1 kilometer and 10 meters – how Pearl Abyss taught players to trust the horizon in Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss revealed the main goal behind the open world in Crimson Desert. Developers wanted every point players could spot in the distance to be reachable. The studio called that trust in the horizon its greatest achievement.

During a talk at Gamescom Dev, the team behind the Pywel region explained what it took to bring that idea to life. According to the developers, earning player trust in the horizon line turned out to be worth more than almost anything else they made.

Pywel became one of the densest and most varied open worlds in recent years. Following its March release, the game got mixed reviews over its technical polish, but almost everyone praised the scale of the world. The region combines several biomes, deep dungeons, huge sky-borne zones, and massive urban spaces.

Still, the task wasn't just about making the map big. The graphics division working on Pearl Abyss game engine had the hardest job. Developers needed to optimize and scale the world so it stayed technically efficient while remaining easy to explore.

Pearl Abyss Environment Artist Geuntae Ahn admitted the team made mistakes more than once, building locations that looked great but weren't fun to explore. A striking image on screen doesn't always translate into a space worth digging through:

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.

To pull this off, the team started judging every landmark from two distances – one kilometer away and ten meters away. First, an object needed to read clearly as a speck on the horizon, then hold up once players actually reached it. Natural areas had to feel dense, but not so dense that they got in the way of scanning for the next objective or point of interest.

Ahn noted that nature was never designed with video games in mind, so recreating it convincingly remains a constant challenge. Beauty and explorability, he said, are not the same thing.

A separate problem came from differing standards among developers, which made it hard to stitch together hundreds of pieces of the sprawling map.

The BlackSpace engine, built specifically for Crimson Desert, went through several technical overhauls during development and continues evolving for the studio future releases.