Crimson Desert Could Feature the Most Lifelike Game Physics Ever Created

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 a new proprietary engine called BlackSpace, which builds upon the experience Pearl Abyss gained working on the Black Desert 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 BlackSpace 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 BlackSpace 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.

You’ll laugh, but the aspect of the walkthrough that impressed me the most was watching a horse get drenched in water. I haven’t seen anything like either before in any video game. As I watched protagonist Kliff ride through a stream while on horseback, Pearl Abyss showcased how only the parts of the horse that actually touched the water remained wet after leaving the stream. I’ve seen plenty of video game characters enter water and leave with their clothes still drenched, but I’ve never seen a game reflect whether only a horse’s hooves got wet, or only the legs–I even saw the horse only get partially submerged, and the game accurately reflected on the horse how drenched they got instead of reverting to a fully-drenched state.

Does any of this have anything to do with how fun Crimson Desert will be? Presumably not, and since I didn’t get a chance to play the game, I can’t speak to what the gameplay feels like–I saw a smidge of combat and exploration in action, though, and both looked pretty cool). But the BlackSpace engine is a lot more detailed than Black Desert Online looks, and it feels like Pearl Abyss is really pushing it through its paces to create as immersive an experience as the team can. For those who like to just exist in the world of an RPG and appreciate how even the smallest of details are considered, Crimson Desert might be the game to watch this year.

Crimson Desert is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC in late 2025. The game 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.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article mistakenly noted that Crimson Desert uses the same engine as Black Desert Online, when BlackSpace is actually a wholly separate engine that builds upon what Pearl Abyss used for Black Desert Online