Crimson Desert fan spends days watching NPCs build a statue in real time like a Red Dead Redemption 2 fan watching clothes dry, Kingdom Come: Deliverance boss says "this is absolutely insane"

There are fine details, then there's this. If you stand around after completing the mission to get the wolf statue built in Hernand in Crimson Desert, you can literally witness the monument be chipped into existence in real-time.

No, really - there are now clips of it happening. You need to do the Wolf Over Hernand quest, to get things rolling, then just stand back and watch the process unwind. I should warn you, it's genuinely a bit boring, and even sped up it takes a while.

But seeing the result is a staggering testament to the work that's gone into the game. Pywel is a massive setting, full of lovely mysteries and secrets and surprises, and yet this may be my favorite so far, because it's something that took really specific time and energy from the devs. Someone had to sit down and quite literally sculpt this digitally in order for it to be a reality.

People in the industry are wowed, too. "This is absolutely insane!" tweets Daniel Vávra, co-founder of Warhorse Studios and lead writer on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Given how well constructed the Kingdom Come games are, that's anything but faint praise.

It's all very reminiscent of all the people watching and idle hanging around you can do in Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, where you can watch clothes dry if you feel so inclined. At least at the end of this there's a nice statue, but then freshly dried sheet and clothing are satisfying too, in their own way.

Someone actually makes a joke about perpetual building construction in GTA 5, noting it's still not done after 13 years. Well, there's a challenge in here for GTA 6, that's for sure.

Crimson Desert players average over 20 hours a week in the open-world game, blowing away almost everything else on consoles