f13.net

Recently I've seen people write off various MMO's as not supporting exploration so I'm curious what most people's criterion is for good exploration. Specifically I saw this charge leveled at SWToR, which I no longer play but when I did I found it great for exploration. To me exploration is the ability to see something cool far away and go find out what's there and SWToR had that in spades as the opposite faction's quest areas were largely accessable to either side. As a bonus I found it very rewarding because the chests you have to fight so hard to get in your own quest areas are free for the taking in the enemie's areas. Kind of how several of my characters had over a million credits thanks to the jumbo chest rewards of purples, oranges and money.

So what does an MMO need to be explorer friendly to everyone else?

I guess if I could sum it up briefly I'd say it has do with being able to find things where no one told me to go looking.  Almost all MMOs have this to some degree, but I'm not talking about the occasional little sidequest or easter egg.  The main problem is that with the advent of sites like wowhead, etc, this never truly exists no matter the game.   You can make the argument that you could choose not to use these sites, but I guess this reveals another things - which is that it really does depend a bit on what other people are doing.  If I want to just go wandering in a forest, and 20 people are bee lining right for the point of interest, it pretty much nukes the exploration.

I'd say the best example of exploration I've come across (probably ever) is Minecraft, simply because it is randomly generated.  I'm honestly not sure it will be possible to create an MMO with exploration ever again since information spreads easily and quickly, and an inherent part of exploration is the unknown.

I'm sure this will go off-rails, but Everquest was my explorer's best memory.  Rolling a mage for the first time out of Qeynos, hitting the hills and the Karanas.  It all seemed so big and elusive at the time.  The fishermen down by the water in WK, the scarecrows in the fields.  And then seeing Highpass for the first time.

I'm positive that I've been ding-conditioned out of loving exploring, but to me it is seeing something that isn't explained and appears to have a purpose that I can't figure out.  I personally look back fondly at those times and have a hard time recapturing that feeling with new games, regardless what everyone thinks of it.  I only wish the nostalgia was as good as going back to play it now.

Ya I think the need for efficiency has been so conditioned in at this point that people rarely feel the urge to explore for exploration's sake.
Still odd how not exploration friendly is such a common criticism though.

Large, expansive worlds with min-events that can pop up randomly.  My fondest experience with exploration was in a Tale in the Desert where 'body' tests and mushroom hunts forced you to explore the world.  Also having resources that were unique to areas forced people to roam in order to find/gather them or to have inter-regional trade to obtain them.  The game had a massive scale and required that you explore to find rare items that were very valuable for trade etc.   

GW2.

The following points just concern physical exploration of the world, but I don't think that "exploration" is necessarily limited to that. There are (or should be) more ways of creating gameplay for explorers.

• If I see a mountain-top, I want to be able to get to the top of it.
• If I see a cliff, I want to be able to jump off it - even if it kills my character.
• Invisible walls that block movement in areas that do not look like they would block movement kill immersion and lowers my will to continue exploring.
• I don't like "You have explored all 14 points of interest in zone X!"-achievements. Instead of promoting exploring in general, it promotes finding all the listed points of interest then moving on to the next area.

Asheron's Call would be the pinnacle of Exploration for me.  The world was freaking HUGE, and there were little dungeons, caves, huts, houses, camps and all sorts of things scattered everywhere.  And I also think that pretty much every square inch of the world was explorable. No invisible walls or the like blocking your way.   I probably spent at least 2 years in that game and only saw maybe 1/5th of the whole map.   And since, other then the loosely connected portal networks, there was no "fast travel" like flightpaths and whatnot from every minor stopping point to every other one, simply getting places was often a big adventure in and of itself.

I take this one step further and think of exploration as finding places, doing things, or discovering interactions that haven't had a designer's hand all over them.  Basically the sense that I'm finding something novel and maybe, just maybe, having an experience that's unique to me rather than premeditated and being shared by everyone. 

That probably just sounds like a broken game to a lot of people these days.  No idea how to reintegrate this into MMOs.  As mentioned, I'm sure this is all coloured by nostalgia too.

Exploration for me is traveling in a direction for like a long time, and then thinking to myself, holy shit I am lost. That simple sort of possibility really brings the world to life for me. An example would be Vanguard for me, I know they could have done much more with the space they had and often fell short with big empty areas, but Vanguard was a game you could get lost in easily.

I agree, the authorship needs to be subtle.

A lot of games now are designed the way Chekhov said stories should be written, where every part plays some vital role. In MMOs this usually means that every bit of the map is part of some quest, that you will eventually be breadcrumbed towards it, and if you "explore" it you are simply going there out of order.

For me to feel like exploration is cool I have to feel like I'm going there of my own volition and when I get there I don't think "oh, this is clearly for some quest but the thing I'm supposed to collect isn't popping."

The ones that stick in my mind are...

Anarchy Online - until I found the antiguardians/auno website (which in retrospect killed the enjoyment of the game and turned it into a 'collect them all' operation)

SWG - I particularly recall one evening when I was collecting hides/meat/milk for crafting and levelling Scout for shits and giggles on Tattooine and roamed far and wide (before mounts/speeders)

Neocron also had some good exploration in places, I remember spending loads of time attempting to map the main sewer (there was nothing of note down there so none of the guide sites had bothered)

Something else that could encourage exploration would be a diminishing of the exclusive focus on the endgame and the way that, as a result, the rest of the game (talking about MMOs here) is a means to that end. Because of this there is an active disincentive to exploration - it slows your levelling down!

One of the games that I did the most exploring in was EVE. My skills levelled up on their own without me having to do quests, and there was a vast universe out there to explore. And a LOT of that exploration was incredibly dangerous with no tangible reward, and when you got there it mostly looked exactly the same as the zone your first character started in! But damn, if it didn't feel good to reach some deep 0.0 backwater in a Rifter.  :awesome_for_real:

Making sure your game can't be datamined for every bit of information about every NPC out there and drop rates and everything else.  I don't know, technically speaking, how possible this is to do, but at the very least it should be as hard as possible to gather this information automatically.  This is the first step, I think, to making exploration meaningful again.  Back in the EQ days, we had spoiler sites like Allakhazam, but the information on them was gathered manually at the time.  That meant that when you went out there, you might check Allakhazam's for zone spawns and such, and then you might run into something that wasn't on the list, because nobody had reported it yet.  Somebody almost certainly had seen what you're fighting, and they had probably fought it before.  Perhaps many times.  But nobody had actually bothered to take a moment to write a note describing the monster, so it wasn't on Allakhazam's.  You could find something that wasn't listed on the spoiler site, and then, if you felt like it, you could send that bit of info in yourself.  You would be credited with its discovery.  The screenshot of Innoruuk on this page (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=12906) is one I sent in, and the fancy glowing-letters signature on the screenshot of the loot here (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=23016) is the character I was playing at the time.  I found that pretty cool, that my screenshots were put up on Allakhazam's.  Hell, it's still pretty cool that they're there after all these years.  But none of that would have happened in WoW, because someone running a datamining addon probably would have killed him before me, and the info would have been thrown up on wowhead.

