Pearl Abyss unveiled the believable, hyper-realistic graphics of the BlackSpace Engine that is at the heart of the upcoming Crimson Desert game.
Debuting in late 2025, Crimson Desert will showcase high-end visual fidelity thanks to the proprietary game engine, the developers said in a demo during the Game Developers Conference. The graphics look pretty extraordinary, when highlighted from certain perspectives. The open world action-adventure game is coming for Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Mac. I got a good briefing on the tech and the strategy behind making the company’s own game engine.
Engine strategy
From the outset, Pearl Abyss aimed to showcase games imbued with its unique style by utilizing its proprietary engines for games like Black Desert, which used the predecessor BlackDesert Engine. The company developed its own engine to achieve the aspects it considers important in games, such as intense and dynamic action, realistic graphics, and detailed open worlds. The engine demo build is not the same as the game build itself.
The engine reflects the goal of implementing elements that gamers see and experience within the game in a way that is uniquely Pearl Abyss. The Crimson Desert development team aims to meet high visual standards and create a high-quality game focused on delivering realism and an intricately detailed world.
Ultimately, Pearl Abyss is developing with the goal of immersing players in a visually stunning world and providing an enjoyable gaming experience powered by the BlackSpace Engine. The proprietary BlackSpace Engine, embodies the company’s development philosophy by empowering the team to craft their unique game style while granting them full control over the engine’s technology. From the beginning, the engine was designed to create highly detailed worlds that offer deep player immersion and to support features such as multi platform support.
The engine philosophy aligns with Pearl Abyss’s standards and vision, building upon the experience gained from developing ‘Black Desert’ on PC, mobile, and console with the “Black Desert Engine”, which greatly contributed to the birth of “BlackSpace Engine.”
Pearl Abyss has accumulated knowledge and know-how from developing its previous Black Desert Engine and the development of the BlackSpace Engine benefited from those learnings. While the Black Desert engine continues to evolve with the development of the Black Desert franchise, the BlackSpace Engine has been specifically designed to power Pearl Abyss’ new IP in development, including Crimson Desert.
A free fall into the world of Crimson Desert
The demo started out on a perch on a floating structure high above the world of Crimson Desert. I could see for many miles in just about any direction, and then my character jumped off the ledge and began floating downward.
“This new engine was built very much for a singular purpose, to make amazing open world games and make those games with hyper realism in mind,” said a member of the team. “It’s not necessarily with just graphics because you see it’s still very stylized. But it also has hyper realism in terms of interactivity.”
While the character was sky diving, the dev added, “The development team put a lot of time and focus into things like draw distance, seamless loading and distance rendering.”
The seamless rendering uses hierarchical level subdivision for distance rendering.
“We use something called proxy LODs to optimize distance rendering. There’s a lot other stuff going on behind the scenes there, but those things work together to make this view look as realistic as possible, like the real world,” the dev said. “Just like in real world, you know, the things that are further away from us, we’re seeing them in less detail.”
As the dev pointed that out, I could see that the terrain in the center of the image was clear, but the ground detail around the edges was more fuzzy. I didn’t even notice that at first. The devs toggled the detail on and off and I could see the level of detail shift in the image. Depending on where you looked there was a disparity between the loaded and non-loaded images.
At this point in the demo, I veered off into questions about how they connected multiple shards. Getting back to that “sniper and the metaverse” problem, I wondered what it would be like if a sniper (in a modern game, not Crimson Desert) could fire a bullet across multiple shards, or game regions. Typically, each shard is assigned to a different server. What would happen to that bullet if it crossed a shard line?
The dev responded that there are systems that are localized to a given region and there is a hierarchical level subdivision that takes effect. There are global systems like weather and like time of day that are that are consistent across the entire map. So there isn’t a singular instance where part of a part of the world, or like a global system, is not affecting part of the world. Combat, however, is mostly localized to small regions. The loading optimized around travel speed.
Seamless loading
Players can witness the sheer draw distance involved in rendering the vast continent Pywel. This expansive world is not merely a backdrop but a tangible landscape that players can physically explore.
“It’s a good big picture representation of the graphical standards that we strive for in our games that we create with the BlackSpace Engine,” a game dev said. “So all of this sprawling landscape that you’re seeing here right now with the desert, those kind of snowy mountains on the left here. These are not background images. They’re all places that you can actually go to as your character in the game.
Crafted with an emphasis on rendering and seamless loading, the world heightens immersion by optimizing draw distance and ensures smooth gameplay. Especially during high-speed skydiving, players can experience immersive sensations reminiscent of real world dynamics.
