GDC 2025: We Saw Under The Hood Of Crimson Desert's Engine, Here Are Some Of Our Takeaways

So many games on today’s market look fantastic, highlighting the strides developers have made from both an artistic and technical point nowadays. One company that has always been known for great visuals, though, is Pearl Abyss.

The house that Black Desert Online built has always set itself apart from other MMO developers as having one of the best-looking games in the genre, even going back a decade. Indeed, Black Desert Online still holds up as the MMO enters its second decade of operation, but its next major title, Crimson Desert, takes those visuals up a notch, thanks to the company’s in-house next-generation engine, BlackSpace. 

During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, Pearl Abyss gave us an under-the-hood look at the engine and talked about the advantages of utilizing a bespoke engine versus working with a third-party option. Here are some of the key takeaways from our deep dive. It should be noted that what we saw was a hands-off demo running on a bespoke engine demo designed to push everything to its limits, using Crimson Desert’s Pywel as the playground. 

It Creates Incredible Interactive Worlds

One of the first things I do in any game whose developers describe the world as “living and breathing” is to try to sit in the chairs, on the benches, on beds, and more. This simple action, especially in an MMO, showcases just how interactive and alive a world will truly be the more I get into them. 

Some games allow this action, and those worlds always feel more interactive than those who don’t. Others when pulling off a “/sit” emote will see the character either pop a squat right on the floor, clip through a chair, or pull out a chair of their own from their pocket, defying both the laws of physics and bag space. 

However, the BlackSpace Engine is being built to create an incredibly interactive world with not just Crimson Desert, but the future titles in Pearl Abyss’ pipeline, namely DokeV and Plan 8. 

No only could our demoist sit on any chair Kliff, the protagonist in Crimson Desert, but he could even realistically pop a squat on a ledge overlooking the continent of Pywel, hang out on the top of a roof, on a staircase, and more. 

This continued, with Kliff able to freeze parts of a river using an ice arrow, creating some icy platforms to hop across, or fire arrows thunking into wooden palisades, turning the once stout defenses into charred steaks, easily blasted apart by an attack. 

Environments can be destructible, from a hill fort to the forest you are walking through. While it does have its limitations (we couldn’t set the trees in the forest on fire, for example), it does point to a world I can’t wait to test the limits of when I can finally get my hands on Crimson Desert, the first BlackSpace Engine game coming down the pipeline.

Oh, and if you forgot, you can pet the dog. And cat.

It Can Trace All The Rays

Raytracing is becoming more and more mainstream, with each successive Nvidia, AMD, and now Intel generation of GPU able to handle this version of rendering better than the last. Many games nowadays require a GPU capable of raytracing, and while the system requirements of Crimson Desert doesn’t point to that future, it still has plenty of raytracing elements for those who are able to leverage it.

This was best demonstrated inside a stone tavern, watching the light realistically bounce and filter through the windows, streaming into the space. It was as clear as day when raytracing had been turned on - light more realistically filled the room, diffused where it would naturally, with bounce lighting casting a realistic hue of whatever the ray was bouncing from across the stonework. Shadows looked more accurate than their standard rasterized counterparts. 

This solution is global as well, with all lighting calculated in real-time and reacting to the weather in the game, such as an overcast day or light reacting normally through dense volumetric fog. 

Some of the most impressive examples of raytracing nowadays heavily rely on reflective surfaces or emissives to really drive home what’s going on around the player. Cyberpunk 2077, which when you turn on the RT Overdrive preset I still maintain is the best looking game I’ve ever played, is an example of this. It’s much easier to see the benefits of raytracing when it’s being reflected right into your face at every turn, whether it’s a water puddle or a glass wall in Night City. 

Crimson Desert’s solution is just as impressive, but given the nature of the world of Pywel, it’s not as immediately noticeable. But, when it’s on it can transform a scene, as shown in the video above. The middle example especially highlights what raytracing can bring to the table, with more accurate shadows being cast onto the wall of the shop thanks to the light streaming into the room from behind Kliff. In the feasting hall, look at the rafters on the top right and you’ll notice when using standard ambient occlusion shadows, there is so much lost detail because it’s simply trying to approximate how the light would react there. With raytracing, it’s being done accurately, and as a result the occlusion is much clearer, more in line with what we’d experience in real life.

I think my favorite example of this, though, is how the light moves through volumetrics in a scene. Good volumetric fog makes me happy in a way I’m not sure I can describe, and the BlackSpace Engine’s solution makes good fog. 

