Kim and Yoon: BlackSpace exists so they decide when a patch ships

Lead engineer Jin-hwan Kim and graphics lead Jin-ho Yoon explained why Crimson Desert is on BlackSpace rather than Unreal Engine 5. They consider their own engine a better fit for a large open world, many platforms and frequent updates. Seamless loading and handling of large amounts of data were carried over from the Black Desert experience.

The game was first conceived as an MMO, so multiplayer was built into the engine from the start. Scalable rendering lowers the load when there is a lot of light, shadows and textures. Memory is being squeezed for weaker hardware, including Nintendo Switch 2. Ray tracing on weak devices remains one of the hardest tasks.

Their own engine does not tie the studio to someone else’s commercial schedule: they add features and patches themselves. The refusal of Unreal in the text is about control, not about a finished engine having no capabilities.