Yesterday introduced us the inaugural New Recreation+ Showcase, through which a number of content material creators determined to chop out the Kojima-glazing intermediary and simply showcase a crapload of video games. Whereas the occasion ended up getting ridiculed quite a bit for feeling extra like a podcast than a showcase, it did embrace fascinating new glimpses of a variety of upcoming video games, together with what claims to to be one of many largest open-world RPGs of 2026.
Crimson Desert, the sprawling action-adventure with the racecar-like horses from Black Desert On-line builders Pearl Abyss, is ready to launch on March 19. PR rep Will Powers was requested throughout New Game+ in regards to the precise measurement of the sport world, after among the preliminary previews appeared that the sport’s fairly large vistas had been “only a tiny nook of the map.” Powers then gave an eye-popping reply:
Twice the playable space of Skyrim. It’s bigger than the map of Purple Lifeless Redemption 2. The realm that you just’re taking part in in, the continent of Pywel is completely large.
In equity to Pearl Abyss, that’s not a very out-of-pocket factor for a developer largely identified for an enormously popular freemium MMORPG to say, particularly given how a lot of Crimson Desert seems to be like an MMORPG that finally had a single-player motion recreation grafted into it (which is what actually happened). However nonetheless, that’s quite a lot of recreation. Or not less than quite a lot of recreation map.
Crimson Desert claims to have twice the playable space as Skyrim and a map bigger than Purple Lifeless Redemption 2 pic.twitter.com/iCtLZ7IWU4
— Jake Fortunate (@JakeSucky) January 9, 2026
The footage shared so far in trailers and previews does present a fairly world and a few strong fight, and look, I’ll all the time give brownie factors to any recreation that permits you to journey a dragon. However what in regards to the chance that it is going to be quite a lot of house with no actual objective? Powers himself tries to chop off that concern on the cross. “Dimension doesn’t actually matter if there’s nothing to do,” he mentioned “Open-world video games are about doing issues, having actions, having distractions, so we wished to create a world that’s not solely large however extremely interactive.”
To her credit score, streamer Luality chimed in pretty usually in the course of the interview attempting to press Powers on what sorts of interactions the participant can look ahead to on this large world, asking in the event you can battle dragons or romance NPCs. The perfect Powers got here up with in response was emphasizing “all kinds of deep crafting techniques.”
Therein lies the actual problem with making guarantees about map measurement within the yr of our Lord 2026: it’s lengthy since change into a ineffective metric. Having a recreation world the dimensions of Australia is all effectively and good, you possibly can even have it’s filled with empty house to traverse. However you must do extra with empty house than simply fill it with crafting provides. That’s a official cause to reward video games that truly make their terrain significant, like Kojima’s Demise Stranding 2, and a cause to place in your skeptic glasses at any time when anybody begins hyping up the dimensions of their map fairly than what’s in it.
