Black Desert Xbox One E3 2018 Preview

While at E3 2018 I was invited to a Pearl Abyss party where I was able to check out Black Desert Xbox One once again. This wasn't my first time playing the game on the console as I was able to check it out during my time at Pax West 2017. Things have greatly changed however and this version seems much more realistic in terms of being something that has been natively ported to the platform. Last time around I was told it was just a wrapper of sorts whereas this has seen many more months of work and optimization.

The results here are rather mixed as I saw the game running on a Xbox One X dev kit. Instead of performance being a problem the world has some serious issues. It seems to run alright, but the visual pop-in is very bad. It reminds me of Tera in that regard, it's a gorgeous world on the platform though it didn't render right. This could be fixed I imagine since it's still being worked on, but I was hoping that aspect would be further along. There are also some screen tears present, but I don't recall them being too distinct. Still, they've got that experience entirely right on the platform and it just needs some further optimization to make sure it's a smooth rendering world. The draw distance is great, wanted to mention that as well.

With the interesting party I also sat in for a Q&A session which is quite something. Neat details include Black Desert Xbox One Beta arriving in Fall 2018. This seems to be a large scale partnership as Microsoft is backing the mobile version with Azure servers and they also work with Samsung for the best mobile visual experience. Pearl Abyss is also working on two other projects with one of them being a FPS game. They mentioned Black Desert is a universe they want to continue building within so that may be the other title they teased.

They also went over why dungeons aren't included in Black Desert as it just wasn't suitable for the experience. Apparently they made a lot of them and then just scrapped that aspect. When it comes to cross-play on Xbox One it will be separated from PC as they decided it wouldn't be best. They would literally just need to flip a switch, but again felt it wouldn't be the best choice. There are also no plans for Black Desert Playstation 4 edition, but they want to try to make it available on every platform possible so maybe. There's no definitive release for the Xbox version, but hopefully just after beta and they're trying their best.

Read our Black Desert Xbox One Pax West 2017 Preview
Our Game Hubs