Crimson Desert Devs Reveal Something ‘Worth More Than Almost Anything We Made’

When Pearl Abyss was assembling the gargantuan open-world game, Crimson Desert, the team maintained a concrete mission: to ensure that if a player could see something in the distance, they could reach it. During a recent talk at Gamescom Dev, representatives piecing together the environment of Pywel detailed the effort required to bring the world to life and achieve the ultimate goal of getting players to trust the horizon. According to the team, securing that trust was worth more than almost anything else they made.

Pywel represents a diverse, dense open-world environment. When Crimson Desert was released in March, it landed with a mixed reception regarding game polish, but reviewers and players universally appreciated the monumental scale of the world. The realm features multiple biomes comprising deep dungeons, enormous sky-borne areas, and massive cityscapes. During development, the project expanded beyond simple scale. The Game Engine Graphics Division at Pearl Abyss faced challenges optimizing and scaling the world to make it technically efficient, accessible, and conducive to player exploration.

Geuntae Ahn, an environment artist at Pearl Abyss, explained during the Gamescom Dev talk that the team occasionally failed by making areas that looked beautiful on screen but were not necessarily playable or fun to navigate. The developers wanted the environment to serve as content rather than mere backdrop. To achieve this, they examined landmarks from two perspectives: one kilometer away and ten meters away. This approach focused on viewing a location as a speck on the horizon, traveling to it, and experiencing it up close. Natural areas needed to feel dense while accommodating horizon scanning for objectives.

Ahn noted that replicating nature for video games presents inherent challenges because natural environments were not originally designed to facilitate gameplay. Furthermore, differing standards among developers created hurdles when attempting to mesh hundreds of portions of the sprawling map together. The BlackSpace engine, developed to host Crimson Desert, underwent technical revolutions over the years and continues to evolve to support future releases from the studio.