The game follows the journey of the protagonist Kliff and his Greymane comrades as they embark on a mission in the vast continent of Pywel. Crimson Desert offers compelling characters and diverse stories combined with intense action-packed gameplay. Pearl Abyss is dedicated to providing a top-tier gaming experience designed to captivate a global audience.
The game takes place on the vast continent of Pywel. Embark on the adventure of a lifetime as you traverse lush forests, medieval cities, quaint villages, frigid mountains and scorching desert.
In the game, you can travel across Pywel with a variety of mobility options at players’ disposal—walk, climb, ride mounts, glide through the air, and even skydive to explore its vast landscapes. For a unique and breathtaking experience, ride flying mounts, soaring above the world and taking in stunning views from high above.
The seamless open world has been made possible through Pearl Abyss’ proprietary BlackSpace Engine that is capable of creating expansive terrains that come to life thanks to the highly detailed in-game objects and structures. Further immersion is realized through real-time changing environments and weather changes, including temperature changes.
While the environment is massive, the game and combat system is very tactical as well. Players can combine various elements such as Kliff’s sword and shield, bow, and even scavenge weapons dropped by enemies to create combos and experience gripping gameplay. Furthermore, players can use jumping, blocking, parrying, and wrestling-inspired special moves to create their own unique combos, which is a key feature of Crimson Desert that allows them to shape battles with their own distinctive combat playstyle.
Dynamic combat (realism and impact of battles)
Crimson Desert delivers intense and dynamic combat that captures the authenticity 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.
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.
The devs had the character land inside a fort on the ground. Then the combat started. The warrior fired flaming errors at gunpowder barrels on the ground and under the towers, causing a massive amount of destruction in the wooden fort and its various destructible structures and objects. If you knock down an enemy, that enemy can knock others down behind him.
“The level of force applied to an object can also affect the amount of debris that that object creates as it destructs,” the dev said. ” So even tiny, subtle details like that can make a difference in graphics quality.”
You can also shoot out a blast of ice at enemies and freeze them, and the result is cool ice physics. You can wear down doors or break them down altogether. The dev fired a bunch of flaming objects at a gate. The gate started burning, and that made it easy to destroy the gate into pieces with more force later on
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. From strands of hair to the manes and tails of horses, each aspect is realistically portrayed. The natural movement of trees and grass in the wind, along with cloth fluttering on village lines, are 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.
Realistic fog effect is achieved by Fluid and Froxel Raymarching, intricately showcasing how fog swirls as Kliff moves. As the natural lighting changes along time, it affects the density and color of the fog, 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.
In Crimson Desert, all lighting is calculated in real-time, ensuring natural lighting effects by synchronizing the movement of particle elements with the lights, such as fire.
Weather in Crimson Desert is 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 resulting 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.
The beauty of the world
Looking at the horizon, the devs were able to speed up time using something called unified atmospheric scattering with volumetric clouds. This allows the clouds to move in real time across the sky. The clouds move using tech called atmospheric scattering. You can see god rays shining from the heavens. At night, you can see the moon go behind clouds and see the change in lighting as a result, depending on the cloud density. That adds more believability to the world. In the rain, non-player characters (NPCs) will hold up their hands to shield their faces from the rain. It’s another small detail that adds realism.
They showed me a night scene in the game that was easy to create because they could play with the global illumination. Then, in a dev-only mode, you could see that the light sources came from objects like street lamps in the town. So you could see the light sources and how the scene looked with ray tracing enabled or disabled.
The water simulation was also excellent, with waves looking realistic. The foam in the water around rocks also gave the scene a more realistic look. Whether it was a mountain stream or a rocky beach, the water collisions and flow looked accurate.
The objects like rocks in the water affect the flow of water. It made the world look all the more believable.
“The fastest you can go mostly vertically is if you’re skydiving, but if you’re going horizontally, then it’s around your horse speed,” said the dev. “So you’re never going to be traveling in this the system using something like a fighter jet, so the metaverse question is moot.
You can now climb trees or cliff sides or scale buildings as well. If you see a mountain in the distance, you’ll be able to climb that mountain too. If you don’t want to run around a cliff, you can scale it, if you have the stamina for that.
The team also created “shape variation,” which allows for slight variations in tree designs so that all of the trees don’t look the same in a forest. The result is a more natural looking wilderness.
When a character gets dunked in the water, you can see the character’s hair get wet. You can also see a change in the sheen on a horse if it goes into the water. Cloth simulations also looked great in the demo, with a bunch of banners flapping in the wind. When you see a rider’s cloak collide with a horses body, the resulting effect looks natural thanks to the physics that govern the collision. This attention to detail matters, the dev said, because small errors can completely ruin the sense of immersion in a game.
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