Yesterday brought us the first New Game+ showcase, in which several content creators decided to cut out the middleman from Kojima and simply show off a slew of games. Although the event ended up being widely ridiculed for being more like a podcast than a showcase, it included some interesting new previews of a number of upcoming games, including what claims to be one of the biggest open-world RPGs of 2026.
Crimson Desert, the sprawling action-adventure with the horses resembling racing cars Since Black Desert Online developers Pearl Abyss, is scheduled to launch on March 19. Public relations representative Will Powers was interviewed during New game+ about the actual size of the game’s world, after some early previews made it seem like the game’s fairly massive vistas were “just a small corner of the map.” Powers then gave a stunning response:
Twice the playable area of Skyrim. It’s bigger than the map Red Dead Redemption 2. The area you play in, the continent of Pywel, is absolutely huge.
In fairness to Pearl Abyss, this isn’t a terrible expense for a developer widely known for a hugely popular freemium MMORPG say, especially given the amount of Crimson Desert looks like an MMORPG to which a single-player action game has finally been added (this is what really happened). But that’s still a lot of game. Or at least a lot of game cards.
Crimson Desert claims to have twice the playable area of Skyrim and a larger map than Red Dead Redemption 2 pic.twitter.com/iCtLZ7IWU4
– Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) January 9, 2026
Images shared so far in trailers and previews shows a pretty world and solid combat, and look, I’ll always give brownie points to any game that lets you ride a dragon. But what about the possibility that it’s just a lot of space with no real purpose? Powers himself tries to allay this concern in passing. “Size doesn’t really matter if there’s nothing to do,”he said”Open world games are about doing things, having activities, having fun. So we wanted to create a world that was not only huge but incredibly interactive..”
To her credit, streamer Luality interjected quite often during the interview to try to press Powers on the types of interactions the player can expect in this giant world, asking if you can fight dragons or romantic NPCs. The best response Powers came up with was to point out “all sorts of deep crafting systems.
Therein lies the real problem with promises about card sizes in the year of our Lord 2026: it has long become a useless metric. Having a game world the size of Australia is all well and good, you can even fill it with empty space to browse. But you need to do more with the empty space than just fill it with craft supplies. This is a legitimate reason to praise games that actually give meaning to their terrain, like Kojima’s. Death Stranding 2and a reason to put on your skeptical glasses whenever someone starts exaggerating the size of their card rather than its contents.
