Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss has wowed players by making significant improvements and in some cases overhauling entire systems on an almost weekly basis. It’s a remarkable rate of updates for the huge, single-player open world action adventure. So how has Pearl Abyss managed it?
In a new interview, the developer said it’s able to act fast on player feedback not just because that’s what it’s used to doing with its previous game, but because it has a different outlook to other triple-A developers.
Speaking to the Washington Post, Pearl Abyss PR and marketing director Will Powers pointed to MMO Black Desert, which it has updated on a weekly basis for over a year, as informing its post-launch support for Crimson Desert. Crimson Desert began life as an MMO follow-up to Black Desert before it was re-jigged to become a single-player game. You can see some of the MMO-ness in Crimson Desert’s design, but it’s also getting MMO-style support.
Powers said this approach is unique in the video game industry, particularly for big single-player open world games. It’s also part of the reason why Pearl Abyss hasn’t released a roadmap of content.
“Everything, patch-wise, content-wise, has been iterated in real time based on feedback, based on response,” Powers said. “If you bake in a roadmap, you’re presuming. We are not baking in presumptions around what the players want.”
Pearl Abyss is also happy to incorporate ideas from the community via patches. It’s already done this multiple times, sometimes reacting to player exploits and feedback in just days. “We’re not onerous about, if an idea didn’t come from us, then it can’t be in the game,” Powers explained. “I think that’s something that [other companies are] too ego-driven a lot of the time to be able to accept other people’s ideas. It’s almost Silicon Valley-esque. A good idea can come from anywhere.”
Powers went on to describe Pearl Abyss as “an indie publisher with a triple-A quality game,” which means it can move faster than triple-A developers and publishers who sometimes find themselves bogged down by bureaucracy.
Throughout all this, there has been some concern that Pearl Abyss developers are crunching in order to maintain the momentum behind Crimson Desert. But Powers said the South Korean studio has normal work hours, and is able to do what it’s doing with Crimson Desert because it’s built for releasing big changes quickly.
The latest Crimson Desert patch basically rewrote the entire endgame. As IGN had reported, some Crimson Desert players had started to complain that the vast open world of Pywel had become too peaceful because they’d killed everyone. This was because for the most part enemies do not respawn, and camps, which you can overtake, do not become repopulated with enemies once you’ve cleared them out. This week’s patch changed all that by adding the boss Rematch and Re-blockade features. It’s a huge update that should keep players going for even more hours. Fans are now awaiting the next game-changing update, now they’ve come to expect patches almost weekly.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