When I found that Crypt of Nadox Innoruuk, it was because me and a few friends got together and were killing our way around the relatively new zone to see what was there.  At the time, the zone had already been out for several weeks, perhaps a month or more, if I remember correctly.  We didn't just run in there on the first day of the expansion.  We were casually exploring a mostly empty zone, late at night.  We found a weird luggald that conned indifferent, we killed a couple luggalds near it.  I went to Allakhazam's to see what was up with this indifferent luggald, but there wasn't much of anything there, because nobody else had written anything about it, and there wasn't any datamining at that time.  I posted a message commenting on it, and as I was doing this, Innoruuk suddenly spawned and killed us because we had no idea what was going on at all.  Then we regrouped, came back, I took the screenshot, we kicked his butt, and I sent in the loot.  The fact that a spoiler website like Allakhazam's exists doesn't hinder exploration.  It helps it.  Without Allakhazam, there is no 'person who discovered X' because we lack any shared information.  With wowhead, there is no 'person who discovered X' because fifty thousand people uploaded their data and it was parsed and added to the database.

There's a lot of other little things that add up to making a good exploration game.  As others have noted, not putting pointers toward every damn thing.  Making expansive zones, full of mobs that are just there rather than there to be killed for a specific purpose helps a lot.  Less lead-by-the-nose quests also helps a lot.  And one thing that is really, really big is making sure that quests don't always have one point to start at.  In EQ, until the Serpent's Spine, I think it was that started to change that, quests could be started not by talking to the quest-starter NPC, but by finding a weird thing when you killed a mob, and then investigating the weird thing you found.  You didn't need an arbitrary flag on you that says 'you are now on the quest', you would get a quest item and then research the item, working your way backwards to the NPC that wants it.  In WoW, it feels like a waste of time to kill anything you haven't been instructed to kill, because you won't get credit for it.  Even if it's a quest mob, even if, when you're on a quest, that mob drops a rare item for the quest, if you haven't specifically been told to kill it, the item just isn't there.  Most games now, including EQ since TSS, are this way.  Also, just as important as having things drop in random places is having places where absolutely nothing important happens at all.  Not every corner of the world needs to have important stuff in it.  It's not believable and it stymies the sense of exploration if you're finding cool shit everywhere, because then it stops being special and interesting.  So it's not just being able to find things where you haven't been directed to, it's also not finding things in areas where there's nothing to find. 

A dungeon should have rooms that you're directed to for quests, rooms that you have to go through to get to the quest rooms, then it should also have rooms that nothing directs you to that have some cool stuff in them, as well as rooms that nothing directs you to that have absolutely nothing in them.  It's no different than random loot mechanics.  Sometimes something drops and you're excited, sometimes nothing drops.  Well, to make exploration interesting, there have to be times when nothing drops (areas that there just isn't anything interesting about) along with times when something drops (areas where you find something unexpected).

I'm...kind of rambling here, I know, because my thoughts aren't all that coherent on the subject (also because I haven't slept all night) but I think the thoughts I'm pointing out are solid.  Exploration is possible in games again, but it needs to go down to basic zone design and how your quest system works and how little your game allows external programs to interact with it.

Unfortunately, any information that is sent to the clients can ultimately be datamined even if the game doesn't officially support addons for such. People will write tools that listen to the data-stream and extract the relevant bits (literally) from there.

I don't mind datamining, I can easily ignore it and let people who don't like exploring just get their info and move on.

I do like exploration. I like seeing cool areas with a lot of detail and vignettes/set pieces, related to the questing or not. The remains of a card game gone bad, like a crime scene. If it lends clues to the questing, all the better. Part of what I like about TSW is that it rewards the observant player, and everyone else can google it.

But I do like to have incentivized exploration, it's nice to get rewards either tangible or story from little out of the way places.

One way to do this is to have randomization in place -- the NPC who starts Quest XYZ can randomly spawn in one of 10 places, say. The challenge then is to make a game that you actually want to play through organically, rather than grind through as quickly as possible.

That's what I loved about SWG Creatures.  I submitted so much data to that site because I was out exploring all the planets, taming babies, and just wandering aimlessly.

To stop it completely, everything has to be randomized.  NPC names, can spawn anywhere, can wander anywhere.  You almost need NPCs to live in the world and be able to take up professions, tasks, and adventures on a 'whim'.  Mobs have to migrate and compete, etc.  Landscape has to be cable of changing.  Basically a true sandbox.

Short of a Minecraft-like world, I'm not sure it's possible.  Even that can end up with Google Map snapshots.

Aside from 'vastness', I think there's another factor for exploration, and that's art direction. Technically speaking, space is space. The 'geographical' distances in WoW were probably larger, fake meter per fake meter, than EQ SWG or AO, but by basing itself off a cartoon art style (nothing wrong with that!), it prevented one's mind from the genuine touch of the uncanny, mysterious or foreboding vistas that were legion in EQ and AO.

You can futz with risk/reward, you can futz with randomization, you can throw clever game theory mechanics at something all you want, but if the art direction and environmental design aren't done by actual real artists, you just aren't going to get a sense of venturing into something both unknown and real.

I really liked LOTRO for exploration. I think LOTRO is reinforced by what Engels just said.

It's more to do with distance between points of interest rather than art direction or size of the world, I think. Take Skyrim; didn't they build it using some kind of "maximum 60 seconds between PoIs"-mantra? And it worked for me - I could weer off the "story"-path, pick a random direction and no matter where I went there was interesting stuff to see (and do!).

"Largest world ever made! Over 9000 billion square miles to explore!" doesn't mean much if there's nothing in it.

I agree with this completely.  The problem is that, aside from Minecraft which you mentioned, gaming has been moving further and further away from this concept.  People want predictable experiences, and exploration is by definition unpredictable.  You can't really tack on anything which allows for that type of exploration without alienating all the people who either 1) don't like to explore or 2) don't have the time to explore.

For example, my friend and I love Minecraft because we can head out in a random direction for 20 minutes until we find something interesting, then just delve down into the mine/cave/whatever and see what we find.  But for the same reason that most MMOs now have an LFG feature - this would not go over well for a lot of people.  They want to start the dungeon right away. 

As an aside, I remember my first few days of WoW when the game was still brand new to me - I knew nothing.  I was in Ashenvale and saw some people looking for a healer for Blackfathom Depths.  I of course volunteered and realized I had no idea where the dungeon actually was.  In fact, only one guy in the group did, and he only knew approximately.  So, we had to find the place, fight out way to the entrance, and THEN actually did the dungeon.  To this day it is one of my favorite WoW memories.  But the problem is - even IF sites like WoWhead (then it was Thottbot) didn't exist, you still only get that experience ONCE.

