As an author, I'm obligated to say... What!? So I spent all that time world building and developing characters and relationships for nothing. Wow. My novel could've been a 20 page comic book.
It's about purpose.
World building and character relationships are some (of the many) of the fundamental ways people enjoy literature. If you efficiently describe a lot of content, that makes for a good book. If you ramble on and on about the same thing repetitive, that doesn't make for a good book.
When writing, sometimes your characters travel to another location. You don't write about every single moment of that travel, because you know that wouldn't make for interesting writing. So you use literary fast travel. You either skip to their destination to get on with the story (get to the next plot point that required them to be there) or you filled travel with a few interesting moments and only wrote about those moments (and ignored the rest of travel). No good writer spends multiple chapters just writing about boring uneventful purposeless travel. Unless it has a purpose, it's a waste.
Slow travel lacks purpose in games (with usually one exception: the first time you travel someplace it's all fresh new content to you and interesting enough to play through). So slow travel is like an author exhaustively describing the travel of their characters without purpose.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This kind of goes into the refinement and removal of the soul of the genre. Developer realized they didn't néed to make a real world. Just streamlined environments nearly on rails can support the quest hubs gameplay.
WoW was one of the last open worlds created. To me it's the transition MMORPG between modern and old school. Most of the modern genre took things like the UI and quest hub progression and simplified everything else.
I'd just like to give a little shout-out to vanilla LotRO.
Whilst I never got into WoW so can't directly compare, LotRO was nearly 100% open world at launch, no loading screens between zones (except erid luin), very large zones to explore, very interesting classes (no holy trinity), high quality world building, decent amount of dungeons at launch (took a few months to get the raids in), good focus on teamwork (you started getting group quests in the tutorial area) and a ton of lore to keep you happy.
Whilst I can see that you obviously immensely enjoyed WoW and its commercial success is testament to its good design at the time, there have definitely been loads of MMOs that have "beaten" its various features. The difficulty for modern developers is not only beating the features, but making each feature work together well enough for the specific target audience.
I am also a firm believer in WoW not being successful because of its current feature set. Whilst it's features were new and exciting 11 years ago and made the MMO genre accessible to the masses, that hasn't been true for at least the last 5 years.
WoW is successful because of its community: with so many people playing it, chances are your friends play it and people like to play with their friends. Friends will keep you in an MMO way past the point where it stopped being fun. Friends will persuade you to come back for expansions. Friends will keep you entertained when the content fails. Perhaps the issue with modern MMOs is not that their features are bad / worse than WoW, but that modern MMOs don't foster communities as well as the older MMOs.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
You can't call it a seamless world when it can draw such low end graphics like that so easily.Wow's textures were just god awful,they were like some kid's handy work on dad's photoshop or something,definitely not the work of a professional. As for size idk possibly,i know FFXI was massive and tons of content.EQ2 was also massive with tons of content.Matter of fact Wow still had to add some ideas already in EQ2 and has never had the housing with housing items. Adding content,well a LOT of instance content,the easiest content to make for a game developer.
For me it was the class design that FFXI owns the roost,along with it's perfectly calculated sub class design as well.Then grouping was actually grouping in FFXI with mechanics based around it.Mobs and players both utilized the Renkai system and elemental properties again Wow does not have that depth.Basically Wow if you want to ASSUME it marginally had a bigger world "i don't agree"did everything cheaper,low end.
I would prefer FFXI's textures over Wow's in a heartbeat and FFXI was made before Wow.IMO the simple reason is thaty Blizzard was copying EQ1 and basically wanted to just make sure their graphics were better than EQ1 instead of trying to put forth their best effort.Even to this day i see Blizzard going with lack of effort in ALL of their games,they never put out their best effort because they don't need to,people buy it up anyhow.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
This kind of goes into the refinement and removal of the soul of the genre. Developer realized they didn't néed to make a real world. Just streamlined environments nearly on rails can support the quest hubs gameplay.
WoW was one of the last open worlds created. To me it's the transition MMORPG between modern and old school. Most of the modern genre took things like the UI and quest hub progression and simplified everything else.
Well gameplay is still the soul of any game, so that's what decides whether it lives or dies. Many MMORPGs have failed to provide gameplay with the same depth of WOW, so there's a legitimate criticism that could be made that those MMORPGs should be shooting for a higher bar than what WOW has raised.
World-building is also important, but it's not like it's suddenly disappeared. Games like ESO put a ton of effort into their world-building. But the world is only of secondary importance compared with what you're actually doing in a game. If that's not enjoyable, you aren't going to have many players sticking around for the "great world design".
