Pearl Abyss says Crimson Desert's world has been revealed to be twice the size of Skyrim and bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2 in a new info drop.

I'm still not sure how to feel about Crimson Desert. I played it about two years ago and it had me keen on its punishing combat and ability to do wrestling moves on unsuspecting bandits – including a Stone Cold Stunner, which I can't say I've seen deployed in a non-wrestling game before – but since I was only able to fight bosses, I was unsure how that would actually translate to an open world game. But it looks like the approach is "why not" as it includes a ton of mechanics that you wouldn't expect from a fantasy game.

Most notably is the map, according to Pearl Abyss PR director Will Powers. "The world's at least twice as big as the open world/playable area of Skyrim, [and] it is larger than the map of a Red Dead Redemption 2." But it's all well and good to have a big map, but what's more important is you actually have things to do in it.

Powers explains: "Open-world games are about doing things, having activities, having distractions. So we wanted to create a world that's not only massive but is also incredibly interactive."

New footage revealed during the New Game+ Showcase also includes a look at some of the mechanics included in the game for traversing the open world, allowing players to mount and ride dragons, bears, and then inexplicably for fantasy, also dinosaurs and mechsuits. The game also takes a page out of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's book by including explorable sky islands which are described as "very important." Plus, earlier footage showed off a grappling hook, which is always a win.

At a ridiculously detailed showcase of the open-world engine behind the RPG Crimson Desert, I asked a ridiculously detailed question about water and all hell broke loose.

The history of the Fallout games is a complicated one, but it was Bethesda's almost $6 million offer that ensured it would be the steward of the franchise, no matter what it's original creators might have hoped for.

The Fallout IP was originally owned, published, and created by Interplay, whose internal Black Isle Studios made Fallout 2. Interplay licensed the franchise to Bethesda, but hit dire financial straits in the mid-2000s and was forced to sell assets in order to pay its staff. According to Brian Fargo, co-founder of Interplay, "the only asset they really had to sell was Fallout."

Speaking to Game Informer, Fargo says that a lawsuit attached to those financial issues "made [Interplay] sell all the Fallout rights to Bethesda," but there might have been another way. Fallout's art director, Leonard Boyarsky, who had left Interplay to found Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines studio Troika Games alongside Tim Cain and Jason Anderson said that he tried to make a bid for the rights before they got to Bethesda.

"We got some possible investment interest," Boyarsky says, "but we never even got a chance to make an offer." Bethesda reportedly paid $5.75 million to secure the rights. Previously, Cain had made clear that the three-person team of Boyarsky, Anderson, and himself had been "outbid" for the rights to make Fallout 3, but Boyarsky suggests it was a little more brutal than that. "It wouldn't have mattered if they heard our offer or not," he says, "because they would have laughed."

The rest, as they say, is history. Bethesda's held firmly onto the Fallout franchise since then, handing it off to Obsidian for New Vegas and Amazon for Fallout season 2, with Fallout 5 somewhere way off in the distance after The Elder Scrolls 6. As for Troika, two out of three of them are working as close to Fallout as you can get without being at Bethesda these days, with Tim Cain rejoining Obsidian to work on a secret project teased after The Outer Worlds 2, which Boyarsky helped build as creative director.

Bethesda design director wants a Fallout 5 you could play for up to 600 hours because "that's the kind of games we make."