Originally posted by Finduilas You two should try Settlers of Gannereth, no content but one HUGE world to explore. DnL is on my radar. Roma Victor is also potentially interesting, but there does need to be something to discover other than just empty terrain. You like time sinks? Why? You like spending 10 minutes doing something interesting, like killing a named mob, and 6 hours camping the mob? Why? I should have been more specific wrt the term "time-sinks". I was referring to the application of the term to describe travel-time etc. The only kind of camping that interests me is the kind you used to be able to do in SWG when you went trekking off into the wilderness. You like exploring? Great. What about AFTER you've explored a zone? Do you like being made to travel across large areas of land, already familiar and unchallenging to you, just to get to the place where you can start exploring again? That pre-supposes that the design of the game's setting makes it necessary to return to some sort of starting position, such as Qeynos or Freeport in EQ2, in order to access certain facilities that cannot be accessed in the immediate vicinity. I would prefer that there was no such requirement. I am not against having faster methods of transport between distant points, but that journey should become an adventure in itself. EQ2 is a prime offender when it comes to immersion-breaking insta-travel. But when you think back to the drakota attack in the tutorial, don't you agree that incidents like that could have been used to make sea-travel more exciting and involving than a sequence of magic bells? Alternatively, why not have quests like the much-used caravan-guarding scenarios of my old pnp days to turn a journey into a quest? It doesn't have to be "down-time". And answer this. Where or when in WoW were you able to travel from one place to another, very quickly, without first exploring? Aside from the boat rides. Did you hack the game, open up ALL griffons? When I played it you had to DISCOVER each griffon NPC, before you could ride the griffon to that spot. Riding the griffon back did not spoil exploration, since you've already explored the your destination and places in between. Actually, WoW didn't do a bad job at all in that regard. Boat journeys were too brief but you did at least have to wait a short time at the docks before a ship arrived. Griffon flights often revealed areas not visible from the ground and rewarded players with limited glimpses of the areas that could be explored in the future. It was a reasonable compromise and the only criticism I have is that the world seemed a little too compact. There needs to be a balance. If devs made games just to suit you, who'd buy them? Look at Horizons, large seemless world to explore, but almost dead on it's feet. It costs $20-50 million to make an mmorpg, it needs to sell.
I played Horizons briefly when it was released. I recall big teleportation gates and "here be monster" signs. Not exactly an explorer's paradise, Finduilas. If that game is failing, I doubt it is a direct consequence of the size or "seamlessness" of the gameworld.
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