Quest hubs aren't really what determines whether a game has great world design or not. It's about the story and its presentation within the game world.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
As an author, I'm obligated to say... What!? So I spent all that time world building and developing characters and relationships for nothing. Wow. My novel could've been a 20 page comic book.
It's about purpose.
World building and character relationships are some (of the many) of the fundamental ways people enjoy literature. If you efficiently describe a lot of content, that makes for a good book. If you ramble on and on about the same thing repetitive, that doesn't make for a good book.
When writing, sometimes your characters travel to another location. You don't write about every single moment of that travel, because you know that wouldn't make for interesting writing. So you use literary fast travel. You either skip to their destination to get on with the story (get to the next plot point that required them to be there) or you filled travel with a few interesting moments and only wrote about those moments (and ignored the rest of travel). No good writer spends multiple chapters just writing about boring uneventful purposeless travel. Unless it has a purpose, it's a waste.
Slow travel lacks purpose in games (with usually one exception: the first time you travel someplace it's all fresh new content to you and interesting enough to play through). So slow travel is like an author exhaustively describing the travel of their characters without purpose.
In a MMO such as EVE slow travel serves a different purpose, it is a strategic element for both PVP and PVE.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
In a MMO such as EVE slow travel serves a different purpose, it is a strategic element for both PVP and PVE.
Well it's a bit like how Tolkien's details regarding travel in LOTR. Technically they did serve a purpose (filling in details of his world-building), but he didn't exactly write it in the most efficient way possible.
Similarly the purpose to EVE's slow travel could be achieved in a way that didn't force players themselves to be the ones manually slow-traveling. I've often pointed out that similar gameplay could be accomplished with NPC transports/miners with hireable guards; they do the menial work for you automatically (and therefore distances and localized markets still matter) and meanwhile you can travel around doing less menial things elsewhere (and immediately take control of the hired guard, should your convoys alert you that they're under attack.) All the strategy; almost none of the tedium.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
wow vanilla was like 207 km² star wars galaxies had 518 km² asheron's call even had 1,295 km² and guild wars nightfall had a world map of 38,850 km²
ps: vanguard can't even mess with rift or warhammer online *G*
As I mentioned earlier, measuring MMORPGs by literal distance is useless, and EVE's millions of lightyears of distance obviously wins that contest by a huge margin (transitioning to a conversation about what really measures a game's distance: travel time...and I'm pretty sure EVE wins that measure of world size too...which might continue into a conversation over whether world size actually matters, given that the more popular themepark games have certainly done better than EVE, despite EVE's ridiculously larger game world...but that comes back on the OP's post, since he's the one claiming WOW is "largest" which is false by most measures except popularity.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yes it was magic for awhile. Then Blizzard showed us how all the tricks were done with convenience feature after convenience feature. It was always a grinder but it was a rewarding grinder. Now its just a mechanically flat grind.....
DFO/Planetside 1/WW2online most definately have much bigger worlds. WoW at launch had hardly any content at all. I'd give runescape the prize for the most content in a mmo.
wow vanilla was like 207 km² star wars galaxies had 518 km² asheron's call even had 1,295 km² and guild wars nightfall had a world map of 38,850 km²
ps: vanguard can't even mess with rift or warhammer online *G*
As I mentioned earlier, measuring MMORPGs by literal distance is useless, and EVE's millions of lightyears of distance obviously wins that contest by a huge margin (transitioning to a conversation about what really measures a game's distance: travel time...and I'm pretty sure EVE wins that measure of world size too...which might continue into a conversation over whether world size actually matters, given that the more popular themepark games have certainly done better than EVE, despite EVE's ridiculously larger game world...but that comes back on the OP's post, since he's the one claiming WOW is "largest" which is false by most measures except popularity.)
yea, lets measure by the size of their bumms instead ^^ seriously, if you dont wanna know it's size, ask for something else than... it's size ^^
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
The point is fairly obvious, with great books and films you don't skip to the best bits, you enjoy the whole experience. Lotr is one of the best books of all time and it is long and meandering with lots of full bits, but its the time you spend with the characters that adds depth to the story. But like vanilla, it felt large and flowing, the world felt alive and the price for this is that you had to travel in the world. We can clearly see the extreme opposite of this in wod and how badly the virtual world had broken down. The trick is finding the right balance and I think summoning stones was a good middle ground for example.
