We managed to snag a few guys from the engine team to answer some of our questions over the last few days. The engine team is the team that is responsible for making sure that our proprietary engine works, and they were tasked with making sure the game would work on the Xbox One.

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Hey guys,

We’re the Engine team, and we’re all essentially engineers that created and then adapted the game engine that runs Black Desert. It’s not as flashy as the developers, or the art team, but our work allows them to do their job.

Getting the Black Desert engine to work on Xbox One has been relatively straightforward. We have a lot of experience with the DX11 architecture, and luckily the Xbox One uses the same stuff. Of course, getting it to run is only a fraction of our work, and the rest of the time is making sure that it works well. Of course, there have been many challenges along the way, with the UI overhaul being particularly challenging. Loading speeds were also particularly interesting, as the game is pretty heavy on loading due to the whole map being 1 zone, but we have optimized everything so that it runs well.

Our current targets for performance of the game on the Xbox One S and X are as follows:

Xbox One S: 1080p 30fps

Xbox One X: 2160p 30fps

Our targets are easily achieved out in the open field, but in high population areas we’ve had some difficulty managing these numbers (mainly large towns and cities). We are still working on optimizing the game, so that we can provide a better gaming experience for our users. This means these numbers are definitely subject to change.  

We have seen a lot of people in the communities talk about whether or not you will be able to change the graphics settings. While there will be a few options available, there will be considerably less options in the Xbox version.

Overall the development of the engine on the Xbox One has been very similar to our PC version. The one thing that surprised us most in development was that even though PC’s are generally more expensive than Xbox Ones, the difference between them is not that vast. We were very impressed by what the Xbox can offer at its price point.

Designing for the Xbox has taught us how to squeeze out every resource possible in making sure our game runs well, and we intend to use all the memory and resources that the Xbox One S and X provide.

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So that was the Engine Team. These guys are incredibly busy right now so we tried to minimize the disruption we caused them, and it seems as though everything is coming along well, just that they don’t have much in the way of interesting stories. We’ll be interviewing a different team next time, so stay tuned for more dev note updates.

The Black Spirit gets decorated each season, and he has now been prepared for summer.