Crimson Desert Still Looks Too Good to Be True in Tech Preview

Pearl Abyss’s upcoming action-adventure game Crimson Desert looks unreal—literally. The general reaction has been that the game is impressively beautiful to the point of feeling almost too good to be true, a sensible ambivalence given how games can be polished in captured footage yet underwhelm in players’ hands.

Digital Foundry’s First Look Tech Preview sent Alex Battaglia and John Linneman some exclusive handcrafted footage curated by Pearl Abyss from a recent preview event. The developer deliberately used a PC built around last-gen hardware for the captures: a Ryzen 9 7900X3D processor, 32GB of system memory, and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card—hardly top-end but also not cheap, and something you could build for just over $2,000.

The showcased settings are striking: upscaled at 4K with native AA, a steady 60 frames per second, ray tracing on, particle quality at 100, and everything set to “Ultra.” For context, Ultra is the second-highest quality tier in Crimson Desert, with “Cinematic” above it.

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