As we learned at The Game Awards 2024, Korean developer Pearl Abyss finally nailed down a release window for Crimson Desert. The game was first unveiled at G-Star 2019, and back then, it was still billed as an MMO that was not too dissimilar from the studio’s premiere game, Black Desert. Not long afterward, the developer announced a genre change from MMO to single-player open-world action/adventure, albeit still with optional multiplayer support. Back then, the game was still tentatively headed toward a Winter 2021 launch, but in July 2021, Pearl Abyss said the project had been indefinitely delayed.
Crimson Desert only resurfaced at Gamescom 2023 with a gameplay trailer. Multiplayer appears to have been silently cut, but other than that, communication has been constant, and there have even been limited hands-on opportunities at various conventions. At the recent Game Developers Conference 2025 in San Francisco, Pearl Abyss put the spotlight on the game’s BlackSpace Engine. According to the team, the proprietary technology can render vast, sprawling, and seamless open worlds with great detail. In the game, Kliff and his fellow Greymanes will traverse a variety of landscapes, including lush forests, medieval-inspired cities, snow-capped mountains, and vast deserts.
The simulations running under the hood of the BlackSpace Engine augment the realism of the environments: trees, grass, cloth, and hair are all naturally affected by wind movement. The environments featured in Crimson Desert also support real-time physics and destructibility, not to mention volumetric fog, real-time lighting, detailed atmospheric scattering effects, and dynamic weather. Optionally, ray tracing can further enhance visual realism. The engine also supports highly realistic water effects thanks to the usage of FFT Ocean simulation and Shallow Water simulation, creating realistic waves, currents, and ripples.
Lastly, the BlackSpace engine also improves combat encounters thanks to the detailed hit reactions and physics-based interactions. Object destruction can vary depending on the force applied, and enemies can dynamically collide with the environment, adding depth to combat. Pearl Abyss has shared several brief videos of the technology. You can find them embedded throughout this article.
Gameplay-wise, Crimson Desert promises a great variety of traditional content (quests, puzzles, dungeons), ‘life’ content (cooking, hunting, mining, gathering, fishing, crafting, horse taming), and a fairly complex combat system that combines parrying, blocking, dodging, jumping, and even some wrestling moves. The players will create their own unique combos.
Crimson Desert is slated to launch this Fall on PC and Mac, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.