Earlier this year at GDC in San Francisco, Pearl Abyss invited me to take a look under the hood at its new in-house engine, BlackSpace. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:What I saw was pretty mind-blowing. The studio has developed tech that feels downright futuristic. From small things like hair collision, draw distance, and dynamic weather that have a huge impact on our immersion, to big things like seamless loading, ocean and shallow water simulation, and optimization so good you don’t need a supercomputer to enjoy all of it - BlackSpace is one of the most technically impressive things I’ve seen ♉in my gaming career.

But seeing what an engine can do is different from seeing what it will do in actual games. It wasn’t until 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Summer Game Fest earlier this month that I finally got to play , the BlackSpace engine’s debut game, and see how all of this cool tech performs in action. While I have some concerns about the playability of the game itself, there’s no denying that Crimson Desert is a leap forward for the open-world genre in several ways. It’s the kind of game I expected we’d be playing on the PlayStation 6, or whatever the next thing we call an Xbox. It’s hard to believ🌠e we’ll be playing it this year.

Commanding The Battlefield

In my hour-long preview, I stepped into mercenary Kliff’s shoes as he helped an army prepare for an upcoming battle. This involved a lot of roaming around, chatting with commanders, and p🐠repping their armaments. During this section, I got a good sense of how expansive and detailed the map is. The mission area is vast, with pockets of soldiers spread out across what feels like miles of terrain, and realistically positioned to defend against an invasion.

There are major points of interest, like a castle, that serve as visual landmarks, but all of the space in between also feels occupied and alive. Everywhere you look, something is going on. Crimson Desert avoids the common pitfall of building a world that feels like it🍰 only exists in service of the player.

Crimson Desert looks almost exactly how it did in the BlackSpace preview I saw earlier this year. Even with a full-scale war unfolding across the map, mobs of NPCs batt🎃ling in the fields, and fiery explosions in the air, the game nails a level of performance and fidelity unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The only flaw I could see - and I was really looking for them - was frequent NPC pop-ins when approaching large groups, especially when moving quickly on a horse. While that’s a pretty noticeable one, it was the only thing on screen that ever took me out of the moment.

What did take me out of the moment on more than one occasion is the control scheme. Jumping into a game like this hours into the story without any kind of real tutorial is always goi🥀ng to be a challenge, but the control scheme is absurdly complex for what is ostensibly a third-person action game. If you thought Red Dead Redemption 2 had esoteric controls, strap in.

This is largely a consequence of the sheer♔ number of things you can do. Kliff is a man of many talents, so by necessity, there are a lot of actions that require multiple inputs, or sequences of inputs, to achieve. A lot of those actions are simple. You can’t walk up and press a button to talk to an NPC; you have to focus on them with a trigger button and then hit the contextual button to interact.

One of the battle prep tasks you have to do involves lifting a giant post and planting it back in the ground, which Kliff does with the help of some magic. The button sequence for this is ridiculous. First, you click both sticks together to go into focus mode, then you have to line up with the pole perfectly to produce the interact button, then you lift it, then you mash a different button to raise it over your head, then another button to grab hold of it. You later have to do this mid-boss fight, and it seems the challenge of this boss isn’t about learning his attack patterns or working on your paಌrry timing, it’s about remembering this arcane sequence of button inputs you need to do to pick things up.

The Flashiest Fighting You Ever Did See

This complexity extends to combat as well, which is ꧑more forgiving when you realize how much freedom Crimson Desert gives you when it comes to swinging swords and casting spells. Again, there are a lot of things Kliff can do,꧅ and a lot of input to learn. There’s a fighting game quality to combat, especially in the way that directional inputs influence actions. For example, there’s a button to throw enemies, but there’s actually half a dozen different ways to throw an enemy, depending on the direction you press while throwing them and the buttons you press immediately after.

Kliff’s fighting style mixes swordplay, martial arts, magical acrobatics, and elemental palm techniques, making him feel like five different character classes all at once. You can change your equipped element on the fly, imbuing Kliff wit⭕h fire, ice, or lightning - each effective against the endless hordes of enemies in different ways. I wish I could talk about the intricate tactics of combat, but my strat💛egy involved getting knocked down over and over until I could roll away and fire an arrow towards the mob that called down artillery, nuking everything within 50 feet of me. Later on, I memorized a combo that makes Kliff jump high in the air, climbing on magical platforms, then come back down with a giant smash attack. I barely knew what I was doing, but at least what I was doing looked pretty cool.

That jump attack is one I used later while battling ﷺan armored tank. Its only weak point was directly on top, and it was covered in spikes, so there was no way to get close to it. After several failed attempts, my PR guide introduced me to, I’m not kidding about this, Kliff’s Spider-Man web-swinging. I knew Kliff could transform into a black wraith and glide around, but swinging through the air on magical tethers was news to me. I was so amused by this, after the fight, my PR guide also showed me how you can climb a tree (oh, also there’s Breath of the Wild climbing in this game) and bend it back to catapult yourself like in an old Goofy cartoon.

I 🐼don’t understand how Crimson Desert is a real game, but I’m utterly fascinated by it. Pearly Abyss decided to not only make a game with the highest fidelity ever, but also to make a game that’s, somehow, every game. I imagine there was a brainstorming session early on with all of the developers. People shouted out ideas, and they got written down on a huge dry-erase board. The next step is usually narrowing that list down, but for some reason, they decided they should do all of it.

I’m wildly impressed by every aspect of Crimson Desert, and while I can’t say yet if all of it adds up to a game I’ll actually want to play, I enjoyed the extravagance of it all. If nothing else, Crimson Desert is a spectacle; one that has to be seen 𝔉to be believed.