Powers weighs Crimson Desert marketing against overpromising

In an IGN interview, Will Powers said Pearl Abyss is balancing awareness of Crimson Desert against promising too much before 19 March. The studio’s benchmark is Black Desert, an MMORPG with more than 55 million players, and he thinks the internal bar for a second major game is even higher than the external one.

The world, he said, grew out of systems written for a different kind of game and for a community. That is why people say they have not seen this before, even though the original plan was something else. He places the announcement around 2020 and calls a six-and-a-half-year gap too early: the team became a victim of its own timing while it built the engine and other technical work.

After six hours of gameplay, the question changed in his telling. Earlier, people were unsure what the game was. Now they ask how what was shown can be real. He does not want the studio accused of hiding things, because a presentation from five or six years ago has to be corrected with a larger amount of material.