While developer Pearl Abyss has continued to work on improvements for its open-world action adventure title Crimson Desert, CEO Heo Jin-young has revealed that the game’s core development team has now shifted its focus towards making DokeV. Speaking to South Korean publication Inven, Jin-young said that the team is now able to “pick up the pace,” (via machine translation) thanks to Crimson Desert having shipped.
While he hasn’t offered an official launch window for DokeV just yet, Jin-young said that it will take “about two to three years from the current timeline to completion and polishing.” The timeline shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, especially since DokeV has seemingly been changed up quite a few times during development. As a result, it has also seen several delays over the years.
DokeV was first unveiled all the way back in 2019. While details about the title remain nebulous, at the time, Pearl Abyss had described it as revolving around players looking for Dokebi – strange creatures that gain their strength from dreams. A gameplay trailer had also been showcased back in 2021.
In 2022, Jin-young had said that both DokeV and Crimson Desert would be coming out in the same year. “DokeV, along with Crimson Desert, is being developed to meet our internal development roadmap,” he said at the time. “However, since this year our core development team is immersing itself in developing Crimson Desert, we will do our best so that for DokeV. We will be able to disclose additional information as they are done.” Interestingly, a report from back in 2024 had indicated that both games would be out in FY 2025. As we now know, however, this timeline would also be missed.
As for the studio’s recent release, Jin-young has revealed that Crimson Desert is close to selling 5 million copies. “We aim to quickly share news of reaching 5 million copies sold with our shareholders, and all employees will work hard to achieve the best possible results by the end of the year,” he said.
To further expand the player base of Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss has also started R&D on a potential port for the Nintendo Switch 2. The biggest obstacle in this regard, according to Jin-young, is the fact that Nintendo’s platform has weaker hardware compared to other modern gaming hardware. “Compared to other consoles, the Switch still has lower specifications, so there are things we would have to give up,” he said before revealing that the studio had “begun R&D with interest.”
Jin-young has also spoken about one of the biggest criticisms faced by Crimson Desert – its weak story. He acknowledged that the storyline was quite “lacking”, and accepts it as being “due to our shortcomings.” He went on to note that the development team “focused on strengthening the gameplay aspects that we are good at, and we hope to better complement this part in our next project.”
In the meantime, take a look at the details about the most recent update for Crimson Desert, which brought in five permanent mounts, and reduced stamina use during flying. The open-world game is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more.
