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

Yesterday brought us the inaugural New Game+ Showcase, in which multiple content creators decided to cut out the Kojima-glazing middleman and just show off a crapload of games. While the event ended up getting ridiculed a lot for feeling more like a podcast than a showcase, it did include interesting new glimpses of a number of upcoming games, including what claims to to be one of the largest open-world RPGs of 2026.

Crimson Desert, the sprawling action-adventure with the racecar-like horses from Black Desert Online developers Pearl Abyss, is set to launch on March 19. PR rep Will Powers was asked during New Game+ about the actual size of the game world, after some of the initial previews gave the impression that the game’s pretty massive vistas were “just a tiny corner of the map.” Powers then gave an eye-popping answer: 

Twice the playable area of Skyrim. It’s larger than the map of Red Dead Redemption 2. The area that you’re playing in, the continent of Pywel is absolutely massive.

In fairness to Pearl Abyss, that’s not a terribly out-of-pocket thing for a developer largely known for an enormously popular freemium MMORPG to say, especially given how much of Crimson Desert looks like an MMORPG that eventually had a single-player action game grafted into it (which is what actually happened). But still, that’s a lot of game. Or at least a lot of game map.

Crimson Desert claims to have twice the playable area as Skyrim and a map larger than Red Dead Redemption 2 pic.twitter.com/iCtLZ7IWU4

— Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) January 9, 2026

The footage shared thus far in trailers and previews does show a pretty world and some solid combat, and look, I will always give brownie points to any game that lets you ride a dragon. But what about the possibility that it will be a lot of space with no real purpose? Powers himself tries to cut off that concern at the pass. “Size doesn’t really matter if there’s nothing to do,” he said “Open-world games are about doing things, having activities, having distractions, so we wanted to create a world that’s not only massive but incredibly interactive.” 

To her credit, streamer Luality chimed in fairly often during the interview trying to press Powers on what kinds of interactions the player can look forward to in this giant world, asking if you can fight dragons or romance NPCs. The best Powers came up with in response was emphasizing “all sorts of deep crafting systems.”

Therein lies the real issue with making promises about map size in the year of our Lord 2026: it’s long since become a useless metric. Having a game world the size of Australia is all well and good, you can even have it be full of empty space to traverse. But you have to do more with empty space than just fill it with crafting supplies. That’s a legitimate reason to praise games that actually make their terrain meaningful, like Kojima’s Death Stranding 2, and a reason to put on your skeptic glasses whenever anyone starts hyping up the size of their map rather than what’s in it.