'Crimson Desert': How We Filled the Vast Continent of Pywel & Scaling Open World Creation with an In-House Engine
Monday, August 24, 2026 12:00 AM to 12:01 AM · 1 min. (Europe/Berlin)
Talk
~All~Arts, Visuals & VFXGame DesignLevel DesignTech & Coding
Information
Pywel is not simply a world filled with assets. It is a world designed to constantly encourage discovery and exploration. First session explores how we filled the vast continent of Pywel, the methods we used to create environments that inspire players to keep moving forward, and the valuable lessons learned from both successful and failed development efforts while building a large-scale open world. The second session introduces how Pearl Abyss uses its in-house BlackSpace Engine to build and express the massive open world of Crimson Desert. We will cover the engine philosophy behind a real-time, dynamic world, how the engine represents scale, distance, atmosphere and environmental density. Also discuss how procedural terrain tools and biome-based placement systems for props and vegetation help artists create large regions while preserving manual control and regional identity.
Session Type
Talk
Target Audiences
Environment Artists, Rendering Programmers, Technical Artists
Experience Level
Beginner
Key Take Aways
1. 'How We Filled the Vast Continent of Pywel'
- Learn why realistic natural environments are not always suitable for open-world gameplay and how we designed playable nature with a focus on readability and landmark visibility.
- Discover how a sample-driven production workflow and automated world-building pipeline enabled us to maintain consistent quality across the vast continent of Pywel.
- Understand how we approached environment art not as background scenery, but as content that motivates players to travel, explore, and discover.
- Learn how real-world landscapes and landmarks inspired the creation of a fantasy continent while maintaining strong regional identities and a cohesive world structure.
- Explore the challenges, failures, and lessons learned throughout development, including vegetation density, terrain complexity, and landmark design, and how those experiences shaped the final world.
2. 'Scaling Open World Creation in Crimson Desert with an In-House Engine'
- Understand how the BlackSpace Engine, Pearl Abyss’ in-house engine, supports both runtime world expression and open-world production workflows.
- Learn how a real-time, dynamic world philosophy can help create a sense of scale, distance, atmosphere, and environmental density in a large open world.
- See how terrain data and procedural terrain tools can become the foundation for downstream world-building systems.
- Learn how biome-based placement systems for props and vegetation can scale artistic and design intent without replacing manual authorship.
- Understand how artist control, regional identity, iteration, and runtime constraints can be integrated into an open world production pipeline.