Although my exposure to LoTR was limited, I think you're right, BW.

Xuri, while I agree that its not simply space, its not simply dodads to find within the space that makes or breaks immersion. In fact, Skyrim is a very good counter example for me. The fact that within 40 seconds of walking just about anywhere there was SOMETHING either out to get me or about to reveal its vast troves of deep historical lore was stimulus overload. Dark Mysteries of Ancient Times shouldn't be 40 seconds away in every direction.

And I think I should clarify that when I say art direction, I don't mean simply the looks of something. Sound plays a dynamic factor that can't be brushed aside. There was enormous work done on simply making the sounds of the various zones of EQ (sorry to keep harping on EQ, but its the one I know best). Some of you will remember that 'not quite an echo' done in some of the darker zones of Luclin, like Grimling Forest. Sometimes even the lack of sound was the most unsettling aspect of a zone. The sunny and bright Plane of Disease was also dead quiet for the most part. Someone in their art department thought about the fact that desert dunes absorb sound and made the zone bristle with silent hostility.

Weird, one of several things I didn't like in the beta weekend is there felt like no exploring at all in GW2. Just "go to the scout guy, expose map, go to Heart #1 which is totally not a quest hub, we promise."


Agreed. It was the first and last game that I remember logging in sometimes and going "hmm...I think I'm going to head 'that' way because that directions looks like fun to explore." I remember my friend and I would find, for example, some random structure out in the middle of nowhere and we'd kill all the mobs then stand on the structure saying things like "I wish I had a flag to put here!" It was the last game I remember where it truly felt like you could find places no one else had seen.

If you just follow those, yeah.

There are a lot of little hidden areas.  One place I followed a stream.  That led up a small hill and into a stream, which I had to work at entering.  Once I did, there was a massively long cave complex which eventually came out high above a body of water and a small town.  I've found other interesting places like that.

Use the Scouts and Hearts for when you want something active to do.

The thing that killed any desire to explore in MMOs for me is the lack of any sort of consequence for dying. Now, from the perspective of a time sink, this is a good thing, but part of the terror of exploring in EQ was the fact that if you died, you had to do a corpse run, so it made exploring all that much more terrifying.

Nowadays I regularly throw myself off cliffs and kill myself in MMOs because it's a slap on the wrist and you're back in the game.

I'm NOT advocating the return of terrible death timesinks, but that's why exploration died for me.

Actually there are a lot of spots outside of the hearts that will spawn events as well. Sadly most people seem to see the hearts and the skill markers and make the same assumption you did. But we all know what assumptions are made of right?

Bread. Apples! Very small rocks? Cider...? Great gravy. Cherries? Mud! Churches! Lead!?

I know Skyrim gets mentioned a lot for encouraging exploring, but that's because it tells you something is there long before you see it. It's like having the guide book and map so you know if you head this way it will be worth your time.

There are a few places that aren't marked and are interesting, but they are the exception.

Red Dead Redemption is better for unmarked exploration and random spawing events. The events get a bit samey after a while, but they can come out of nowhere.

This is another thing I would agree about also.  The corpse run (my experience with them being Asherons call again) definately added an element of danger and excitement to your "out in the world" exploration adventures.  Nothing quite matched the feel of being in hostile, unexplored territory and potentially dying to an overpull or unexpectedly strong monster and knowing that simply getting back to your body was going to be an adventure in itself.   Now a days, death is completely meaningless.  Especially with the way graveyards work in WoW, where no matter where you die, it is always a matter of twenty seconds to a minute to get back to your body.  In AC, if you died, it was entirely possible that your Life Stone location could easily be a 10+ minute run from where your corpse is, and you would have to murder or avoid numerous monsters on your way back to it.

The biggest thing for me is that there need to be things out in the world that are useful/interesting, but that you are not directed to specifically. Some recent examples would be the puzzle things in Rift, or the datacrons in SWTOR; useful, non-gamebreaking rewards for heading off the beaten path. My personal exploration highlight would be EQ2 (although this comes from playing it extensively at launch and thus, much of the content was unspoiled); there were these items that you could right click and mark with your name: "Rendakor was here" and they'd stay that way until the server reset. Most of them were hidden well off the beaten path, with only some discovery exp and maybe a named nearby if you were lucky. EQ2's early quest design was also a lot less directed than WoW (and all that have come since) so there were quests scattered all over the place, which gave you a real incentive to wander around instead of just following the breadcrumb.

Honestly the constant hub to hub, breadcrumb style questing is what killed exploring most for me because (as Margalis said earlier) if you wander around you're just going to be seeing quest content before you're supposed to be. Put in areas/mobs that don't have quests. Bring back named mobs that just wander around in the world and drop real, useful loot. Put in random events that just spontaneously happen (but don't over-do it like Rift). Hell, an easy fix would be to tone down quest XP and increasing mob XP (specifically, increasing the level range of mobs that grant full xp) so you could actually level by just wandering around killing things instead of having to follow the breadcrumbs.

That corpse run thing seems exactly backwards to me. It totally disincentivizes risk-taking.

If  one is  trained on instant gratification of today flavor of MMOs  it might appear so. But  the thrill of danger is worth something in itself - you play a game to experience  something entertaining, exploration of new places with potentially dangerous consequences is one of such things. What do you experience facerolling the filler world mobs or grinding dailies for rewards besides the  junkies addiction to "dings" and achievements?

One of the blogger reviewing tsw complained that one part he doesnt like in TSW is that there is no feeling of achievement by getting the long laundry list of meaningless quest marked as "done", as TSW doesnt even allow to have long laundry list!

The endless stream of "achievers" MMO is ever present on the market - endless treadmills grinds for loot and rewards that is all that is in there.  But some of the elements which were present in older games are almost gone.

I agree with this. Apparently I was trained on instant gratification for my junkies addiction.

To me, the death penalty is what influences risk taking the most.
1) Oh you died, you have to repair your gear? Drat.
2) Oh you died, and you left some of your more expensive items on your corpse? Oh you better run back to it (possibly organizing a party on the way) and get that stuff back. Annoying but not as bad as 3.
3) Oh you died, and you lost xp? Or better yet, you de-leveled? Fuck that shit. Zero risk taking, please.

I'd like to see someone go with a massive procedurally generated world.  Something so large that the entire player base would only fill a small portion of it.  Then try to procedurally distribute neat things all over it.   Put in normal major cities and put all the "content" near them then let the explorers have everything else.

I also think of Asheron's Call when I think of exploration. The loot model in that game encouraged you to find a place that had mobs you could tackle, and start farming them.

In many other games, farming mobs is not only disincentivized w.r.t. xp ratios, but also, if you're out somewhere farming mobs (for some valuable drops, say), you're probably interfering with someone else's Kill 10 Rats quest.

