Pearl Abyss’ upcoming game Crimson Desert will be powered by their own proprietary game engine dubbed the BlackSpace Engine.
And at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2025, the South Korean developers show off what it’s capable of.
And it sure is capable at making realistic graphics.
You can see the clips that the dev team showed here, as posted by IGN, showing five different scenes showcasing five different tech and capabilities the BlackSpace Engine has.
The following descriptions are as per Pearl Abyss’ press release:
Seamless Open-World Exploration: The BlackSpace Engine renders vast, far-reaching open worlds in great detail and allows for a continuous exploration experience with its seamless loading. Players can traverse a wide variety of landscapes including forests, medieval cities, snowy mountains, and vast deserts, with the world around them rendering in real-time.
Detailed Physics and Environmental Interactions: The engine’s simulations enhance environmental realism, with trees, grass, cloth and hair swaying naturally in response to wind and movement, enhancing the world’s believability. Destructible environments, real-time physics interactions, and details like volumetric fog create a dynamic, living world where objects and surroundings respond intuitively to the player’s actions.
Dynamic and Realistic Combat: The BlackSpace Engine brings weight and impact to every combat encounter. Detailed hit reactions and physics-driven interactions create part of the foundation for Crimson Desert’s deeply engaging combat system. Object destruction can vary depending on the force applied, and enemies can collide with the environment dynamically, adding depth to battles.
Real-Time Lighting and Atmospheric Effects: The engine calculates lighting in real-time, replicating detailed light behavior for increased realism, even with ray tracing disabled. Detailed atmospheric scattering effects, dynamic weather such as rain, snow, and fog, and the engine’s real-time lighting calculations all enhance the world’s graphical quality and immersion.
Realistic Water and Fluid Simulation: Using FFT Ocean Simulation and Shallow Water Simulation, the BlackSpace Engine produces highly realistic water effects. The simulated water creates realistic waves, flow, and ripples, adding to the game’s immersive and graphical quality.
That final clip is the most impressive of the lot, showing how the game engine can create believable ocean waves as well as flowing water.
Game developers these days have rarely invested in making new game engines. These are costly endeavours, and it adds up later on as new developers joining the team must learn a new, specific workflow. It’s why the current trend sees game developers use only a handful of commercial game engines (Unreal, Unity, etc.) and for the large teams that do make their own engine, they are being used in multiple projects (like EA’s Frostbite).
So to see Pearl Abyss coming up with their own tech from the ground-up just for this one game sure is impressive, though we hope it all pays off.
Crimson Desert is an upcoming open world game which follows protagonist Kliff and his comrades traverse the continent of Pywel. The game is expected to release in late 2025 (no firm release date yet) for the PS5, PC (Steam), Mac, and Xbox Series X|S.