Another example of this modern mindset, my son is a big sci fi fan, so I gave him Stephen baxters the ring to read, an amazing book that requires you to follow a group of humans over the years in a spaceship flying to some unknown destination. He however couldn't get into it and he told me he skipped to the end with the battle. He thought the point of the book was that we had an all powerful ship that can destroy planets, and thought the book was 'rubbish'
Post edited by Bladestrom on
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
In a MMO such as EVE slow travel serves a different purpose, it is a strategic element for both PVP and PVE.
Well it's a bit like how Tolkien's details regarding travel in LOTR. Technically they did serve a purpose (filling in details of his world-building), but he didn't exactly write it in the most efficient way possible.
Similarly the purpose to EVE's slow travel could be achieved in a way that didn't force players themselves to be the ones manually slow-traveling. I've often pointed out that similar gameplay could be accomplished with NPC transports/miners with hireable guards; they do the menial work for you automatically (and therefore distances and localized markets still matter) and meanwhile you can travel around doing less menial things elsewhere (and immediately take control of the hired guard, should your convoys alert you that they're under attack.) All the strategy; almost none of the tedium.
Slow travel actually does serve a purpose.
It makes getting places difficult as not only does it take time, but you could easily die along the way.
One result of this is that the world feels much larger.
Another effect of this is that the people actually feel like they are traveling through a desert or a dangerous swap.
You generally don't get that feeling with fast travel games and mounts.
The OP is too green to know there are charts and maps illustrating MMORPG's world size. And World of Warcraft was never known for it's depth. It has remedial crafting, at best.
yea, lets measure by the size of their bumms instead ^^ seriously, if you dont wanna know it's size, ask for something else than... it's size ^^
You do realize that measuring something's size in time is still measuring its size, right?
It's just a more accurate measurement. I could make my game world a quintillion lightyears huge, but if you can travel at 200 quadrillion lightyears a second, then the world is effectively only 5 seconds from one side to the other, and extremely tiny.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
WoW has always been the accessible game for the masses. When WoW came out,, I tried it for a few hours, I thought it was ridiculous that you didn't have corpse runs and could just solo-quest through the game and went back to EQ.
WoW has always been the accessible game for the masses. When WoW came out,, I tried it for a few hours, I thought it was ridiculous that you didn't have corpse runs and could just solo-quest through the game and went back to EQ.
WOW has always been the accessible game for the masses.
It has also been the deep game for advanced MMORPG players.
No other MMORPG came as close to the ideal ("simple to learn, lifetime to master") as WOW did. Naturally since you only tried it for a few hours, you missed out on that depth.
The good news is WOW's combat is deeper than ever, so if you went back to WOW today you'd experience more depth than the game has ever offered. I've presented the Demonology Warlock rotation in several threads, and in all those threads nobody has been able to provide evidence of deeper combat than that in other MMORPGs (except one: FFXIV's Lancer class, which I'm re-subbed and playing currently and enjoying so far.) So from an objective standpoint of the difficulty of mastering a game (aka "game depth") WOW remains great (and I think has more class specs at that depth than FFXIV does; many FFXIV classes are a bit on the shallow side.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This is an old conversation, the fit a static rotation into a time window thing that wow does is dull and hasn't changed in 10 years. Rote memorisation is not depth, either is jumping to a set of cooldown bars that spawn as you fight. writing algorithms for rawr is more interesting.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
This kind of goes into the refinement and removal of the soul of the genre. Developer realized they didn't néed to make a real world. Just streamlined environments nearly on rails can support the quest hubs gameplay.
WoW was one of the last open worlds created. To me it's the transition MMORPG between modern and old school. Most of the modern genre took things like the UI and quest hub progression and simplified everything else.
Well gameplay is still the soul of any game, so that's what decides whether it lives or dies. Many MMORPGs have failed to provide gameplay with the same depth of WOW, so there's a legitimate criticism that could be made that those MMORPGs should be shooting for a higher bar than what WOW has raised.
World-building is also important, but it's not like it's suddenly disappeared. Games like ESO put a ton of effort into their world-building. But the world is only of secondary importance compared with what you're actually doing in a game. If that's not enjoyable, you aren't going to have many players sticking around for the "great world design".
Quest hubs aren't really what determines whether a game has great world design or not. It's about the story and its presentation within the game world.
Actually, I would say in this case there is a connection. Quest hub centric world is one designed just for quest hubbing with limited range of space. These games have narrow scope of world design to have no exploration and all about funneling the player through the quest content.
yea, lets measure by the size of their bumms instead ^^ seriously, if you dont wanna know it's size, ask for something else than... it's size ^^
You do realize that measuring something's size in time is still measuring its size, right?
