Yesterday introduced us the inaugural New Sport+ Showcase, by 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 loads for feeling extra like a podcast than a showcase, it did embody 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 about to launch on March 19. PR rep Will Powers was requested throughout New Game+ concerning the precise measurement of the sport world, after a number of the preliminary previews seemed that the sport’s fairly huge 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 Crimson Useless Redemption 2. The realm that you simply’re taking part in in, the continent of Pywel is completely huge.
In equity to Pearl Abyss, that’s not a really 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 ultimately had a single-player motion recreation grafted into it (which is what actually happened). However nonetheless, that’s a whole lot of recreation. Or at the very least a whole lot of recreation map.
Crimson Desert claims to have twice the playable space as Skyrim and a map bigger than Crimson Useless Redemption 2 pic.twitter.com/iCtLZ7IWU4
— Jake Fortunate (@JakeSucky) January 9, 2026
The footage shared so far in trailers and previews does present a reasonably world and a few strong fight, and look, I’ll all the time give brownie factors to any recreation that permits you to experience a dragon. However what concerning the risk that it will likely be a whole lot of house with no actual objective? Powers himself tries to chop off that concern on the move. “Measurement doesn’t actually matter if there’s nothing to do,” he stated “Open-world video games are about doing issues, having actions, having distractions, so we needed to create a world that’s not solely huge however extremely interactive.”
To her credit score, streamer Luality chimed in pretty typically throughout the interview making an attempt to press Powers on what sorts of interactions the participant can stay up for on this big world, asking in the event you can combat dragons or romance NPCs. One of the best Powers got here up with in response was emphasizing “all types of deep crafting methods.”
Therein lies the true problem with making guarantees about map measurement within the 12 months of our Lord 2026: it’s lengthy since grow to be a ineffective metric. Having a recreation world the scale of Australia is all effectively and good, you possibly can even have or not it’s filled with empty space to traverse. However you must do extra with empty house than simply fill it with crafting provides. That’s a respectable cause to reward video games that really make their terrain significant, like Kojima’s Loss of life Stranding 2, and a cause to place in your skeptic glasses each time anybody begins hyping up the scale of their map reasonably than what’s in it.
