Crimson Desert Lead Engineer Admits The BlackSpace Engine Has “Deficiencies” in Complex Scenes, But Pearl Abyss Is Working to Address Them

Pearl Abyss has acknowledged that its proprietary BlackSpace Engine still has performance “deficiencies” when Crimson Desert pushes large numbers of characters, effects, lights, shadows, and other elements onto the screen. Speaking to MeinMMO at gamescom 2026, Lead Engineer Jin-hwan Kim explained that the team is actively working to improve performance in these demanding situations while maintaining the visual quality of the open-world action game.

The comments came during an interview with Kim and Jin-ho Yoon, Senior Leader of Pearl Abyss’ Game Engine Graphics Division. MeinMMO asked how the technology handles the kind of large-scale battles and complex scenes associated with Pearl Abyss’ MMO background.

BlackSpace Engine Still Has Challenges With Massive Battles

Kim openly admitted that the engine has room for improvement in particularly demanding scenarios. However, Pearl Abyss has already introduced scalable rendering techniques designed to prevent performance costs from increasing linearly as the number of lights, shadows, textures, and other objects rises.

The developers are also attempting to make rendering less dependent on the number of light sources and better able to scale according to the GPU being used. This approach is particularly important for Crimson Desert, which aims to deliver a detailed open world across different levels of hardware.

Ray tracing remains one of the more difficult areas to optimize. According to the developers, lighting can place a significant load on the GPU, and getting ray-traced lighting to work efficiently on lower-spec hardware has presented major difficulties.

Pearl Abyss is therefore continuing to optimize the game for less powerful systems. The team specifically mentioned efforts to make Crimson Desert run on hardware such as Nintendo Switch 2, while also keeping memory consumption under control.

The BlackSpace Engine was created as a successor to the technology behind Black Desert, with greater flexibility and broader platform support in mind. Kim explained that switching to a commercial solution such as Unreal Engine 5 could have created limitations because Pearl Abyss would have depended on external updates for features needed by its development plans.

The studio instead wanted greater control over its technology and the ability to implement changes without waiting for another engine developer. Kim also said the BlackSpace Engine was designed with different types of games in mind rather than being as heavily specialized as the Black Desert engine.

Despite its current limitations, Pearl Abyss believes the technology can support different genres in the future, including first-person and third-person games. For Crimson Desert, however, the immediate priority remains improving performance in the game’s most complex scenes while preserving its overall visual and gameplay experience.