Games go to great lengths to conceal the duct tape, bubblegum, and live crabs holding them together. I know the crabs are in there; you can't hide them from me. So it's always a treat to look behind the curtain and see what's actually going on. Ordinarily I want the smoke and mirrors, but sometimes I also want to see where the smoke is being pumped in from or where the mirrors are suspended. So I leapt at the chance for a nitty-gritty guided demo of the BlackSpace Engine, a new proprietary game engine behind developer Pearl Abyss' latest ambitions, including the upcoming open-world action game Crimson Desert.
A game engine is basically a framework of software and tools used to make games. BlackSpace isn't just the Crimson Desert engine, and future games that use it will likely make considerable tweaks – the same engine can be used to produce radically different games – but Crimson Desert did make for a good showing of what it can do. Crimson Desert was already on my radar because it feels like a single-player evolution of Black Desert, an MMO that I essentially played as a single-player RPG for hundreds of hours, so I walked into this oddball appointment with hungry eyes. I was joined by several Pearl Abyss shepherds and, virtually, by Kwanghyeon Go and Kyungjoon Cho, respectively the heads of the game engine graphic and system divisions, all crowded around a monitor in a neon-seared meeting room.
