Crimson Desert Is South Korea’s Latest Game With Big Ambitions

The open-world fantasy Crimson Desert looks like the latest example of South Korea’s evolution into a gaming powerhouse.

The opening seconds of a trailer for Crimson Desert seem pretty generic: A gruff, tousle-haired hero cavorts, sword in hand, through an exceptionally pretty and seemingly expansive fantasy open world. But a minute in, the action takes an absurdist turn. He is shown skydiving from a gravity-defying fortress, using parkour to scale a medieval building, riding a hot-air balloon, transforming into a birdlike creature, pole-vaulting over spiked barricades and skidding around corners on a galloping horse.

Kim Dae-il, the game’s executive producer, said in an interview that he hoped players would feel nothing less than “as if they are in an entirely different reality.”

Gamers are used to associating such a lofty goal with the work of a premier American studio such as Rockstar, maker of the Grand Theft Auto series, or a hallowed Japanese studio like Square Enix, creator of the Final Fantasy franchise. But Kim, who co-founded the studio Pearl Abyss in 2010, is part of a wave of South Korean game makers who are dreaming big.

For decades gaming has been an unofficial national sport in South Korea, where industry revenue is an estimated $14.6 billion, fourth globally behind China, the United States and Japan. Some of the most popular titles are imports: StarCraft and League of Legends are both made by California studios.

But in the same way that K-pop and K-drama have become lucrative cultural exports for South Korea — a national wave known as “Hallyu” in Korean — perhaps it is now time to speak of K-games. In recent years, the Korean-made games Stellar Blade, Lies of P and The First Berserker: Khazan have all won plaudits for their high-octane action.

It is a significant change.

In 2013, the country’s political conservatives were pushing legislation to classify gaming as one of the four major social addictions, alongside alcohol, drugs and gambling. By last year, President Lee Jae Myung was calling video games a “truly authentic export.”

Crimson Desert’s development began in 2018 as a prequel to Black Desert Online, a massively multiplayer online game by Pearl Abyss that commanded more than 40 million registered players. Kim’s latest game is a prettier, more responsive single-player action experience that leans into kinetic combat. The steely showdowns between the protagonist Kliff and his enemies are filled with almost imperceptible freezes in the action that occur just as a blow is landed. This makes brawls feel satisfyingly weighty, crackling with the cadence of fighting games like Street Fighter 2, a favorite of Kim’s from his days frequenting arcades in the early 1990s.

Kim, 46, began his professional video game career later that decade, just as South Korea emerged from the Asian financial crisis. After receiving a $55 billion international bailout package, the government invested heavily in broadband infrastructure. Internet cafes, known as PC bangs, spread rapidly as informal social spaces where young people could play video games on high-powered computers.

Sean Kim, 49, a chief executive of Neowiz, which developed Lies of P, a hyperviolent take on the beloved fable “Pinocchio,” spent almost an entire year frequenting a PC bang in 1999.

As he played the real-time strategy game StarCraft in a smoky venue, his adolescent peers enjoyed other online titles that made use of the country’s new digital infrastructure. The quiz series QuizQuiz and the fantasy action title Lineage were among the breakthrough games that set the trajectory of the nation’s video game output: social, online and often free to play. The battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds scored global success in 2017 by following these principles; it was many Western players’ first experience of a Korean title.

Now, South Korea’s gaming habits are moving toward the home console, said Darang Candra, the director of research at Niko Partners, which tracks the Asian video game market. The new crop of Korean titles, including Crimson Desert, which was released on the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on Thursday, cater to this market with graphically resplendent single-player experiences with premium price tags.

Like the glossy audiovisual output of K-pop bands, there is a maximalist exuberance to Crimson Desert’s blend of ravishing presentation and madcap design. Kim of Pearl Abyss is aware that the game can feel overstimulating, so he has also made peacefulness a priority. His favorite part of the game is a scene in which the player stands in a beautifully cobbled town situated atop chalky mountains. It is the perfect place to watch the sun rise, he said, a moment that allows the player to “recharge and begin the day afresh.”

Crimson Desert does not appear to bear many hallmarks of South Korean culture, at least at first glance. The game takes place in a rugged, grassy realm with a vaguely Welsh-coded name of Pywel. The first hour is expletive-filled, as if its dialogue were lifted from “Game of Thrones.” Kim, though, bristled at the idea that the game is not sufficiently Korean. Deeper in the game’s wilds, players do find Buddhist temples and Korean cuisine. The combat in which the strapping Kliff unleashes flurries of kicks and punches was inspired by taekwondo.

“We believe that since we are Koreans, and because the game is written by Koreans, it will naturally feel Korean,” Kim said through an interpreter from an office in Gwacheon, South Korea.

The Korean government has increased its support to the games industry, said Candra, who noted that the National Assembly proposed several game-related bills last year that were “aimed at repositioning games from a regulated activity to a cultural and industrial sector supported by policy.”

Gaming initiatives are set to receive $49.7 million from a $477.4 million funding pot provided by the Korea Creative Content Agency, an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. The broadcasting industry, whose movies and television shows have lit up screens for many years, will receive $60.5 million.

Kim, the Neowiz executive, said Korean game studios could learn from some of the successes in other mediums. “K-pop and K-dramas that are popular in the Western space are often based on stylized takes of modern Korean culture,” he said.

Pearl Abyss’s next game, DokeV, seems to tap into precisely this idea. It is a creature-collecting romp whose setting evokes a shimmering, practically utopian vision of near-future South Korea. One trailer was packed with electro-pop tunes and dance choreography that could set K-pop fans’ pulses racing.

Other upcoming Korean games are more interested in evoking the country’s historic culture. One trailer for the action role-playing game Project TAL shows a shaman in a white hanbok performing a gut ritual high in the mountains. The action-adventure game Woochi the Wayfarer is inspired by the classic Korean novel “The Tale of Jeon Woo-chi,” in which a wizard fights injustice.

Woochi will have a direct connection with some of the country’s most popular cultural exports of the past decade. Jung Jae-il, who is writing the game’s score, was the composer of the best picture winner “Parasite” and the Netflix sensation “Squid Game.”

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