"More Hype Than GTA 6": Could Crimson Desert Be 2026’s Must-Play RPG?
GTA 6 can wait. If you believe Reddit and the Steam charts, Crimson Desert is the game everyone’s losing their minds over right now—400,000 preorders on Steam and a community practically combusting with excitement.
Pearl Abyss’s RPG drops tomorrow on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and it’s already raked in over $20 million in gross revenue on Steam—blowing past Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 just three days before their own launches. With its massive 80 km² map, hard stance against microtransactions, and heated debates over the PS5 version, Crimson Desert is channeling all the hopes of a player base starving for epic open worlds.
Image credit: Pearl Abyss
The Reddit post that says it all
On r/CrimsonDesert, a post by u/Ol_UnReliable20 set the whole place ablaze a few days ago. The title pulls no punches: “More hyped for this game than GTA 6.” Inside, the player admits it’s become “almost impossible to contain my excitement these past weeks,” before dropping a line that clearly hit a nerve: “I don’t care if the story’s just okay—just let me get lost in this world.” Nearly 3,000 upvotes later, that post has become the rallying cry for a community that can barely sit still.
“more hyped for this game than GTA 6
by u/ in r/CrimsonDesert
What’s striking is the nature of the hype. The player isn’t talking about combat mechanics or leveling systems. They’re name-dropping Skyrim, The Witcher 3, the Red Dead Redemption series—games famous for making you forget the real world for dozens of hours. The buzz around Crimson Desert is rooted in a very specific nostalgia: the kind you get from open worlds where you feel like a true explorer, not just a tourist chasing map markers.
An open world promising what others missed
Crimson Desert’s 80 km² map is even bigger than Red Dead Redemption 2’s, and players can’t get enough. On Reddit, the comparisons are flying: “This is what Dragon’s Dogma 2 should have been,” sums up one spot-on comment. After more than five years of development, Pearl Abyss seems to get it—size alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. The studio is promising a reactive, living world where every nook and cranny matters.
Recent disappointments have left scars. Hogwarts Legacy gave us a gorgeous Hogwarts, but one you could never really call home. Starfield offered an entire galaxy, but most of it felt like empty space. In 2026, players don’t want pretty shells—they want immersion—the feeling of living in a place, not just visiting it. And Crimson Desert is ticking all the right boxes:
- A gigantic 80 km² map designed for organic exploration
- A world described as hyper-realistic and responsive to player actions
- Action-focused combat, with epic boss fights
- No microtransactions—a true $70 premium experience
On consoles, the game will support enhanced PSSR on PS5 Pro right out of the gate, while footage of the standard PS5 version dropped last Sunday in partnership with PlayStation Japan. The addition of Denuvo Anti-Tamper did stir up some drama, with a few players threatening to cancel their preorders. Pearl Abyss quickly cooled things down, assuring fans that every performance video released so far was already running with Denuvo active.
400,000 players have already jumped in on Steam
Reddit hype would be just noise if the numbers didn’t back it up. But they do—and then some. According to Alinea Analytics as of March 16, Crimson Desert had racked up around 363,000 Steam preorders, with gross revenue topping $20 million. March 16 alone made up 10% of total sales—that’s $2.6 million in a single day. The game also boasts 2.2 million wishlists on Valve’s platform—a massive pool of potential players.
Stack it up against other recent launches and the numbers are dizzying. Three days before release, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 had only $5.2 million in Steam preorders, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was stuck at $2.4 million. Crimson Desert crushes them—almost four times Kingdom Come 2’s tally, and eight times Expedition 33’s. Granted, both those games had long legs, hitting $101.3 million and $95.5 million after 120 days. The big question: can Crimson Desert keep up the momentum after launch, or has most of the demand already been unleashed through preorders?
Pearl Abyss is making a high-stakes bet—and the numbers are just as wild as the hype. If Crimson Desert delivers on the fever dream it’s sparked, the South Korean studio will have dropped the RPG event of 2026. If not, the letdown will be just as epic as the anticipation—and now we know just how high those stakes are. We’ll find out tomorrow, controller or keyboard in hand.
PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
