Crimson Desert must understand that size is not everything

Video game developers and publishers like to brag about how big their games are. Maybe it's just a human impulse. We're always hearing how a new triple-A blockbuster is twice the size of what came before it, or how there's so much content to be found in it that you'll never see everything there is to offer.

But I think the last two console generations have proven that this excessive scale is far from the boon it used to be. Size doesn't always matter. Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla were each heavily criticized despite being compelling games in their own right because their worlds were so vast and the majority of their missions so trivial that few saw them through to the end. And that's without mentioning post-launch expansions and downloadable content.

On the other hand, experiences like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Skyrim are incredible not because of the size of their open worlds, but because of what their mechanics and systems allow players to do within them. We can embark on epic quests, live out countless fantasies and lose ourselves in fictional worlds beyond compare. Now Crimson Desert will be bigger than both of them, but is this really a good thing?

The Crimson Desert must realize that size doesn't matter anymore

Pearl Abyss Will Powers has been teasing fans with the scale of Crimson Desert's open world, and how describing it in simple numbers unfortunately doesn't do it justice.

“I don't think numbers really do it justice because how big is it in terms of scope and scale? But what we can say is that the world is at least twice the size of the open world, the playable area, Skyrim. It's bigger than the map of Red Dead Redemption 2.”

Fortunately, this point was followed up by expanding on how size isn't the deciding factor in Crimson Desert, and what you do in the open world matters more than anything else:

“The continent of Pywel is absolutely huge, but size doesn't really matter if there's nothing to do,” Powers noted. “Open world games are about doing things, having activities or having distractions. So we wanted to create a world that is not only huge, but also incredibly interactive.”

Crimson Desert lets the player navigate its countless layers on horseback or even on a flying dragon, meaning you could theoretically get around it pretty quickly. You'll also navigate the open world in different ways, depending on the role-playing experience you want to live out, with Pearl Abyss claiming that this will be determined by the player's “head canon” as they play and exactly how they decide to engage in combat, exploration, missions and more. You're playing a predetermined character though, so I guess this fantasy will only go so far.

Very few of these comments help my paranoia though, because if the first thing you mention about the quality of your open world when asked about it is the sense of scale and amount of things to do within it, you feel woefully out of touch with the modern evolution of RPGs. Games like Ghost of Yotei and Assassin's Creed Shadows still exist and serve as generous wells of content for players to enjoy, but they are also criticized for this cookie-cutter design when so many other developers have moved on.

Baldur's Gate 3 – in terms of sheer size at least – isn't very big. It's the characters you meet, the missions you take on and the sheer density of it all that makes it so amazing. You're lost in the quality of everything as opposed to the scale of a fictional world, and in a landscape where so many games have been maligned for offering too much with not nearly enough substance, Crimson Desert finds itself having to walk a very delicate line.

What kind of game is Crimson Desert, anyway?

I've been asking myself this question ever since the game was revealed years ago. I've seen hands-on previews and countless trailers that are certainly impressive, but also somewhat creatively bankrupt when it comes to stealing ideas from other games.

When a trailer revealed the sky to be filled with a bunch of floating islands almost identical to Tears of the Kingdom, I was shocked by how shameless Pearl Abyss was, while the overall aesthetic of the game seemed to draw from a variety of cultures rather than settle on a single cohesive identity. Giant fantasy monsters, vikings and mecha dragons don't really go together.

One of the best comments on the latest trailer describes Crimson Desert as: “Ghost of Assassin's Creed: Tears of the Witcher's Elden Ring,” which is awfully on the money.

There are cities filled with medieval mechs, sky islands populated by ambitious puzzles, a series of battles against both humans and monsters, and an open world that can be explored on foot, on horseback, or while scaling all sorts of gorgeous environments. Crimson Desert is Pearl Abyss taking inspiration from every major open world game of the last generation as it tries to put its own unique spin on things. My primary concern is that the story and cast of characters at the center of it won't be compelling enough to distract from its mimicry.

So it turns out my concerns with Crimson Desert extend well beyond the scope of its open world, but this will be the straw that breaks the mechanical camel's back if Pearl Abyss has nothing else to offer. I worry that it's trying to look and feel like so many other things that it has no idea what it wants to be underneath it all. Yes, it has a big world with tons of things to do in it, but will I want to spend time there or just switch to the dozens of other games that inspired it? Only time will tell.