Crimson Desert Collides with Red Dead Redemption 2, and…

Every time a new open-world game like Crimson Desert starts presenting itself like it's going to be the next big leap for the genre in terms of interactivity and that "lived-in" feeling, this voice in the back of my head immediately brings up Red Dead Redemption 2. I don't necessarily think every game needs to beat it, but it's difficult to deny that Rockstar set a standard that is easy to reference and incredibly challenging to live up to. So, when a new open world comes in with promises as big as the vows Crimson Desert is making, it's hard not to measure it against a game that has already fulfilled them.

Simply going off of what Crimson Desert has shown so far, it looks like everything an ambitious open-world game should be in 2026. It seems packed with gameplay systems and a wide variety of content, and it's massive—although that has proven in the past not to be inherently indicative of quality. But that's all the easy part. The more pressing question is whether Crimson Desert can create the same sense of place that makes Red Dead Redemption 2 feel less like a game and more like a world you could actually live in if it were real. While it'll be interesting to see what the answer to that question is once the game launches, there is already enough on the table to get a glimpse of how Crimson Desert might fare in a head-on collision with Red Dead Redemption 2.

Crimson Desert's Scale Versus Red Dead Redemption 2's Substance

Crimson Desert may not be out yet, but it's clearly swinging big. Pearl Abyss has already been upfront about just how massive Pywel is, even to the point that it compared the size of the game's playable space to that of Red Dead Redemption 2. According to PR director Will Powers during an exclusive interview with Gaming Interviews on YouTube, Crimson Desert's world is "at least twice as big as the playable area of Skyrim, larger than the map of Red Dead Redemption 2." While he did soften up that claim by saying, "Size doesn't matter if there's nothing to do," even a clarification like that doesn't automatically make Crimson Desert exempt from any criticism about its scale if its world doesn't incorporate its content in a way that is more meaningful than "bigger map equals more space for more stuff."

That's ultimately where Red Dead Redemption 2 differs. Even after playing it for a few hours, it feels evident that the goal in creating its world was never to give players a sense of scale for scale's sake but to provide enough space for the world to feel authentic. Rockstar devs even alluded to that much ahead of the game's release during various conversations, like in a 2018 interview with Edge magazine (via GamingBolt). During that exchange, Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut stated, "A big difference for this game is making sure that the player's not just discovering fun things to do, but that the world is constantly serving things up to you in subtle ways." With that, the emphasis was that Red Dead Redemption 2's open-world content would feel less like "missions" and more like "things that happen."

In the end, that's what makes Crimson Desert such an interesting comparison point. There are a lot of things to do in Red Dead Redemption 2, but the game doesn't present itself to players in that way. Crimson Desert does, so much so that PR director Will Powers confirmed in a more recent interview with Destin on YouTube that the "main campaign is only a very small percentage of the overall content of the game." This is an accurate reflection of how the upcoming action-adventure title has been marketed up to this point—as an open-world game with no end in sight when it comes to content.

Crimson Desert was intended to be an MMO before it became a single-player game, which is likely why it has the amount of content it claims to have.

In that same Destin interview, Powers stated, "For me, the game really opened up when I beat it," not in reference to any sort of endgame for Crimson Desert, but rather that once he beat the game, he was freed up to explore content that he hadn't even "scratched the surface" of yet. "The devs wanted to create a world that you want to get lost in, that you want to spend time in," Powers added. However, as enticing as that might make the game sound, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the difference between getting lost in a world because it actually takes you somewhere and getting lost in a world because there's so much to do in it that you don't know where to start. The latter is now widely considered a tired take on the open-world formula, whereas the former is becoming more universally accepted as the new standard.

Crimson Desert's Take on Interactivity Versus Red Dead Redemption 2's

Again, Crimson Desert isn't necessarily trying to be one of the biggest open-world games just for the sake of throwing players into a gigantic map. Where it seems to really want to prove itself is in how players interact with that massive space, and on paper, it checks all the boxes. Content is abundant in the game, from important things like the main story to mundane, everyday activities like fishing and mining. Clearly, the game is eager to give players something to do at every turn, but the thing that makes me personally cautious to jump on the hype train is that I feel like we've seen this before—and it rarely works the way it's intended.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the difference between getting lost in a world because it actually takes you somewhere and getting lost in a world because there's so much to do in it that you don't know where to start.

"Open-world games are about doing things, having activities, having distractions," Powers said during his conversation with Gaming Interviews. "So, we wanted to create a world that's not only massive but is also incredibly interactive." I understand what Powers is saying here, but if interactivity in Crimson Desert ultimately comes down to content, it's going to miss what makes Red Dead Redemption 2's open world so special. When open-world activities are considered distractions, it implies those activities don't belong there, whereas the goings-on of a world like RDR2 feel like an essential, indispensable part of the experience.

That difference comes down to how each open world justifies its activity. Red Dead Redemption 2's fishing, hunting, chance encounters, and even long stretches of travel don't feel like side content competing for your attention but natural byproducts of a world that would still be turning even if Arthur never showed up. In a sense, it never feels afraid that you're going to get bored, so it doesn't try to keep you busy. Instead, you do those things simply because that's what happens in a place like this, and ignoring them feels just as believable as engaging with them.

That's where Crimson Desert's open world faces its biggest challenge. By making interactivity seem more like a constant stream of things to do, it risks making its world something that merely exists to entertain the player rather than something that existed before the player even entered the picture. That approach can be exciting, especially on a technical level, but it also puts more pressure on the game's content to justify its existence. If activities feel like distractions, no matter how many there are, players might get bored anyway. But if they feel intrinsic to the world, they'll disappear into it. Whether Crimson Desert can make that leap is the question hanging over its impressive list of features, and it may not be answered until players are free to wander without something always pulling them forward.

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