1v1 | Interview with Will Powers of Pearl Abyss on Crimson Desert

I was lucky enough to speak with Will Powers of Pearl Abyss about the team’s upcoming title, Crimson Desert. From open-world systems to music and story, we covered a range of topics on the exciting, new open-world RPG.

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I was lucky enough to play Crimson Desert twice last year, at Summer Game Fest in June and Gamescom in August. I instantly fell for the game’s movement and combat mechanics. In the interview and today’s subsequent deep-dive, the focus has been on questions about the story and quests.

In this interview, you will see a variety of topics covered over just under half an hour, from Will’s journey through this crazy industry, Crimson Desert’s expansive open-world, why Pearl Abyss decided on a new IP and a few teases on other things, including performance of the game on console.

Please note this interview has been lightly edited for clarity, but you can watch the full thing over on YouTube.

Jesse: Will, thank you for joining me. I’ve played Crimson Desert twice now, once at Summer Games Fest, and again at Gamescom last year. It’s ‘gone gold’, it’s coming out in March and I’m going to hold you to your promise that I saw in the New Game Plus showcase of that. A full month to review?

Will: “I said we’re trying. I can only hold promises that I’m fully responsible for, but what I said, and I’ll reiterate here, is you’re going to need a lot of time to properly review it. And I think that’s how the game is best taken, sir. It’s taken in iterations or like in multiple play sessions. Because at least when I play it, I kind of go in and I set my goals for that session. It’s like, do I want to have this be a combat heavy play session? Do I want to gather resources? Do I want to do questing? And I kind of set the tone. I set the vibe for that. But then I get distracted along the way and everything gets derailed!

We’ll give you as much time as we can.  That’s kind of the fun of it. And I want to go back to one thing you said. You played at SGF. You played at Gamescom. They were different iterations of the same build. I think one thing we’ve done a bad job of, and I like keeping ourselves honest, is the builds that we’ve showcased haven’t been fully representative of the game that’s coming. We focus mostly on combat. Combat’s great. Combat’s really strong. But is that representative of the game that you’re going to sit down and play? I think that varies from player to player, really, because if you want to focus on questing, like we haven’t shown that off at all. That’s changing. So I think between now and launch, we’re definitely pulling back the curtain, giving players an idea of the world itself. Because of the three things that we want to talk about, combat, open world, and story. Open world is, as you referenced, the biggest of the three. And we’re really showing people what’s in the open world between now and launch.“

Jesse: Yeah, that has been one of the most consistent questions I’ve had, because in those demos, I got to do a boss fight, do some sort of siege combat going in. But the question has constantly been; what’s the story going to be? What’s the thing that’s going to sell the open world? Because I know some people talk about open world fatigue and it eventually kind of hit a forefront with Ubisoft, who had their checklist of things that you were always going to see in everything.

Will: “The Assassin’s Creed Far Cry formula. That defined modern open world games with Assassin’s Creed 2, basically. It basically wrote the formula for open world and then they used it across their open world games to great success. That’s not the only type of open world. And I think that one of the benefits to what the dev team’s creating here is this is an open world that has that through line that pulls you, that narrative that’s going to keep pulling you along. It’s not necessarily the Final Fantasy of ‘the world’s going to end in three days and we need you to keep focusing on that core objective’. You’re like, but I want to help this villager over here. It’s not necessarily that. It’s creating a world that you want to get lost in and you want to get distracted by.

One of the core drivers, I think, that for player motivation that we’re talking about now is ‘who is Kliff’?  What’s his motivation as a character? Kliff, who is the central protagonist of the game, later on in the game as a video we released this week shows, there are multiple playable characters that you can play as at certain points within the plot. But Cliff is the central protagonist that you play as. And he’s part of the Greymanes. The Greymanes are defenders of this region and the world called Pelun, which is a country within Pywel, which is the continent.

