Massively^™

Having spent time in many virtual worlds (DAOC, SWG, EQ2, WoW .. now into LOTRO).
I like have some lightly used areas. Good for RP and even better .. real estate that can be changed later on. Example .. WoW Dustwallow Marsh changes that went in some time ago. Added a new goblin town, new quest, etc. Gives that living world feeling, neat feeling to remember back when this areas use to be all trees and fields.. now it’s a goblin town.

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Of course lets not forget the king of pointless areas... Asherons Call.

You could run for 30 minutes in one direction and not see anything at all. Then out of nowhere theres some kind of Mosswart settlement. It served no purpose at all out in the middle of nowhere. But you could grind XP if you where of the right level.

There were so many of these types of things in that game. I used to just spend hours running around trying to find all the cool little out-of-the-way places. Of course back then not everybody was concerned with leveling fast, getting to max level (pretty much impossible in that game at that time anyway) and doing quests. It was more about exploring back than.

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@mikejl: I can't be completely sure, but I don't think that they really intended from the get-go to revamp dustwallow marsh three years down the road. I think they realized that they needed to add a bit of mid-level content (quests) and it was an under-utilized zone that they thought would make a good location for it. The reason I don't think this is due to the fact that Blizzard has very rarely updated/expanded on low/mid-level content. With the last expansion and the next expansion there is almost no content (if any at all) being added pre-60. I agree that if this is done right, it can make the world feel alive, but I don't think this was the purpose for adding the quests/towns to Dustwallow Marsh. I think they were addressing a prominent problem, nothing more (though that's not to say that they didn't/can't do a good job of hiding it with lore and such.)

@Pufonthis: I completely understand what you mean having played AC for 4 years. I loved that aspect of it, though. There were always new things to explore. For instance, there was this bridge out around eastham/cragstone that I described several times to old players (it had rings that were balanced against each other that sort of acted as arches on the bridge) but no one else had ever seen it. This gave me an awesome feeling knowing that very few other players had ever seen it (I only ever even saw it twice, I looked for it several other times, but was unable to relocate it.) This massive world feel can go a bit too far, though, which might have been the case in AC. That said, I think I preferred that to the "amusement park" feel of WoW.

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I don't agree with the use of the word "pointless"...it implies that these games need to be nothing but wall-to-wall purpose.

If it were a single player game like NWN, Baldur's Gate or Diablo, or was a hub-based title like Mythos or Guild Wars, then the omission of these mini-areas would make sense, but these companies are making worlds in which people spend a lot of time, and a lot of those people DO spend time doing things that aren't related to advancement.

I think that in the WoW culture, having the eyes on the end-game means a lot of players aren't "experiencing" the world that the Blizzard devs have taken so much time to create -- including these mini-areas.

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What you refer to here is something I greatly enjoyed about my early days in EverQuest. When I started that game for the first time, I really had no instruction whatsoever on what to do. The entire world was out there, and no NPCs were there to nudge me along. There was no map. The sense of freedom and solitude was overwhelming.

Discovering all the nooks and crannies in original EQ was great fun for me. It was dangerous, too - it was easy to stray into higher level areas, and it was easy to die carelessly (and death in EQ was something to be feared). When you found something interesting for the first time - like some ruins in a desert, or some abandoned Druid rings, an ancient bridge, or a dungeon you'd never seen - it came as a real surprise and was very rewarding. Combine that with the ability for some classes to "bind" to a location, and you could find a remote spot that truly felt like your own.

It's really quite different now - In WoW (and other modern MMOs) your paths are generally dictated to you and it's easy to get from place to place. Zones are filled with quests, and NPCs generally clearly direct you to quest hubs as well as quest objectives. Almost every bit of terrain is mapped out, and you'll see almost all of it in the course of questing through a zone. In general, that's good, but it does come at a price.

There are, of course, exceptions, and I love them. Almost everywhere in WoW has some quest associated with it, but sometimes they're easy to miss, and a few places really serve "no purpose" and bring back that old EQ sense of isolation. I can think of quite a few places that "feel" isolated and unique to me: monkey island in SE STV, the farm near the exit from the deadmines in Westfall (and even the lighthouse on the coast there, to a lesser extent), Ravenhold manor, Deadwind Pass (pre-BC), almost all of Aszhara. Not to mention places like the Ironforge airport which aren't really designed to be accessible...

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