One of 2026’s biggest games will undoubtedly be Crimson Desert, the colossal open-world action RPG from Pearl Abyss that’s set in the same world as the studio’s acclaimed 2017 MMORPG Black Desert Online. Now less than two months away — it’s got a scheduled release date of March 19 on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PS5 — hype for the game is starting to ramp up significantly, spurred on by a new impressive 15-minute gameplay showcase.
Last week, the team at Pearl Abyss announced that the ambitious new title has officially gone gold, meaning that its main development has been finished. Now, the developers say they’re in the “optimization phase,” and are focusing on making sure the game runs well.
“Yeah, we’ll show 4K 60 native, sure, with ray tracing on, that’s not done through DLSS or FSR, that’s done natively in-engine,” Powers explained. “And then if you want to further optimize then you can tweak all the settings and do all the things, but we want to show that you don’t have to — like the game itself should be able to stand on its own.”
Making its own engine in-house instead of using something widely available, he noted, gave Pearl Abyss the ability to fine-tune its tools for exactly what it needed, as opposed to something “off-the-shelf” that’s not specialized and is instead designed for general use.
“I’m not going to say that the game is absolutely perfectly optimized, but within the engine it’s using every single thing. So it’s as optimized as it can be within that space. That’s not possible otherwise,” he said. “And so rendering thousands of trees within draw distance, it does those things better than an off-the-shelf engine could because of that.”
“Off-the-shelf engines weren’t able to deliver the uncompromised vision that the developers set forth to create with this game. So, they needed to create their own engine in order to deliver on that vision,” he added.
It’s great to hear that the developers are putting a lot of effort into ensuring good performance, as it would be a shame if stuttering and choppy framerates marred what looks to be one of the wildest open-world RPG experiences ever made. Its gigantic medieval fantasy world of Pywel features five distinct regions said to be jam-packed with a diverse array of things to do, complete with rich combat and exploration systems, cities bustling with NPCs, and a character-driven, longform story.
All in all, it almost sounds too good to be true; that’s led to many deeming Crimson Desert a rival to the almighty GTA 6 itself, which is extremely likely to be this year’s biggest game (assuming it actually comes out on November 19 and doesn’t get delayed again).
Preorders for the $69.99 title are available now ahead of its March 19 launch, with the PC version on sale for $62.09 at Loaded.
What are your thoughts on Crimson Desert? Are you excited to get your hands on what could be one of the biggest games of this generation, or are you skeptical of what we’ve seen so far? Let me know in the comments.
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