They’re the good guys. That’s kind of the easy, like moral compass – they want to help people. They want to defend, and unfortunately, they got their butts beat pretty bad before you start playing the game. So you’re starting in a world that has had its kind of balance disrupted. And you start by trying to reunite your fellow Greymanes. But as you start going along this journey to do that, you start realising that’s the least of your problems.

There’s something much bigger going on that affects not only you and the Graymanes, but the fate of the entire continent. So that’s, kind of what’s pushing you, pushing you forward. But at the end of the day, we’re dropping you in an open world that you want to spend time in. So do you want to progress the main story? Do you want to just go around and quite literally pick flowers? You can do that and focus on alchemy. Like there’s things that you can do that are inspired by how you want to play the game. We’re not forcing you into a box of: You have to play it like this.“

Jesse: I’m curious with it being the same publisher as Black Desert Online, was there any crossover? Were there any noticeable things taken from one into this as the team transitions into what is a gigantic-sounding single-player game?

Will: “I want to correct you slightly, if you don’t mind. Because it is confusing in all fairness. We have one building. But in-house there are two dev teams. So they are completely separate teams. We divide the teams up into live service development, which is continued operations on Black Desert and then new IP development. So it’s literally in the same building, but they are two separate teams within the building. It’s a complicated question that you ask because you really do have to also consider the history of Crimson Desert. Crimson Desert was originally announced as not only a prequel to Black Desert, but also an MMO. So a completely different genre.

Through its development, it’s really like you hit a crossroads in development where do you want to maintain what the original trajectory of the game was, or do you want to let it become its own thing and really blossom? Obviously, they chose the latter of those two and let it blossom into its own thing, its own brand new IP. So, while the game shares the word Desert in the name, it is a separate IP. There will be homages. There will be little Easter Eggs for players of Black Desert that they might recognise. But the similarities kind of end there in terms of Final Fantasy. Okay, there’s chocobos across Final Fantasy, but there’s always a Sid. sure, but there’s only there’s only one Snow. There’s only like there’s only one Lightning, even though she did return. So  think of it like that, where there’s homages, but it’s not a continuous IP.“

Jesse: .Is the open-world built to be reactive to the player’s actions? Do events occur off-screen without player involvement that might change up the map in some way?

Will: “Certain things are definitely reactive to your actions. I think ‘World States’ is a big thing about them. I can’t talk about it today. But ‘World States’ are a big thing that show off what you’re asking. So whether you’re progressing the main story or you are progressing a faction questline and that changes your relationship with that faction, that has a potential to change a world state. Whether you’ve gone from ‘at war’ to ‘neutral’ to an alliance with a faction, now they can help you out. Their troops are not fighting you. They’re not blockading different regions for you, sending troops or doing resource gathering in areas.

So those faction relationships influence the world state. And that’s more than just what’s happening directly on your screen. That’s like a big overall world state for the map. Certain main quest lines will trigger changes like that. But the world is living and breathing. It’s made to feel like that. That’s that’s really important. And I think that that’s one thing that the developer has a strong pedigree for when you look at their history of developing these massive open-world games that are meant to sustain for years and years.“

Jesse: We talked a lot about the game, but what about you? Could you walk us through your journey through the industry before finally ending up here with Pearl Abyss?

Will: “Sure. I worked in games for a long time. I think I started 17 years ago. at PlayStation.  I’ve always been in PR and marketing for games. I was at PlayStation for about three years. From there, went agency side, worked with a couple Japanese developers I was supporting 505, Konami, SOE at the time before they became Daybreak. I announced EverQuest next, which was fun. That was a fun time and supported EQ2 for a while.

Then I went publisher side again, I worked at Deep Silver before Embracer acquired them. Launched Homefront Dead Island, I launched Kingdom Come Deliverance 1, the Metro franchise. I worked on the original Metro Exodus campaign as well as Redux. Then I went to Tencent, brought their brand to the West, worked on Arena Valor, went hardware side for a while. And then most recently I came to Pearl Abyss and now, this is really exciting.

