Everything you need to know about ‘Crimson Desert' before playing

After nearly a decade of development, Pearl Abyss has officially released its ambitious open-world epic, “Crimson Desert.”

The game is set to launch on March 19, 2025, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S worldwide.

Built on a proprietary BlackSpace Engine, the game defies existing industry trends. It has implemented ray-traced global illumination and massive scale displacement mapping, which offers environmental textures unprecedented 3D depth.

Users can play three distinct modes on PS5 Pro: quality, balanced, and performance.

The launch of the game marks one of the first major titles to utilise Sony’s PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) upscaling.

Although the visual features are impressive, experts report issues with aggressive “level of detail” pop-in and some CPU-bound performance issues, especially at 60fps.

Gameplay

The game is said to be a 'clear soup,' pretty to look at, although there is a lack of depth in the story. The player takes on the role of Kliff, leader of the Greymanes, with a focus on spectacle over character development.

The major challenge of the game is its “open-world overload” as it attempts to integrate deep melee combat (a combination of traditional swordplay and professional wrestling moves), complex systems (base building, soldier management, trading), and survival mechanics (cooking and foraging system).

Hardware performance

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the game scales perfectly across modern CPUs. Despite AMD’s X3D chip holding the gaming crown, Intel’s Raptor Lake architecture signifies strong performance, though quad-core and older Zen+ chips struggle with the game’s systemic complexity.

Although it is considered overdesigned in nature, the game is being hailed as a significant achievement for Pearl Abyss.