Pearl Abyss may finally be able to close the long and exhausting development chapter of Crimson Desert, but that does not mean the studio is slowing down. The South Korean team has now officially confirmed that its core development group is shifting over to DokeV, the long-dormant project many players had already assumed had quietly disappeared.

It must feel strange to close a chapter that has remained open for more than five years, but that is exactly what Pearl Abyss is preparing to do. On March 19, the South Korean studio finally delivered Crimson Desert, its long-promised ambitious open-world project, one of the biggest releases of 2026, and one that eventually turned its mixed early reception into a more positive one. Now, however, the time has come to look ahead. The studio is not abandoning the game, but it has confirmed that Pearl Abyss’s core team, meaning the main group that built Crimson Desert, is now moving on and turning its attention toward DokeV, the other major open-world project that has been in development for six years.

As the company itself recalled, DokeV was originally announced back in 2019 alongside Crimson Desert during that year’s Pearl Abyss Connect. The studio’s goal was to move beyond being known purely for MMOs and step into a new era. The problem was that the team had to build its own graphics engine from scratch for both Crimson Desert and DokeV, the BlackSpace Engine, which meant development resources could not realistically be split across both projects at the same time. As a result, the studio chose to focus entirely on the medieval open-world game.

DokeV is finally moving again

Now, with Crimson Desert out in the market and Pearl Abyss seeing a promising future for that open-world title, the South Korean company has officially announced that its focus is shifting to DokeV. According to GameSpark, Crimson Desert has entered its post-launch phase, which means “the core development team can now fully dedicate itself to DokeV, accelerating its development and adaptation to the new technology.”

DokeV, however, is not only very different from Crimson Desert in tone, it also appears set to drift somewhat away from the concept originally presented in 2019. At first, it was described as an “open-world MMO focused on creature collecting,” but by 2021 Pearl Abyss had already said it would instead move toward an open-world action-adventure game, where creature-catching mechanics would be only one part of the overall experience rather than the whole point of it. In that sense, the project is starting to look more in line with the broader and more varied design philosophy seen in Crimson Desert.

Pearl Abyss also has no intention of stopping there. Once DokeV is far enough along, the studio plans to connect that development cycle to Plan 8, another MMO first announced in 2019, this one centered on shooter mechanics, science fiction, and exosuit combat. That also means DokeV is now unlikely to launch before 2028 at the earliest, based on the South Korean developers’ current timeline, while Plan 8 may not arrive until the next decade.

Source: 3DJuegos