Crimson Desert Might Have The Most Realistic In-Game Physics I’ve Ever Seen
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
While at GDC 2025, I spoke with a few members of Pearl Abyss, the developer and publisher responsible for sandbox MMORPG Black Desert Online. The team is now working on a single-player action-adventure game called Crimson Desert, which uses the same custom Black Desert game engine specifically designed for the first game. Crimson Desert sees you play as Kliff, a mercenary who finds himself repeatedly dragged into conflicts that threaten to plunge the world of Pywel and its people into chaos.
During the GDC conversation with Pearl Abyss, the studio gave me an under-the-hood look at the Black Desert engine in action, showcasing how it manages to recreate how fire, water, light, wind, and a whole lot more work in the real world.
The backbone of the Black Desert engine seems to be how quickly it can handle rendering Crimson Desert’s seamless and remarkably detailed world, a medieval high fantasy continent called Pywel. My tour through the open world via a dev kit included examples of cloth and hair reacting to changing wind direction, shadows moving in conjunction to multiple light sources of various intensities, and various degrees of severity when it came to different weather conditions, all of which influenced NPCs and certain elements (like water and wind) to behave in a believable way.