An Explorer's game has places in it that the game doesn't send you to directly, and where the rewards are not necessarily something you can tally up.

What you're describing is a multiplayer Daggerfall. Intriguing.

Hub questing kills exploration. WoW is a good example of this. When it launched, it was much less linear but became progressively more so. While I enjoyed leveling up through the story line, I did not enjoy it as much on the later expansions as I enjoyed the first times through, because exploring is the most interesting thing about playing mmos.

Resource gathering invites exploration.

I agree that Red Dead Redemption is a good exploring game with the little random events. I would love to see a Red Dead mmo.

Punishing death penalties (like corpse runs) does not make exploring more interesting for me. Probably the opposite.

Quick transport doesn't kill exploring for me. It's nice to be able to get around from major place to major place without taking 20 minutes to do so. That way, I can spend more time exploring.

Eh, risk of loss is not something I care about as far as exploration, with exception I likely need to find it again if something were to happen. That's enough for me.

What makes exploration to me, is if something in the distance catches my eye, I go there and find something that feels like there is a history ( good art direction ETC.. ). Or a random path off to the side that just says "go down this way, what could be here?". Something I am not directly lead to by quests, but may have something interesting, be it do doodad, or maybe some lore. It does not even need to be written lore, but it should be implied by the culture/placement/architecture of what ever it is I have found. Things that makes areas more of a world, not just a place for a quest to exist. Something that tells a story in its placement, functions, or look. A small burned village outside of main quest corridors. Things like that.

Adding the "thrill of danger" to exploration depresses the number of people who will explore; the more danger, the fewer people who will do it. That's not "supporting exploration", that's discouraging it.

This times ten. You could go anywhere, and almost anywhere there was interesting stuff. There was one place in the Southern Direlands where you could go up the coast for a long ways. You'd have to deal with dangerous spawns much of the way, there was an interesting terrain structure, but nothing particularly amazing--but then suddenly there was a tower, and in the tower a chest, and if you opened the chest, there was a note from the developer basically saying, "It's really cool that you came all this way to see what was here...thanks!" No achievement, no special item, just an acknowledgement that hey, somebody might explore the whole thing.

The best thing I've ever done in a MMO, I think, was deciding I needed to see this "Direlands" place everybody was talking about, this "Teth" place that everyone wanted to get to, ten levels before I was supposed to go there. Since I couldn't use a portal, I had to go there overland. Since I was lower level, my aggro range was pretty big and my survivability low. The overland route was very long, the area very big. Dying had some potentially serious consequences (not as bad as EQ, much worse than WoW). It was the most exciting and tense thing I've done in an MMO, and it was a pure explorer experience.

Yea that's pretty much it.   You could put all the normal diku crap near the NPC towns then let everyone go crazy with the rest of it.

And then wait for the tears of the people who don't have the time to go out into the wilderness and find the interesting things there.  There is a reason things are the way they are.  I say if you are going to go for exploration, go all out with it and just limit yourself to a small playerbase who wants it.  I'm not saying no quests/no dungeons/no NPC town, etc etc.  What I am saying is that if you give a game the illusion of being accessible, and even MAKE it accessible in some areas, the parts that AREN'T accessible are going to cause rifts in the community.

I've been playing SWToR a bit because hey, free week and one thing that makes me really not enjoy it is the huge expanses they make you run through. Even in the cities. Running through the Senate halls and the palace on Corscant gets so fucking old it made me wish for WoW style quest hubs. WoW would have had 4 different quest areas in the same space SWToR wastes on the Senate. Sure it's impressive the frst time you see it but having to run all the way to the back of it to hand in 4 different quests is just insane. And half of Coruscant is  a no-vehicles zone. WTF? And it's a L10 zone which means originally you didnt even have sprint. You have to wonder that no one ever mentioned how fucking boring that was at a design meeting or qa review.

Not every MMO has to be made for everyone.   People who don't want to explore yet still want to see the neat stuff?  Fuck them.   There are lots that just wouldn't give a damn.   The normal diku stuff is there because it's fun too.

Although I tend to favor stronger death penalties, I don't think they do much for exploration either.  My early experiences exploring in EQ were indeed made better by fear of death, but later on, once I had gained a solid understanding of the game, the fear of death was less of a factor.  And even further on, there wasn't any fear of death because hey, I tended to twobox a cleric and a friend of mine that I had access to her account had a necromancer, so corpse recovery was a nonissue.  I don't really think it made exploring less fun when it was a nonissue.  I always liked exploring even when I knew I could easily just summon and resurrect my corpse if things went downhill.

It maybe so . It like saying - having more complex mechanics and controls depresses the number of people who will play your game. Ergo there sure be no games more complex than angry birds!

 Really risk/reward is  a huge factor. How much exactly there is of danger?   Like other people said there are degrees. - yeah if I risk delevel or permadeath... fck it! But in AC for example I would risk 30-40 minutes of corpse recovery or foreiting the corpse entirely (if it was THAT BAD of an area). Corpse recovery was an adventure of in itself ,which I could get friends help for(another social factor).

Damn this puts me in mind of exporing lower guk when I was one of the dozen or so people on our server high enough level to survive in there, (45 or so iirc)
Our party had a total wipe out and at the time there was 2 groups who could do the place, that I knew about, and people in one group absolutely hated some people in the other group. Fortunately I was kind of ok with both factions so it fell on me to organize our rescue party. Then one of the guys in my party totally lost it and got into it with a girl in the other party. Was totally embarrassing after they'd just made the effort to rescue our corpses and all.

There was a time I was getting paid as a guide for Guk/LGuk.  Having Feign Death really helped the exploring.  It also helped in training more than they could handle on groups of twits.  There is no going back, but I have fond memories of EQ even with all the complete insanity and horrific corpse runs.

One day, after hitting twenty, I decided that exploring runnyeye was a really really great idea.  A mage friend bound me (a Troll SK) inside Rivervale.  Inside runnyeye the obvious happened.  Client crashed and I log back in nude inside Rivervale.  Back then there were corpse rot timers, and my corpse had lots of great stuff, like my Circlet of Shadow.  I died so many times just trying to run through Rivervale because invisibility would drop.. I really was getting the timing down nicely.  I figured out that being killed while zoning did not cause me to lose xp.  A good thing, since there were probably 20-30 deaths that night.

Eventually my mage friend came back on and was trying to drag my corpse out.  He would get swarmed and be forced to run despite his level being much higher.  Eventually I had the bright idea of him just looting my corpse (that is how far back this was).  While the eternal suffering was not enjoyable, the risk and challenge of that kind of exploring is extremely compelling.  Running around in unusual locations, being in places where you REALLY SHOULD NOT BE, that is the stuff.

This is easy to say from the perspective of a gamer.

From the point of view of a developer trying to convince the parent company/VC to part with $50m to make an MMO? Not so much. Everyone in the business now knows that WoW got its 11m subscribers precisely by making an MMO for everyone, so arguing for a different direction is very much swimming against the tide with the money people.