It's just a more accurate measurement. I could make my game world a quintillion lightyears huge, but if you can travel at 200 quadrillion lightyears a second, then the world is effectively only 5 seconds from one side to the other, and extremely tiny.
Yes, and no. Even if you could fast travel to one side of the world fast scale still matters. If a world was the size of the United States fast travel wouldn't take away it having full content. A game that could fill a United States sized map with content would still be large even if transversed quickly.
Actually, I would say in this case there is a connection. Quest hub centric world is one designed just for quest hubbing with limited range of space. These games have narrow scope of world design to have no exploration and all about funneling the player through the quest content.
The exploration that existed in early MMORPGs still exists in modern ones. There are still scenic overlooks and hidden caves and things to learn about the game world and relate to others, and only in the worst MMORPGs is that not the case.
So exploration is still offered as an activity, it's just that the achiever activities (advancing your character) are dramatically more varied than endless mob-grinding.
Exploration has always been optional. You're taking time away from your Achiever activities by exploring.
In modern MMORPGs if you play 'optimally' (according to Achiever gameplay) then you're hopping from hub to hub with the mini quests in between (because most hub-based games still have quests between hubs, like ESO and WOW.)
In older MMORPGs if you played optimally you're hopping between even fewer locations (you're grinding mob type A for a much longer period of time, then when you're high enough you move to mob type B.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yes, and no. Even if you could fast travel to one side of the world fast scale still matters. If a world was the size of the United States fast travel wouldn't take away it having full content. A game that could fill a United States sized map with content would still be large even if transversed quickly.
Distance is still the worst metric for measuring that though. Measuring the amount of content (number of quests, monsters, etc) will be a better gauge of how truly rich a world is (any chump level designer can drop a gargantuan heightmap down and add some random hills to it, but a smaller world filled with cities and bandit hideouts and beholder lairs is going to actually be a far richer world.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Comments
World building and character relationships are some (of the many) of the fundamental ways people enjoy literature. If you efficiently describe a lot of content, that makes for a good book. If you ramble on and on about the same thing repetitive, that doesn't make for a good book.
When writing, sometimes your characters travel to another location. You don't write about every single moment of that travel, because you know that wouldn't make for interesting writing. So you use literary fast travel. You either skip to their destination to get on with the story (get to the next plot point that required them to be there) or you filled travel with a few interesting moments and only wrote about those moments (and ignored the rest of travel). No good writer spends multiple chapters just writing about boring uneventful purposeless travel. Unless it has a purpose, it's a waste.
Slow travel lacks purpose in games (with usually one exception: the first time you travel someplace it's all fresh new content to you and interesting enough to play through). So slow travel is like an author exhaustively describing the travel of their characters without purpose.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
WoW was one of the last open worlds created. To me it's the transition MMORPG between modern and old school. Most of the modern genre took things like the UI and quest hub progression and simplified everything else.
Whilst I never got into WoW so can't directly compare, LotRO was nearly 100% open world at launch, no loading screens between zones (except erid luin), very large zones to explore, very interesting classes (no holy trinity), high quality world building, decent amount of dungeons at launch (took a few months to get the raids in), good focus on teamwork (you started getting group quests in the tutorial area) and a ton of lore to keep you happy.
Whilst I can see that you obviously immensely enjoyed WoW and its commercial success is testament to its good design at the time, there have definitely been loads of MMOs that have "beaten" its various features. The difficulty for modern developers is not only beating the features, but making each feature work together well enough for the specific target audience.
I am also a firm believer in WoW not being successful because of its current feature set. Whilst it's features were new and exciting 11 years ago and made the MMO genre accessible to the masses, that hasn't been true for at least the last 5 years.
WoW is successful because of its community: with so many people playing it, chances are your friends play it and people like to play with their friends. Friends will keep you in an MMO way past the point where it stopped being fun. Friends will persuade you to come back for expansions. Friends will keep you entertained when the content fails. Perhaps the issue with modern MMOs is not that their features are bad / worse than WoW, but that modern MMOs don't foster communities as well as the older MMOs.
SWG (pre-cu) - AoC (pre-f2p) - PotBS (pre-boarder) - DDO - LotRO (pre-f2p) - STO (pre-f2p) - GnH (beta tester) - SWTOR - Neverwinter
As for size idk possibly,i know FFXI was massive and tons of content.EQ2 was also massive with tons of content.Matter of fact Wow still had to add some ideas already in EQ2 and has never had the housing with housing items.
