Crimson Desert: How the Venus Dragon Boss was born

Bosses are integrated into the fabric of Crimson Desert's world. Judging from the many different ones we've seen now in multiple hands-on demos and videos, they often seem to be a jaw-dropping spectacle that tests all your abilities. One of the headliners is Venus, the giant mechanical dragon we battled at developer Pearl Abyss's Seoul offices in preparation for this month's IGN First. If you watched our last gameplay video, you've probably already seen this powerful boss in action, but here we'll take you behind the scenes to show you how it's designed, from the sound of its wings flapping to the method of its fall.

It's safe to say that the land of Piver in the Crimson Desert offers a classic fantasy with a twist, often incorporating unexpected elements into the mix, including (but not limited to) rideable dinosaurs and supercharged mechas. Combining classic fantasy beasts with a sci-fi metallic sheen, Venus is the embodiment of this philosophy. Members of the Pearl Abyss design team explained that they put a lot of effort into trying to blend the organic and mechanical, but as part of that, and perhaps surprisingly, they also wanted a level of believability. The art team noted that even though Venus looks like a sci-fi dragon, many of the materials used in its character model are inspired by everyday materials that can be found not only in the modern day, but even as far back as the more fantasy-like Middle Ages. This approach to Pearl Abyss applies not just to Venus, but to all the robots, industrial buildings, and steam trains you can find in the game. While these elements are closer to science fiction, the design team insisted on maintaining believability.

All of this helps us believe that this beast might actually have been built by Mani, the inventor who sent you out to fight Venus. Exploring Mani's office before this encounter further informs our understanding of the dragon's origins, as the room is littered with documents about its construction, as well as industrial machinery that foreshadows the mechanical nature of the beast.

When you finally see Venus, its claws crushing ancient masonry with ease, you can clearly see how the machine mimics an organism. The Crimson Desert design team ensured that the gears and chains beneath its armored casing “authentically” work together. The components come together to take on a shape you've never seen before, yet at the same time it feels familiar – the beast's swooping golden wings and earth-shattering roar are reminiscent of the songbird from BioShock Infinite, an equally impressive mechanical invention and a man-made creation designed within a fantasy framework.

The sounds produced by Venus presented the team with a very specific challenge: having to combine the organic movements of the winged beasts with the mechanical clanks and whirrings of man-made objects in nature. During a visit to Pearl Abyss' South Korean headquarters, we toured its purpose-built Foley recording studio and learned about all these different elements, giving us a fascinating insight into the process of discovery.

The first item on the agenda is flapping wings, which also becomes the basis for all other dragons in the game. While Venus is mechanical, you'll notice that its wings are giant pieces of fabric, so their sounds are also produced by moving fabric: the waving of a leather jacket. The weathered rustle of the material evokes the sound of wing membranes cutting through the air and provides a solid starting point for how to add an auditory layer to this creature, with the ultimate goal of creating something previously unheard.

Next was giving it the weight of metal, so the closing squeaky cabinet doors were introduced into the mix. Next is a ribbed plastic hose—the kind you'd typically see on the end of a vacuum cleaner—pulled along a corner of the cabinet to further add texture to the dragon's many moving parts. A smaller plastic tube is then pulled and pushed like an accordion, and surprisingly the friction gives the beast an almost web-like tone. It's this experimentation and commitment to using everyday objects in unexpected ways that makes the process so interesting to watch. On top of that, dragging a large fork along a metal chain while fiddling the fingers of an armored glove at the joints emphasizes the sound of the smooth movement of the wings, providing a mechanical edge to the effect. It all blends into a symphony of noise, creating a soundscape as carefully crafted as the game's dragons themselves.

The Foley studio is just one of the impressive, cutting-edge facilities in Pearl Abyss' massive office building, which also houses a full 3D scanning center and a performance capture space where many of the game's cutscenes and combat animations are recorded. I particularly enjoyed watching my colleague Matt Purslow experience the latter himself, donning a motion capture suit and wielding a foam sword, which was then mirrored in real time to a nearby screen. It's all very impressive technology, even if Matt admits it could be put to good use with some weapons training. However, the pen is mightier than the sword.

This technology inspired Pearl Abyss's creative ambitions, and each boss battle in Crimson Desert not only challenged players, but also challenged the limits of the studio's creativity. The design team wanted to “figure out their boundaries and limitations,” and Venus presented a particular conundrum due to its large size and ability to fly at high speeds. For a ground-based, human-sized player, this is a very big problem. The developers want this David vs. Goliath effect, though, explaining that they “want you to feel overwhelmed by the overall size and power of Venus.” To take it down, you need to find its weakness.

As with many of the bosses in Crimson Desert, there's a carefully crafted way to defeat this beast in combat, though it's not the only way to achieve victory, but rather to cultivate that feeling of being able to approach combat in this world any way you want. You can violently fight your way through this fight, reading its attack patterns and dealing damage to its gleaming head when it rears up. But Venus' real Achilles heel is the power of the electromagnetic pulse explosion. While not strictly a puzzle boss, there are some elements of this style in this fight, such as luring a dragon to breathe fire at pillars scattered around the arena, which heat up and in turn power machines that generate EMP bullets for your arm cannons. Shoot enough fire into its body and Venus will be knocked unconscious, leaving you to cry over its crumbling skeleton.

The Red Desert Combat team revealed that they did not want the boss to become too mysterious. While you need to meet certain conditions for EMP to work, there are certainly other ways to defeat it. The team specifies that you can use the bow or your combat skills to damage the dragon. They hope players will be able to develop interesting strategies and eventually share them with others when Crimson Desert launches next March.

The EMP approach is certainly an effective one and the team makes sure to sow it along the way to battle. The early skirmishes in this mission are meant to showcase the capabilities of the EMP, as you fight an army of robot demons. The team explains that the idea is to make sure the mechanics are a consistent theme in the lead-up to the Battle of Venus, so that by the time you reach the boss itself, using EMP will become second nature. You'll understand that Venus is a robotic enemy affected by your EMP device, and instinctively know what to do. This approach requires focus on mechanics and gimmick placement, ensuring a natural learning curve is created all the way up to the boss fight.

Variety is very much the name of the game in Crimson Desert, as our story tells it deep into battle Explains that this variety permeates everything, especially the boss designs. In our few hours of hands-on time, we haven't seen EMP being used anywhere else in this adventure besides pilotable combat droids. This is a further example of how every mission, every moment spent in this world is designed to be different from the last.

While mechanical variety is obviously important, the team also notes that variety is inspired by thinking about bosses as characters in the world. The team explained that they try to put themselves in each boss's shoes and carefully consider what their motivations are. This inspires their movements and overall design, and helps create variety among the dozens of bosses that appear in the game. This philosophy is certainly on full display when you place all the bosses we've seen in Crimson Desert side by side.

Simon Cardy is a senior editor at IGN, who can be found mostly lurking around open-world games, obsessing over Korean movies, or despairing about the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky: @cardy.bsky.social.