearl Abyss, Crimson Desert is the studio’s second game, and after being teased in 2020 – it’s shaping up to be a complex combat-driven exploration adventure. In Crimson Desert, you play Kliff as he investigates events that transpire across the region of Hernand and embarks on a journey of exploration through a vast open world.
