Open-World Game With Dragon Riding Is 2x The Size Of Skyrim

Yesterday introduced us the inaugural New Sport+ Showcase, wherein 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 rather a lot for feeling extra like a podcast than a showcase, it did embrace attention-grabbing new glimpses of quite a lot 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 a few 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 Pink Useless Redemption 2. The world that you just’re taking part in in, the continent of Pywel is totally huge.

In equity to Pearl Abyss, that’s not a very out-of-pocket factor for a developer largely recognized for an enormously popular freemium MMORPG to say, particularly given how a lot of Crimson Desert seems like an MMORPG that finally had a single-player motion sport grafted into it (which is what actually happened). However nonetheless, that’s plenty of sport. Or not less than plenty of sport map.

Crimson Desert claims to have twice the playable space as Skyrim and a map bigger than Pink Useless Redemption 2 pic.twitter.com/iCtLZ7IWU4

— Jake Fortunate (@JakeSucky) January 9, 2026

The footage shared up to now 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 sport that permits you to trip a dragon. However what in regards to the chance that it is going to be plenty of house with no actual function? Powers himself tries to chop off that concern on the cross. “Dimension 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 look ahead to on this large world, asking when you can struggle dragons or romance NPCs. The perfect Powers got here up with in response was emphasizing “all types of deep crafting techniques.”

Therein lies the actual difficulty with making guarantees about map measurement within the yr of our Lord 2026: it’s lengthy since grow to be a ineffective metric. Having a sport 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 authentic motive to reward video games that truly make their terrain significant, like Kojima’s Dying Stranding 2, and a motive to place in your skeptic glasses each time anybody begins hyping up the scale of their map somewhat than what’s in it.