Since my whole timeline is full of people swooning about @dark1x claim that getting from one point of Crimson Desert’s map to another took a whopping 4 hours, let me share what’s going through my mind: I’ve been doing Level Design for 17 years now - I designed most of the levels / world for the Ori games and I’m still supervising LD on Wicked, so I think I can share some valuable insight. I always find it a bit worrying when everyone gets excited about ‘oh my god, they crafted an insanely huge world!’. In fact, I have basically the exact opposite reaction, which is more like: ‘Oh no, they started with a huge terrain, I hope they had an army of level designers to actually create a meaningful world instead of just a procedurally crafted, empty husk.’ I know how difficult it is to design good levels and how much time it takes us to build ours - so just hearing that, I already know that there’s likely not going to be a lot of actual good level design in Crimson Desert. And I actually don’t want to sound too disparaging or ruin anyone’s fun because Crimson Desert certainly looks insane and I can’t wait to play it myself either, but I also know how important and how underrated good level and world design is for a title and what the effect is if you have to OK huge, but empty worlds. I’d say at this point even some of the best studios in the world weren’t able to crack that nut. Even Nintendo struggled for a long time with the world size of Breath of the Wild and ultimately they had to put hundreds of devs on it to fill it up with content, but even their content then mostly consisted of ‘oh, here’s another Korok Seed!’ and other such lukewarm experiences. Since procedural level generation produces pretty crappy results and since we don’t have AI yet that can actually create well designed levels, the only way out of feeling like being in an empty world is to make every inch interactive. Minecraft did that and it was quite genius - but I doubt that’s what CD is going for. I understand the allure of ‘they created an entire universe!’, but be careful what you wish for: In Gaming Worlds, huge usually also means extremely shallow.