Crimson Desert shares 50% of its name with Black Desert, so it’s reasonable to someone to assume they’re connected in some way. In fact, the developers said so themselves at one point. However, as things stand right now, the upcoming open-world single-player game is not related to the ongoing MMO from the same developers.
Some of the potential confusion that players on the fence get is owing to existing Crimson Desert footage that does paint it as a sort of Black Desert spin-off, if not a directly related game. Pearl Abyss PR Head Will Powers addressed this in an interview to Luke Stephens recently:
“If you look at the 2019 Announcement trailer from G-Star… it is a MMO, it is a prequel to Black Desert Online. (…) Official communication from our company. That video is still up on our YouTube channel. And some people watch it, and they get confused, because it’s still available.”
Crimson Desert is an independent IP, but takes many pages out of the Black Desert playbook
To get it out of the way: there’s official confirmation that Crimson Desert has no continuity with Black Desert. It’s not set in the same world at all. Both are distinct IPs independent of one another.
Will there be callbacks and references to Pearl Abyss’ big cash cow, though? Pearl Abyss nods yes to that, but don’t read into it or form continuity theories. Will Powers told Day One the following:
“There will be homages. There will be little Easter Eggs for players of Black Desert that they might recognise. But the similarities kind of end there…”
So now that we settled the score, there’s the development side of the coin. We can see unmistakable impressions of Black Desert on this one, which is obvious given how it was an MMO in the beginning. It’s confirmed that Pearl Abyss’ Black Desert development team did not work in this new single-player IP directly, but there’s institutional transfer of knowledge that helped them flesh out some of its open-world ideas.
Crimson Desert won’t let your customize your character in the same way BDO does, but it has a number of life-skills. Cooking, fishing, farming crops (sort of), and the like are not leveling treadmill like an MMO, but they do seem to owe the MMO lineage (of both the game and studio) some thanks.
There’s also some repeat features, from broader mechanics like horse taming, to more unique interactions like your pets auto-looting fallen enemies. So, all in all, this is the one clear line of connection that does exist between the two games.
Meanwhile, one side-effect of coming from a MMO studio is the heavy speculation on Crimon Desert’s potential multiplayer mode, which the developers have said nothing on, but may be compelled by a sueccessful launch.
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Edited by Sambit Pal