On the topic of death penalties - it seems to me that it matters.  Exploration isn't just about wandering around and seeing things in my opinion.  The danger DOES matter I think, there has to be some kind of risk/reward and when the risk is "I waste 5 minutes running back" and nothing else, it just doesn't feel very exciting.  People say risk makes exploration less attractive, but I would say that without risk you don't actually have exploration, you just have sight seeing. 

A large part of me wants to agree with this, but I'm not convinced for certain this is universally the case.  Doing the whole 'poke your nose into places you're really really not supposed to be' was fun at first, and I can't argue with the fact that the danger of getting instantly killed in such a location was a big part of what made it so exciting.  But at the same time, death wasn't a big issue for me at that point either.  When I did those explorations, we had our necromancer and cleric logged off right in the same zone, so it would take only a few minutes to recover and resurrect our bodies.  Granted, the corpse summoning was expensive, and I was always a massive cheapskate, so I would try everything I could to recover corpses manually, so even the recovery was exciting.  But in the end, I was never in actual danger of losing my corpse.  The only times I was ever in any real potential danger of losing my corpse was when a planar raid group to Fear or Hate suffered a total wipe.  And I will say without hesitation that I never really explored those zones while they were still dangerous.  Only when I was much higher level did I really wander around Fear and Hate and explore, so the real danger that I would actually lose my stuff did indeed keep me from doing any exploration in those places, with the exception of sending Eyes of Zomm or using a bind sight chain.

I was thinking a bit about this and aside from Minecraft which I and a couple others mentioned on the first place, I think the reason I like DayZ so much is exploration.  You never know if hiking up somewhere will end up with a nice spawn of weapons/ammo or a bunch of useless things.  You never know when a hostile player will pop up.  And if you die you start over.  There are ways to lessen the hurt of death, particularly if you play with a group - but I think this is really the strength of DayZ, and it manages to do it without procedurally generated content for the most part - just (semi) random loot spawns, and mostly by leveraging other players as a way to create a threat.

Granted, the game isn't perfect, and the zombies themselves play altogether too small a roll in DayZ when compared to other players, but when i think about the game it seems like a good example of a game which nails exploration really well from my point of view.

And those "11m everyone" will go to only one MMO. Unless you out-wow WoW- which is impossible, at best you will get successful clone a-la RIFT.

Yeah, we know that, but the suits are always gonna chase that internet dragon.

I'm sorry, but Minecraft = end of the stupid argument about whether there are enough people who want a procedurally generated MMO of some kind. Yes, there are. Yes, they will have problems of their own. But the many developers who have claimed for years that no one or hardly anyone wants anything of that sort are just wrong, wrong, wrong and now they have a big fat $$$ in front of them if they care to take notice of it. Most of them are now too busy trying to out-Zynga Zynga to pay any attention.

Minecraft isn't a MMO though. Just because a lot of people play FPSs hasn't meant that MMOFPSs have really taken off.

And again you aren't paying $60 to play Minecraft. Or a monthly fee. The economic choices you make are different, so the way the game is treated by players is different.

Love is (iirc) a procedurally generated MMO too. It made barely a ripple in the MMO market.

There are a lot of social problems you'd have to solve before something like Minecraft would be suitable for an MMO.

This is basically the problem with almost ANY feature that makes an MMO interesting in the first place.  The degree to which you introduce mechanics to mitigate social problems is practically the same degree to which the game becomes less of an MMO, as far as I am concerned.  This, I would argue, is probably one of the reasons people are associating older games with having exploration they liked.

The more the game structures itself in such a way that "social problems" don't arise, the more predictable the game becomes. And, more or less as I already argued, the more predictable it is, the less exploration makes sense/is interesting.

Kinda skimmed through, so someone may have said this already, but ... I think exploring is more than just discovering zones/hidden places/other worldly things. I think it also is "exploring" systems. For example, tinkering with crafting and magic systems if something I find enjoyable. Experimenting with builds or decks (TSW) is also exploring. That's "exploring" but not in a geographical way.

The regent magic system of Asheron's Call is a good example of a system you can explore through experimentation.

EVE has a great system for creating a unique fitting for a ship to perform a specific role, this is exploration of builds.

Can't think of a great crafting example, but I remember a couple where you might just throw a few items together to see what comes out and discover your own recipes. (Until someone publishes them all, of course).

The asheron's call magic system suffered from this exact problem.  The concept behind advanced spellcasting was an awesome idea, but could never really survive out in the wild, because it was only a matter of time before someone cracked the formula for the spell mechanics and posted the entire list for everyone to use.

There is penalty for risk taking, and there is "ouch, the developer just kicked me in the balls, stole my wallet and makes out with my wife while I'm a whimpering heap of pain on the floor"  penalty for risk taking.

They are not equal, and just because you don't want to be kicked in the balls doesn't mean you don't want any penalties.

I did that sort of thing too. It was fun at the time, but I'd never go back to that sort of thing. I just don't have the time or inclination anymore.

The problem with this point of view is that with no real consequences and anonymity, people will act like (and are) dicks.

This is old, but it sums it up nicely:
(http://daily-grind.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/greaterinternetfuckwadtheory.jpg)

Much of the real world has those same social problems mitigated by the fact that being a dick to other people can get you smacked upside the head, or kicked out of the restaurant, or whatever. On the internet, there are no real consequences to the 14 year old in WoW or Day Z calling (you or I) a goddamned fukin fagot lol u suck. That's just not likely to happen when they interact with others (or you or I) in real life.

Talking about AC got me interested to see if it is still going.  So I checked, and holy shit. Not only is it still going, it's fucking 12 bucks a month for a sub!?!  How the hell did that happen?  LoTOR goes free to play but fucking AC is still 12 fucking bucks?

I don't know if this really adds to the conversation but I wanted to state this.  I rarely, unless I"m annoyingly stuck, look up guides/maps/etc.. for single player games but when playing an MMO I will not hesitate to look stuff up.  Therefore I tend to have a lot more fun exploring and discovery in single player games than in MMOs. 

Coverting an MMO to F2P takes money and dev time. I am pretty sure that AC would take a lot of work to convert, it is really old and none of what they might need to convert over was built into it. It probably makes more for them as a legacy sub game than it would F2P once you take the cost of conversion into account.

Yeah, that's the problem with carebear games. People feel like "sharing". You'd be less likely to share if it gave you an edge in a PvP environment (wither it's markets or combat).

Don't know that this works with static information, though.  It's not a finite resource.  All it takes is one guy who knows a recipie to post it on the internet and it's out forever.  It's not a matter of carebears versus non, people in Warcraft are just as competitive as people in EVE (with regards to different things), and in both games there are a ton of resources out there telling you how to do just about everything in the game.  Information is HARD to control.