This is something you don’t get to do very much – launch a new IP.“

Jesse: Something nowadays where there is so much talk with developers, there are a lot of issues getting funding – and sequels are everything, whether it’s video games or movies or TV. Seeing something new, even if it’s now just sharing a word with a previous IP is great. It is always fun to get to review something like this, because I come into it and I don’t always know what to expect. Whereas with sequels, it is generally iterative in a way where you kind of know what you’re getting.

Will: “And software is really fun to work on and talk about because there’s a lot of imagination that goes in there. There’s a lot of creativity that goes into software. And a lot of it is the player expression determines their own experience. So when, which is where this game comes in, when you give a kid a sandbox and you give them fun tools to play with, they can create their own fun. And that’s how I describe this game.

Even with destruction, nothing’s pre-rendered and pre-recorded. The physics are calculated based on where you hit the tower. You saw that in the SGF build.  That’s not just bespoke in that one instance. That’s calculated every time you’re hitting something that’s destructible. The physics are being calculated in real time. And that’s one of the core strengths of this game is that we built an engine to support the vision. So that’s why development has taken a little bit longer than obviously anyone would like, because not only did the team make a game, they made an entire new engine to build the game in and the future of Pearl Abyss on top of it.“

Jesse: When I last played, we were playing on admittedly pretty powerful PCs. When I asked them about the engine, the chap running the demo was like, yeah, there’s no upscaling. It’s just running – I can’t remember the last time I played something that looked this nice and this clean, but wasn’t a 1400p upscaled to 4K. It looked fantastic.

Will: “Well, that’s the thing, we’re being very clear about what we’re showing because especially with the Internet, you can’t do smoke and mirrors and we’re being very purposeful about showing it in person and letting people see in the settings so that they can know that there is not smoke and mirrors here.

I was just at CES earlier this year working with AMD and we were showcasing in their booth because this is one of the first games that’s an AMD Redstone partner title. So all of their technologies. However, we weren’t showing any of the things off in their booth because we were all natively rendering it within the engine in the game.  That’s really powerful, a really powerful statement of this additional support for the people that want it, for the people that want to get the most out of the game, but the game can also stand on its own. And the technology that it’s built on is powerful enough to stand on its own and run on its own.“

Jesse: One of the last things that tends to happen in game development is the optimisation. But you guys seem pretty far ahead of it. And with this type of game, we’ve got just roughly under two months left before release. What would the focus of the team generally be at this point when the game has gone gold?

Will: “It’s exactly what you just said. It’s on optimisation. It’s a polish and optimisation period. which is completely typical of any other development. I see the internet and I see, not like in a matrix sense of I see the internet, but I see comments on the internet of, oh my God, I don’t want a day one patch.

Yes, you do. You want the day one patch, because that’s optimisation, that’s better performance, that’s bug fixes, that’s… everything that you want to ensure that you’re going to have a smoother experience. And that’s what the game, what the dev team is continually focused on between now launch and post-launch is going to continue to make the game and the experience, the playable experience as good as it possibly can be.“

Jesse: That was one of the main things that when I got more into the industry and actually was able to talk to the creatives who make games – day one patches would have always been a thing if there had been a way to get them to you. Instead, they would do new revisions on carts or CDs back in the day.

Will: “That’s right. They would change the ISO  for future prints, they would use an updated version. So that’s how it used to work on carts. Like you said, the initial printing would be different from a reprinted version because they’d improve and fix bugs.  It’s such a good thing. But I think that what people don’t realise is if you ask an artist, ‘tell me when you’re going to be done with your art’?

The answer is never. Because art by definition is imperfect and it can continually get improved. It’s subjective. There is no objectivity to art. And that’s game design. That’s why publishers are essential, just like editors for writing or producers for music. You need the business side of it in order to ship the art. So if there were no day one patches, games would never ship.”

