Crimson Desert devs extremely confident in console performance, it seems | indy100

Crimson Desert - Official "Life in Pywel" Overview

IGN / VideoElephant

Crimson Desert developers seem to be extremely confident in the game's ability to run on consoles despite skepticism from fans.

Crimson Desert is an open-world action role-playing game from South Korean developer Pearl Abyss, which is best known for its MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Black Desert Online. It's the studio's highly-anticipated first single-player game and was designed to be a prequel to Black Desert before eventually becoming a standalone title.

So far, pretty much all the footage that's out there of Crimson Desert in action has been on PC with very little footage available of the game running on PS5 or Xbox Series X/S.

This has caused concern among some fans that we could be heading for a Cyberpunk 2077-esque situation where the game ran pretty much as it should on PC but was nothing short of a disaster in terms of console performance at launch (which CD Projekt Red worked tirelessly on to eventually fix).

Content creator FightinCowboy claimed in a YouTube video he asked developers about PS5 performance at a preview event.

The response was said to be: "Regardless of what we say, people probably won't believe us, so instead we are sending the game to Digital Foundry and they'll have a full analysis of performance across all the platforms at launch."

And on the latest episode of DF Direct Weekly, the tech experts at Digital Foundry confirmed this is indeed the case.

- YouTube youtu.be

Rich Leadbetter, the founder of Digital Foundry, said: "Regardless of whatever happens, we'll certainly be able to tell you if there are any specific problems at launch, even if our full review isn't ready.

"I think it's fair to say Pearl Abyss have been actually very open with us, far more open than a lot of other developers in this crucial run up to launch, they are going to make this stuff happen and they seem to be genuinely proud of everything they've done.

"They're opening doors for us rather than slamming them in our faces."

In a PlayStation blog post where Crimson Desert was previewed by Phil Hornshaw, he said: "With an enormous, gorgeous open world, Crimson Desert can be pretty graphically demanding and Pearl Abyss will leverage the PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro to help deliver some impressive visuals, particularly at long distances.

"The PS5's SSD is key for streaming the huge world, for a start, and developers will make heavy use of the PS5 Pro's High CPU Frequency Mode to make viewing and moving through the world as seamless as possible.

"Pearl Abyss also told me it optimised Crimson Desert for the PS5 through a number of features to help maintain all that detail at its large scale, making use of Geometry Shader Oversubscription and NGG Culling to render lots of elements without losing detail.

"On PS5 Pro, the recent upgrade to PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) makes it possible for Crimson Desert to hit 4K resolutions at higher frame rates and its raytracing capabilities make lighting effects more realistic and natural."

Crimson Desert releases on 19 March on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

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