Adding content,well a LOT of instance content,the easiest content to make for a game developer.
For me it was the class design that FFXI owns the roost,along with it's perfectly calculated sub class design as well.Then grouping was actually grouping in FFXI with mechanics based around it.Mobs and players both utilized the Renkai system and elemental properties again Wow does not have that depth.Basically Wow if you want to ASSUME it marginally had a bigger world "i don't agree"did everything cheaper,low end.
I would prefer FFXI's textures over Wow's in a heartbeat and FFXI was made before Wow.IMO the simple reason is thaty Blizzard was copying EQ1 and basically wanted to just make sure their graphics were better than EQ1 instead of trying to put forth their best effort.Even to this day i see Blizzard going with lack of effort in ALL of their games,they never put out their best effort because they don't need to,people buy it up anyhow.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
World-building is also important, but it's not like it's suddenly disappeared. Games like ESO put a ton of effort into their world-building. But the world is only of secondary importance compared with what you're actually doing in a game. If that's not enjoyable, you aren't going to have many players sticking around for the "great world design".
Quest hubs aren't really what determines whether a game has great world design or not. It's about the story and its presentation within the game world.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
star wars galaxies had 518 km²
asheron's call even had 1,295 km²
and guild wars nightfall had a world map of 38,850 km²
ps: vanguard can't even mess with rift or warhammer online *G*
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Similarly the purpose to EVE's slow travel could be achieved in a way that didn't force players themselves to be the ones manually slow-traveling. I've often pointed out that similar gameplay could be accomplished with NPC transports/miners with hireable guards; they do the menial work for you automatically (and therefore distances and localized markets still matter) and meanwhile you can travel around doing less menial things elsewhere (and immediately take control of the hired guard, should your convoys alert you that they're under attack.) All the strategy; almost none of the tedium.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
As I mentioned earlier, measuring MMORPGs by literal distance is useless, and EVE's millions of lightyears of distance obviously wins that contest by a huge margin (transitioning to a conversation about what really measures a game's distance: travel time...and I'm pretty sure EVE wins that measure of world size too...which might continue into a conversation over whether world size actually matters, given that the more popular themepark games have certainly done better than EVE, despite EVE's ridiculously larger game world...but that comes back on the OP's post, since he's the one claiming WOW is "largest" which is false by most measures except popularity.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
MurderHerd
seriously, if you dont wanna know it's size, ask for something else than... it's size ^^
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Another example of this modern mindset, my son is a big sci fi fan, so I gave him Stephen baxters the ring to read, an amazing book that requires you to follow a group of humans over the years in a spaceship flying to some unknown destination. He however couldn't get into it and he told me he skipped to the end with the battle. He thought the point of the book was that we had an all powerful ship that can destroy planets, and thought the book was 'rubbish'
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
It makes getting places difficult as not only does it take time, but you could easily die along the way.
One result of this is that the world feels much larger.
Another effect of this is that the people actually feel like they are traveling through a desert or a dangerous swap.
You generally don't get that feeling with fast travel games and mounts.
The OP is too green to know there are charts and maps illustrating MMORPG's world size. And World of Warcraft was never known for it's depth. It has remedial crafting, at best.
It's just a more accurate measurement. I could make my game world a quintillion lightyears huge, but if you can travel at 200 quadrillion lightyears a second, then the world is effectively only 5 seconds from one side to the other, and extremely tiny.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It has also been the deep game for advanced MMORPG players.
No other MMORPG came as close to the ideal ("simple to learn, lifetime to master") as WOW did. Naturally since you only tried it for a few hours, you missed out on that depth.
The good news is WOW's combat is deeper than ever, so if you went back to WOW today you'd experience more depth than the game has ever offered. I've presented the Demonology Warlock rotation in several threads, and in all those threads nobody has been able to provide evidence of deeper combat than that in other MMORPGs (except one: FFXIV's Lancer class, which I'm re-subbed and playing currently and enjoying so far.) So from an objective standpoint of the difficulty of mastering a game (aka "game depth") WOW remains great (and I think has more class specs at that depth than FFXIV does; many FFXIV classes are a bit on the shallow side.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Yes, and no. Even if you could fast travel to one side of the world fast scale still matters. If a world was the size of the United States fast travel wouldn't take away it having full content. A game that could fill a United States sized map with content would still be large even if transversed quickly.
So exploration is still offered as an activity, it's just that the achiever activities (advancing your character) are dramatically more varied than endless mob-grinding.
Exploration has always been optional. You're taking time away from your Achiever activities by exploring.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver