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 such as 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.
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 CEO 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.
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 for 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.
The New York Times