Earlier this month, Pearl Abyss hosted its first-ever North American Calpheon Ball, bringing its celebration to Los Angeles to reveal the future of Black Desert, as well as celebrate the work so far. During the event, we had the chance to chat with the executive producer of Black Desert, Jaehee Kim.
It was a pretty momentous occasion, bringing the ball and all its trappings to Los Angeles, but for Kim, he seemed pretty happy with the result, stating that it confirmed something he said on stage: we, as gamers, are all connected.
“Today has been a day I confirmed that, as gamers, we are all connected,” Kim tells us through a translator at the Ball. And it was quite the day, as the Calpheon Ball proved that fully. Gamers from around the world joined us at the Ball in Long Beach to celebrate Black Desert with the developers and other players, winning prizes, meeting friends we only get to see digitally, and celebrating with a game that means so much to so many people.
Pearl Abyss is a global company, and leading up to the Calpheon Ball that was shown, as events were held in Europe and in Korea to celebrate the announcements made on stage.
And it’s been a great year for Black Desert, whether you’re playing on PC, Console or even Mobile, as the company has had a lot to celebrate. The release of the Mountain of Eternal Winter brought a new starting experience and region to the MMO, while throughout the year new classes were introduced giving players even more ways to play.
And while the MMORPG celebrated its eighth year anniversary this year, it’s looking ahead to the future. During the Calpheon Ball, the Pearl Abyss team announced two new classes, one of which is already live in-game on PC: the Woosa and the Maegu. While we’ll see the Mobile Maegu make her way to PC in January (while Woosa will be jumping to Mobile), we also got a glimpse of the next major content release: The Land of the Morning Light.
What interested me most was how passionate the developers looked on stage talking about the upcoming region, and most specifically its influences. Taking inspiration from Korean legends and myths, it’s a departure from Black Desert’s traditionally Western fantasy themes.
“At the beginning, we were focusing more on making the game more likable throughout the whole global community. That used to be our goal at the time. But after servicing the game for more than eight years, we had the thought that maybe we can add more Korean themes to the game. It doesn’t mean that it has to be Korean, it’s just that as Korean, of course, it was one of the easy theme options that we can choose for the game to be applied as new content.”
The themes of the myths that are drawn upon for the Land of Morning Light are clear as day and it’s a striking difference compared to the more Western-themed areas of the MMORPG. And, on the surface, it looks to be a nice change of pace. I’m personally excited to explore this new region and see how these legends, folklore and stories from the backyard of the Pearl Abyss team translate into the world of Black Desert.
However, as the team stated on stage when they announced the new region and some of the design elements around it, localizing and getting the themes across to a global audience might prove difficult. However, the team seems up to the challenge.
“It’s been a constant struggle as to how we should localize something that’s so Korean,” Jaehee tells us when asking whether they think anything would literally be lost in translation. Kim compares this to localizing something from either China or Japan, both countries whose stories thanks to anime, movies, and more, might have a bit more familiarity with a global audience.
“Compared to say China or Japan, many of these unique concepts or stories, or words that exist in Korea are not that actually commonly known compared to that of China or Japan. So it will actually be a big challenge to us to localize these concepts for a Western audience. It is always a balancing game between making it super Western-friendly or keep the original identity of Korea. It’s actually [a] super hard process, but we just try to find what’s best for the game.”
How that process proceeds is the culmination of experience building the MMORPG for the last eight or more years, according to Jaehee. Taking those lessons learned when developing experiences like Atoraxxion, the co-op dungeon, or even the creation of more storytelling focused content. That accumulated experience helps develop the next great adventure for Black Desert players.
While that accumulated experience helps to create new content that is both engaging, yet familiar to the themes and style of Black Desert, Pearl Abyss, according to Jaehee, is a studio that aims to try new things as well. Enter the two Twin Classes announced at the Calpheon Ball: the Woosa and Maegu. The discussions surrounding gender, the types of weapons the new class should use and more helped to define what would ultimately be the two Twin Classes that fit well into the theme of the upcoming Land of the Morning Light.
“We are developers who don’t want to try anything that we tried already. So there were many mulling over moments: What kind of weapons should we give her? What kind of gender is it going to be? When it comes to weapons, because we have so many classes, we pretty much used all our options. So that’s [one of the reasons] we chose the fan.”
Funnily enough, it seems that the Eastern theming of the region and the new classes are a coincidence, mainly due to the fact that many of the Western-themed weapon options have been used already in Black Desert.
“When it comes to the Land of the Morning Light, the new expansion region, we have been developing it for such a long time, many years and years. It requires so much discussion, combo and effort to come up with this level of completion of the region. That being said, we pretty much used up all the other weapon options when it comes to the Western weapon options, since Black Desert is heavily, fundamentally a Western-themed MMORPG.
“But now we have Eastern combat options left and like, coincidentally we have been developing this Eastern-themed region, the Land of the Morning Light. So you could say it’s by coincidence, but at the same time, if we didn’t have this expansion region we’ve been developing, such a coincidence would not be made.”
As far as how the two classes became twins, Jaehee says it’s thanks to an animation team member who suggested the idea.
“We had an idea of releasing one class for PC and another, a different class for mobile,” Kim explains. “But there was one animation team member who came up this idea of why don’t we, lore-wise, make them Twins? There’s going to be a sense of connection between these two classes. That’s how this all began.”
And according to Jaehee, conversations already seem underway for the designing of the next class after these two release.
“These are the conversations we have all the time.”
It was clear from the moment the first developer took the stage to the conversations with Black Desert employees around the venue, the passion on display rivals that of any studio out there. The pride the team took in not only showing their work to passionate players eager for the next big adventure, but also taking a step back to talk about the year that was for Black Desert. I heard conversations about Atoraxxion episodes from players, or the Abyss One: Magnus puzzles (which Jaehee tells me were his favorite piece of Black Desert content to work on this year), each attendee excitedly talking about this game that brought them all to downtown Long Beach.
As the Ball raged on behind us, it was a time to reflect on the year that was Black Desert for the team. Kim says that this offline event, held in a foreign land, is such a symbolic way to end 2022 for the studio. But looking ahead to 2023, he smiled as he gave his answer.
“We’re looking forward to the Calpheon Ball 2023.”
Full Disclosure: Pearl Abyss provided travel and accommodations for the Calpheon Ball 2022.
