When Pearl Abyss was assembling the gargantuan open-world game, Crimson Desert, they were hyper-focused on delivering one concrete mission. That was to ensure that if you could see something in the distance, you could reach it.
During a recent talk at Gamescom Dev, the folks piecing together the environment of Pywel in Crimson Desert spoke about what it took to bring this all to life and to achieve the ultimate goal of getting players to ‘trust the horizon’.
In their words, securing that trust was ‘worht more than almost anything else we made.’
Pywel Isn’t Just Massive – It’s Also Deep
Pywel represents one of the most diverse, dense open-world environments in recent years. When Crimson Desert was released in March, it landed with a mixed reception because of the polish of the game, but one thing that was universally appreciated was the monumental scale of the world of Pywel.
It was a multi-biome, expansive realm comprised of deep dungeons, enormous sky-borne areas, and massive cityscapes.
But when Crimson Desert was being developed, it became about more than just making something large. The team working in the Game Engine Graphics Division of Pearl Abyss especially had a hard time. They had to optimize and scale this world in a way that made it technically efficient and also accessible and conducive to player exploration habits.
In the talk at Gamescom Dev, Geuntae Ahn, Environment Artist at Pearl Abyss, explained how they’d failed at times because they made something beautiful that wasn’t necessarily playable. Just because something looks great on screen, that doesn’t mean it’s a joy for players to dig through.
He said:
We didn’t want our environment to just be backdrops; we wanted out environment to be content.
If you can see it in the distance, you should be able to go there.
They started examining landmarks from two perspectives – 1 kilometer away and ten meters away. It was about seeing it as a speck on the horizon, making your way to it, and then experiencing it up close. The world, particularly the more natural parts of it, needed to feel dense, but also accommodate ‘scanning’ the horizon for the next objective or point of interest.
As Ahn said, nature was never designed to facilitate video games, so replicating it as closely as possible in one has always been a challenge.
Beauty and explorability are not the same thing.
The team ran into more issues when they found that, between developers, standards fluctuated, and it became tough to mesh together hundreds of portions of this sprawling open-world map. The BlackSpace engine developed to host Crimson Desert underwent many technical revolutions in the years that the team worked on the game, and it’s still evolving today to accommodate what the team is releasing next.
Do you think Pearl Abyss succeeded in developing a stunning open-world map in Crimson Desert? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out what Embark Studios has said about anti-cheat at Gamescom, and don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Comments