For me, I'd say exploration needs a combination of two things:

1) Lack of fast travel, or auto travel, whatever.  There's a strong tendency for games to move away from long trips from point A to point B, so they let you teleport or take a griffon or whatever.  World of Warcraft is massive, but most people don't really get a sense for it because they work their way across it in tiny quest size chunks, and when they need to go far away they just alt-tab out when they jump on a wyvern, or teleport instantly to wherever they want to go.  Skyrim was probably the game that did exploration the best for me recently, but if you just fast traveled from city to city you probably missed about 90% of it.

2) The world needs to make sense.  There is a ton of "video game logic" that gets exposed when you explore, and it kind of defeats the purpose for me.  Rivers which flow to nowhere, verdant jungles which border directly on arid deserts and snowy tundra areas, geography which is riddled with invisible walls and unexplorable areas which make no sense in context.  Animals which don't act like animals would because we need them here to be murdered for a quest, not because this is where their food is or anything.  Wander too far in the wrong direction and you can be sure you'll be raped by something thirty levels higher than you because you're not supposed to be here yet.  Exploration isn't just about seeing random shit, I can get that from Google Image Search, it's about learning about the land and the wildlife, and for most games there isn't anything to learn about because there isn't anything there that makes sense on a level beyond "A developer thought it would look cool to have a mountain there" or "we needed somewhere for the bandits to spawn for part five of this quest".

I'd argue Facebook as shown time and again anonymity has nothing to do with it.

Basically the issue becomes apparent in any game where the player population extends beyond 'people you know'. People will be assholes in any multiplayer environment; it's just that the persistent nature of MMOs acts as a kind of multiplier. Add in the ability to kick down someone's virtual sandcastle literally in a game that works like Minecraft - one that's supposed to be about exploration and creation - and you have a recipe for griefing disaster.

I think you misread the title of this thread. It asks what's needed to support exploration not what's needed to force it.

For me, the opposite is true. The more time you force me to run back and forth needlessly between point A and point B, the less likely I am to care what might be off by point C. It was cool wandering around randomly in Skyrim because if you got lost or filled up your inventory, home was just a few mouseclicks away instead of a ton of backtracking. Rift, on the other hand, had very few fast-travel points and a ton of pointless run back and forth quests so I rarely felt like exploring because I already spent a ton of time wandering around for my quests.

Asheron's Call was also my favoritest exploring experience in an online game so far.  There were a lot of factors that came together to make it so, some intentionally and some probably serendipitously.  I think there are a lot of other coincident but irrelevant factors that people are claiming as important to exploring just because they are either also something they enjoy, or also existed in a game where they enjoyed exploring.

Death penalties, for example, add spice and excitement and frustration and aversion to playing in general, not just exploring.  If severe enough, they can inhibit and punish exploration far more than they encourage or reward it.  If too weak or easily avoidable (like turning off monsters in Minecraft) then they eliminate a lot of the challenge and unexpectedness of a game.  This doesn't directly impact the rewards of exploration but may indirectly trivialize them as well as eliminating a large set of potential rewards for obstacles overcome during the process of exploring.  As a result this leaves you more dependent on and probably more quickly bored of the discovery rewards you get solely from exploring itself.  So the severity or absence of a death penalty changes the game overall, and indirectly impacts exploring, but probably has only a minor direct impact on it.

Claims that PvP are necessary to make exploring worthwhile are likely projecting a love for PvP onto everything.  I guarantee you a LOT fewer people explored on AC:Darktide (pvp) than on the carebear servers (heh, easy to say since a lot fewer people PLAYED on Darktide than on the other severs! LOL).  Exploring for the sake of exploring on Darktide was extremely dangerous.  And a major portion of what some might have mistakenly identified as exploring was actually Hunting (a Killer activity).  The point was not to see the sights and find interesting places but to seek out people to kill.  The reward was not in finding a cool grotto but in finding a nice place to hide, or in finding someone else's hiding place and ambushing them there.

But there are a lot of factors that do have to intersect just right to produce a rewarding exploration experience. To expand on what others have said, the world needs to be open (no invisible walls), large enough for there to be places that are off the beaten track and large enough that you can feel like maybe you are the first to ever see it, and populated with interesting things to find scattered among those places.  Those interesting things can be visual sights like scenery in Minecraft or the ruins and such in Asheron's Call, or puzzles, or treasure, or resources, or rare spawn mobs, or even just normal mobs you could fight without interference from other players (which yes means the experience for killing non-quest mobs needs to be reasonably rewarding).  But there needs to be SOMETHING in those spaces or exploring becomes pointless and unrewarding. SWG was a perfect example of an unrewarding exploration experience (unless you were prospecting for resources which might have more to do with Achieving than Exploring), with the majority of most of the planets being completely empty of anything to discover. 

Also, unless you want to restrict exploration to the end game or to specific levels, you need to make most or all of those explorable places accessible to all (or most) levels, meaning mobs should be distributed thinly enough to be able to work your way around them if you can't kill them, impassable barriers need to be rare and circumventable, etc.  The AC exploration game was ruined for me when they reworked the mob spawns for 2/3 of the map such that the Dires became impassable unless you were high enough level to fight your way through, and I wasn't even close.  It literally became impossible to get very far into the Dires without fighting something as the mob spawns were changed to be much closer together, and the lowest level stuff was changed to a pretty high level. Prior to that reworking, I had a blast sneaking around between spawns in areas way above my level.  And I even had the opportunity to mix up the exploring with combat as originally AC had a wide range of mob levels scattered pretty much all over the map.  There were low level mobs you could find to fight in or near even the toughest places, and it was usually possible to avoid and work your way around the higher level stuff that would wipe the floor with you but were still a risk if you were careless and were still available to provide a challenge and reward to those high enough level to tackle them. So combat needs to be either avoidable or escapable or both to encourage exploration as anything but an end-game or over-leveled activity.

Another factor for me, and I don't know if I'm typical or an outlier on this among explorers in general, is a key requirement for getting pleasure out of exploring in an MMO is a good mapping program.  And by good I mean one that, at a minimum, shows where you are, what you have explored, and lets you add (and edit and remove!) notes and icons anywhere you want on it while staying in the game.  AC didn't ship with this but a third-party app (what was it called again? Recon?) that worked within the game was soon available which still beats any mapping functionality provided by any game since.  EQ2 and some of the add-ons to WoW both came close enough to be fun, but they still fall short in significant ways, if only in flexibility and ease of use and issues with compatibility with game patches.  Of course, drawing your own maps can be a substitute for those lucky enough to have the skill and talents to do so, sometimes. There were a couple of wonderful artists in early EQ days that published awesome maps that you could print out and use or annotate (by hand) at will.  But even then that depends on there being enough "safe" space to focus on your paper long enough to chart something without dying in the game, and you end up relying heavily on crude (and very anti-immersive) techniques such as /loc to measure distances since you lack real physical measures like footsteps or whatnot.