Using Fluid and Froxel Raymarching, the fog will realistically react to movement and flow naturally in an environment. Yet when the light hits the fog, it illuminates it realistically, highlighting the density and look of the fog. It’s impressive in motion, and I honestly can’t wait to wade into the soup myself. 

Kliff is an Air Bender (sort of)

So any good engine can simulate weather effects, from rain battering a muddy hillside to wind whipping around causing flags to flutter, adding life and energy into a scene. 

I remember the first time I played Ghost of Tsushima and the wind in that game (and, actually, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt a few years prior) and being super impressed with how the environment always felt alive. From particles fluttering around me to the reeds and trees bending with the wind, it adds so much to a scene. 

The BlackSpace Engine is no different here, as wind currents are simulated naturally, and it affects nearly everything around the character. Kliff’s hair and clothes react naturally to the wind, changing how they move with the current’s direction and intensity. Even Kliff’s horse sees his man and tail react accordingly. 

Remember those destructible objects as well? Well, things break in a way that is consistent with the physics of the world - so they don’t simply crumble, but instead are destroyed naturally, equal the force used to cause the destruction. 

A few of Kliff’s attacks can also create wind, drawing air in and expelling it outward from him. Blasting a tree away will not only see the shards of wood fly away from Kliff realistically, but if you look closely enough, the wind he creates will also interact with the world around him, from his clothes and hair to the grass underfoot. 

This is all GPU-based simulation as well, which should result in a much more performant result in the final game versus these calculations being done CPU-side. 

Everything Just Looks So Good

All of this comes together with some rather great art design. While Crimson Desert specifically is set in a more fantasy-themed world, many of its landscapes and towns look like they could exist in our world. From the hilly landscapes to the accurate simulation of how water flows (using FFT Ocean Simulation and Shallow Water Simulation), everything looks incredible. 

This is helped by the fact that BlackSpace uses PBR rendering on materials, allowing them to both look and react like their real-world counterparts. Metal accents on armor reflect the light around them, while torches realistically cast their light (and the shadows they create) during a dark scene. 

It’s not just the lighting that does this, though. Pearl Abyss have created a world that looks incredible, even at far distances. 

Standing atop a hill at the start of our demo, I was told that much of what I saw in the distance was using imposter trees and foliage, mimicking the look of dense forestry and hillsides without actually needing to load it all in, making it easier on the engine at any given moment. 

I’ll be honest, I could not tell the difference, even when I was told that the majority of the dense forest ahead of me wasn’t actually rendered other than the trees closest to Kliff. I’ve seen other games use imposter sprites before, but it’s usually rather easy to tell the difference - and see when the sprites are swapped out for their full-fat 3D models. 

Not here. 

This is especially important in a game where you can effectively go to any point in the distance - including the sky above you. Skydiving was highlighted in our demo (and I remember seeing hot air balloons in some trailers, so I daresay I’ll be doing some aerial tourism myself eventually), and in order to allow for this to seamlessly and smoothly load, Pearl Abyss needed to optimize the draw distance in BlackSpace.

The result, at least in this engine demo, was a world that looked just as seamless as I’m sure the team at PA hoped. 

There’s No Bloat

One of the consistent themes during the nearly hour-long demo was that this engine was being built for the future of Pearl Abyss IP. One of the advantages of building the engine in-house is a fewfold, from the institutional knowledge within your team of engineers versus having to hop on calls with a third party to work through something to the fact that unless the game being built actually needs a feature, it’s just not present.

This limits the bloat on the engine itself and focuses developer time on what is really needed. The engine itself doesn’t have anymore than what is essential for the types of games Pearl Abyss envisions building on BlackSpace. 

Because it’s an in-house engine as well, if something needs to be added or tweaked, it can be done quickly, built with the game it’s being made for in mind. This also has the added benefit of being able to create something that scales across a multitude of platforms and GPUs easily - as Crimson Desert’s release on console and low-ish PC requirements can attest.

It was incredibly neat to see under the hood of one of the more impressive-looking engines on the horizon, especially as the anticipation for Crimson Desert continues to build. I’ve always been curious about BlackSpace ever since Pearl Abyss announced it years ago, and seeing how it’s powering their next major title, but also setting itself up to power the future of Pearl Abyss is intriguing. 

I can’t wait to hop in with Kliff myself and truly explore everything BlackSpace can throw at me, and in turn see what all I can throw at it in the future.