Jesse: Eventually at some point you have to lock it down and be like, okay, this is as good as we can get it for the date we want to hit. Let’s touch it up where we can in the meantime. But at that point, everything is essentially live service for the most part because you keep working on it after launch. Then people mistake that for game-as-a-service where it becomes this thing you’re supposed to treat as the only thing you ever play. And there’s nonstop drops. And every time I talk to people about it, there are things that they know are broken, they know need to be fixed. Half the time I bring them up during review period, they’re like, yeah, it’s here and it’s in our roadmap or it’s in the day one patch. The system we have now is about as good as we can get.

Will: “Patch notes and development timelines are very important for transparency and trust. No game is ever bug-free. I’ve been working in games for 20 years. That is a universal truth. But knowing what, and being clear about things, but also that’s the fun. That’s kind of the quirkiness of some of these games. Think, go back to Red Dead 2. Remember all the flying horses? That added an absurdity that actually probably made that game even better.

I know the developers have spent long, hard hours and years making the game at launch to be the best it can possibly be. And we’ll continue to improve on that post-launch. I think that the most important message here is that the beauty of the game industry now is that games only get better with time.“

Jesse: You mentioned music earlier – Crimson Desert fits within a genre that generally heavily focuses on big, epic music beats, whether it’s storytelling or during gameplay. What style and genre of music are the composers and arrangers looking to bring to the table on this one?

Will: “I love the music team at our studio. They are the most passionate people. And the music, the sound design team just as a whole, they recently like pressed BDO, Black Desert Online’s soundtrack into vinyls  because they wanted to deliver the highest quality possible. And like that medium delivers it. So there’s obviously, really good background music.

Just naturally in the open world, that’s incredibly important. The battle music needs to complement. I think the best music is unintrusive, where it supports and supplements your experience, but you don’t notice it. But you would notice if it were absent. So that feels like the approach that they’re taking here and they’re incredibly talented. One of the strongest pieces of  narrative and open world storytelling is in the music and is your experience in the quiet moments. So you can look at how they’ve done sound design in Black Desert as a reference point for the music in Crimson Desert. And they’re an award-winning team. So that’s something that’s really cool to look at.“

Jesse: Last thing I have to ask, and feel free to just say no if you can’t, do you have anything to say about performance targets on consoles yet? That’s the main question I keep getting.

Will: “Yeah, so I keep getting this question too. And you’ve known me long enough. I will never give a non-answer. I can’t give a full answer to that question because, as we said earlier in the interview, we’re in the optimisation phase right now. So, we’re trying to hit the targets. But if you look at what the team has been able to do for BDO on consoles, granted different engine, but that game on console was on Xbox One. So, gen minus one console. was running at 120 frames.

So like they have high expectations. There‘s a pedigree. I guarantee whatever the expectations on the internet, their internal expectations are higher. They hold themselves to a very high standard of trying to deliver performance across – and we’re simultaneously shipping across five different platforms -PC, PlayStation, Xbox Series X and S, I count those as different ones. So there’s the Pro Series and then the standard series of consoles, as well as natively on Mac. So we’re simultaneously shipping across all these different platforms and optimisation across all of them is equally important. So, we won’t have those exact numbers until the optimisation period has ended. But we’re not hiding things. If you want to see PlayStation footage, look at the trailer we did with State of Play. That was all recorded on a PlayStation 5. Sorry, PlayStation 5 Pro to be very specific.

That is all recorded footage. It’s not CGI. This is like everything is the cut scenes are all in-engine. I don’t know fully if there is no CGI in the game, but let me be very clear. All the cutscenes are in-engine.

But in-engine and gameplay are, in terms of performance, are synonymous. So what you’re seeing in that trailer is performance on console. So that’s how I can roundabout answer. Footage exists of it running on console. Go check it out.“

Jesse: You can’t ask for more this far out, especially with something this ambitious. Will, thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun.

Will: “I appreciate it. I appreciate your time. I appreciate the questions. And as a smaller studio in the grand scheme of things, like we’re not one of the giant corporations.

Well, we generally appreciate all the players in anticipation because we’re one building, we’re one team trying to trying to launch a new IP. So the excitement and the interest is genuinely felt by every person in our offices.“

Crimson Desert is launching March 19th on PC via Steam, macOS, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.