Does the existence of maps available from outside the game spoil the exploring experience?  Sometimes yes, a little, but sometimes it can enhance it.  Personally, if I'm doing quests on railroad tracks anyway, or trying to locate the bank and merchants at yet another quest hub, I'd rather have those utility things marked on the map already, or at least auto-marked as soon as I've found them.  But if I'm off the rails and just exploring, I enjoy marking what I find in my own style and recording only the things that are interesting to me, rather than wading through the spew of often duplicated, often wrong, and often irrelevant data from some crowd-sourced site like EQ2 Maps.  And the ability to either share your map creations with others or contribute to a group effort can be another form of reward for exploring. I have a love-hate relationship with EQ2 Maps btw - most of the hate would go away if I could download the map for a new zone while in the game and delete or edit any of the duplicate/wrong/irrelevant datapoints also while in the game.  And if it allowed me to selectively download only certain categories of datapoints like banks and quick-travel waypoints that would be extra-plus on the love side.  Minecraft maps, on the other hand, I mostly hate, although the auto updating as you go is mostly good, and the in-game swappable item nature of them is awesome.

Eh, I've said it so often I'm a crank, but: exploration and procedural content in an MMO work fine if the thing that matters is the WORLD, rather than the CHARACTER. If it's all about gaining power for an immortal CHARACTER who accumulates resources and power on a linear (or other steadily increasing) manner, people will always fuck the world over in order to benefit themselves. If the character doesn't matter that much, and what really matters is the aggregated action of lots of players on the world, then I think it's a different story. Almost every bad social problem in conventional MMOs comes down to bad shit people do to CHARACTERS or to the POSSESSIONS of characters.

Or, in a theoretical Minecraft MMO, to constructions that players probably spent literal weeks on. It's hard for me to imagine anything more crushing to morale in a game environment, frankly, outside of permadeath type scenarios.

There's not much difference, in my experience.  Supporting [playstyle X] is generally synonymous with making it mandatory.  You can't claim to be supporting crafting if you have a really deep and involving crafting system that produces crap gear that nobody ever uses, just because people can elect to craft.  You have to push people to it.  Maybe not everyone, but there needs to be an incentive to explore, and letting people teleport all over the map removes that incentive.

I'm not saying that fast travel is inherently a bad thing, but it kind of contradicts the explorer mindset.  If you want people to enjoy the journey and feel like discovering new things, you need to make sure that the guy who is doing that isn't wasting his time, and in most multiplayer games, it is, because you can just skip all that tedious exploring by using a fast travel hub.  I can't skip combat, can't click on a button that says "I don't like raids, please give me the raiding gear without having to do them", but fast travel allows you to bypass everything that makes exploration relevant beyond being some kind of weird videogame tourist.

That's what exploration is in a videogame though!

Whether you're in an MMO or exploring all the nooks in a Battlefield map. If a game wishes to support multiple playstyles and activities, it needs to allow - not force - different activities. If I want to go and explore Uldum in WoW, I don't want to spend an hour travelling there. On the other hand, if I want to walk there from Theramore or Darnassus - or even fly manually instead of taking the port/griffon, there's absolutely nothing stopping me from doing so.

In an MMO, or a game like Battlefield, or a SP game like Skyrim - or in real life - the activity of "exploration" is it's own reward. I've gone exploring new cities and bits of the bush and beach caves and areas off the glaciers in New Zealand because it was all new to me. Finding what was around the corner or over the hill and enjoying the activity was it's own reward. I didn't presume for a moment that I was the first person ever to go to these places, but they were new to me - I was just a (non-videogame) tourist.. I wasn't there to claim new unexplored lands for The Crown. And frankly, if I wasn't able to take the fast travel option (planes, ferries, buses, etc) to the general areas of my on-foot exploration, I'd have never walked there from Auckland, let alone Australia.

One of the barriers to exploration that exists in many games, even games that have large seamless worlds, is the Mob's Agro Range.
More specifically, the mechanic that the Agro Range varies depending on our level.
I understand that it is supposed to make it insignificant to pass by Mobs that would once have been a challenge, but now are just more or less scenery as we have gained some levels.
And now  we are on our way to the bigger nastier Mobs, so we don't want to be bothered by these lower level trash anymore.
This always felt a bit bullshit to me. OK if all there is to a game is riding the treadmill to bigger and better Mobs and Loot. Fair enough, until we get bored to death and unsub until the next content is added.
There are alternatives.

Ryzom had a pretty rich world with great AI on the Mobs and they didn't care what your level was.
OK the Mobs were not as much of a problem as you got stronger, but at least it felt a little more natural and exploration was quite an experience, especially with a lower powered character.

For me skill based games, seem to do exploration well, as they usually don't need the Magic Agro Radius Growth.

Can you imagine a spawned group of Mobs looking over at an approaching Adventurer and discussing whether to attack with furious anger, or just wander around whistling, and kicking daisies, because he had the number 50 over his head.
insert suitable emote here

Like many  said AC was the best explorers game to date imho:

- it had beautiful (for its time) , large seamless landscape filled with content
- it had some fast travel option so  you didnt have to cross entire continent on foot , but at same time it was not insta teleport to any point of the map, you had to explore to find new lifestones and you could only bind to 2 (afair)
- mobs density and distribution was varied and hard enough to feel dangerous to most levels, but at same time allowed careful navigation between them


EvE probably could been a good exploration game -if there was anything to explore really. Largely it looks the same everywhere you go and there are very limited new thing you could possible ever hope to come upon. Space is same in every sector.

I also enjoyed exploring WoW quite a bit.  It had rich world ,even though you were essentially guided trough it by quests (this was basically what was killing it - you knew quests will lead to every area and doing it on your own felt inefficient)

TSW has great world and content , without that inefficiency looming over you so it is great to explore as well. But like WoW most of the content is seen by completing the quests and once you done  so ,there is not much else.

What spices things up long term is pvp. The hunter/grazer games you can play. It was amazing in WoW and AC. And something which made playing Shadowbane worthwhile. Shadowbane even though it was horrible for exploration had this nice mechanics -tracking. Which allowed you to literally hunt and track other people down. Or for them to track and hunt you . I really wish more games took a not and expanded on this feature.

Please forgive a slight derail but while what you're saying was the received wisdom in the days when everyone on the internet used fake names (palmer_eldritch), it now seems that people will behave like complete dicks even when their real name, photograph and a good few hints about their home address are available for all to see, on Facebook or Twitter. It seems that all it takes for people to behave like toerags on the interweb is not having the human being they are abusing in the same room as them and their keyboard.

As uh Fordel said

If you go down that path or over that hill to see what is there, you are exploring. If you do it to gain an achievement point or otherwise somehow increase the power of your character, you're achieving, not exploring. You can be doing both at the same time. I suspect most of us are doing both most of the time (gotta fill-in/un-fog every corner of that map!  

But taking away the character level rewards does not detract from exploring, it detracts from achieving.

TLDR of my wall o text:

To support exploring you need:
     Places to go (that are optional, and not something the game drags or pushes you through)
     Things to see once you get there.
     And they need to be accessible (avoidable/survivable enemies, bypassable barriers, etc.)

If you have all three of those things, explorers will explore. If you lack any one of them, they will give up on exploring.

I hate this mechanic, but then I'm also not very fond of level-based games.

I'll throw early SWTOR SWG out there again.  Mobs always had their aggro range, and the only way to reduce it was by taking Scout skills.  There was no fast travel initially.  There weren't even speeders.  Terrain itself slowed you down if you didn't have Scout skills.  Before they implemented only Part 1 of their 3 part re-balance places like Dathomir were scary as hell for all but the most hardcore of explorers.

GW2 has some modern concessions like fast-travel to hubs you've visited, but there's still lots of terrain between points with nooks and crannies.  The other thing that helps immensely is that if you over-level an area, it auto-levels you to match the place.  It makes things not be a complete cake-walk, but gives you a fighting chance, too.  And if you really want a challenge, then head to a higher level area.

Um, I'm hoping you mean SWG?  Or have I already forgotten more than I realized about SWTOR???

Gah, yes, SWG.  :oops:

Apropos of nothing, it struck me while I was reading this post that I no longer wish to play mmo games. I merely want to play mo games, and that's because I'm tired of the fuckwittery the 'massively' brings.

This is definitely something that I've thought about.  I remark occasionally that my best "MMO" experience ever was actually playing Persistent World Neverwinter Nights on a server called City of Arabel.   What I really want is a game world of a size which generally only comes in the MMO genre, and then have that world to play in with a relatively small but dedicated community.   In fact, late World War 2 Online was sort of exactly this.  The game population plummeted, but only the people who REALLY loved the game kept playing, which meant we had a 1/2 or 1/4 scale (whatever it is I forget) map of Europe to fight World War 2 on over and over again, but with an extremely self selected population.   While the lower population did have some reprecussions which kept the game from being how it was on launch, it retained quite a lot.

Being able to quick travel back to a previously explored spot also makes going off the beaten path more useful/interesting. Marking runes in UO and Darkfall for example- you find a good spawn of mobs to beat on for xp and gold that is out of the way where you are less likely to be interrupted by PvPers, so you mark a rune and visit as often as you like.

If this were couched in Real Life terms, I don't consider 'exploring' to be getting in your car alone and driving to a neighboring county. Sure it may genuinely be new to you, but there is no risk, no danger, and you do it leisurely and on your own. More of the same boring solo shit that MMOs have devolved into.

I on the other hand consider 'exploring' to mean hiking, climbing, rafting, handgliding, canoeing - and also major-mode transport like planes, trains and autos - but in very foreign and often dangerous countries and regions of the world. Places that you'd be a complete idiot to try alone or without a proper guide or help. Climb a glacier, spelunking in a dark cave, whitewater rafting a class V, traveling to countries that not only don't speak English but also may not have electricity available everywhere.

Ask yourself, if Real Life adventure revolves around ever increasing superlatives to be notable, how come the armchair equivalent in MMOs sucks so bad in the opposite direction despite being infintiely easier to perform?

The best exploration is always that which most closely matches what you as a human being sitting at your computer behind your in-game avatar would also consider exciting and adventurous. If you aren't feeling the visceral feedback from what you are doing in-game, it's an abject failure. Claustrophobic places, secret doors, danger around any corner - that's what made places like original EQ seem so mythical and vast, no matter how small in actuality those zones really are when viewed without consequences.

I agree you can't bring it back due to people now being conditioned to A.D.D., but if I could I'd:

- reinstate death penalties to make death hurt and be something you want to avoid at all costs (like, you know, your real body would want to)

- make a lot of places you would only be able to explore with others (think elites in the open world - like WoW Jintha'Alor and LOTRO Carn Dum used to have)

- bring back secret walls, pits, one-way entries, real travel modes (like EQ Kedge, Sebilis, Chardok)

- no instaport everywhere, but have personal land or flying mounts (like early EQ or WoW, only instas from certain classes to promote socialization, and perhaps just to major civilized hubs only after you've gotten there once the hard way)

- bring back complex tight spaces in 3D (go look at early EQ dungeons, LOTRO Moria, DAoC Darkness Fallls) - a dungeon should be complex enough that even with a 2D printed map you'd still have trouble figuring things out.

- remove the minimap, esp. the stupid dot radar (what a silly crutch) - at least remove inside dungeons so you only have at most a compass direction and static print-like map - you know, like a real person in a real place would have

- all overland maps have fog of war (you can't see places you've never been yet. duh)

- allow for a simple 2D dungeon map you must earn somehow in-game (ala what you would probably really have available at best) but allow it as separate window for side-by-side viewing on multimons

- add some RNG flavor to everything, even if its just a RNG to select which of 3 paths a spawn takes instead of ALWAYS the same one - this alone would throw most lazy sob's into a tizzy

Daggerfall-like random dungeons.

Explorers should be rewarded for visiting remote areas more than once.  Maybe that cave was empty the first time you went there, but not the next time.  I am not talking about something as simple as long re-spawn timers. 

I think the biggest problem for exploration in MMOs is that it's inherently one-shot content, when things like dungeons, raids, and PVP can be repeated a lot. You spend time making an interesting area, and people go poke into it, but once they have then it's mapped out and they've gotten the nice loot or achievement or weird old guy that you can find out there. Randomly generated terrain/encounters would open up more room for exploration, but I don't know how well that really works in practice.


An interesting thing in this is that in WOW I can always tell what objects are just terrain and what objects are for a quest. For example in the Draenei zone for the first time, I saw the piles of leaves and immediately wondered what quest was going to use them. I'm good enough at it that it stuck in my head that I was wrong about some plants in Hellfire Penninsula, but much later (late WOLK when I leveled a horde alt through there) I found out that they're actually used for a Horde quest and so was right all along.


I think the exact opposite - exploring is all about going to NEW places and finding out what's there, not spending forever semi-AFK watching your guy autorun through areas you've already explored. Exploring in Skyrim is so much nicer because of this, you can press on into uncharted lands for hours, but don't have to spend a long time going back to a city when you're done. I really don't see how walking back through areas you've already explored adds anything to exploration in the game.

You're confusing "exploring" with "thrillseeking".

In Vanilla EQ, Kithicor Woods at night remained dangerous, even when you knew your way around. It would no longer be "exploring" when you were used to the run back and forth, though the danger remained. If you were a Half Elf from Qeynos Hills and you found that the end of a random tunnel in Kiticor ended in Hobbit Town (Rivervale) and then went in, wandering around and looking, you're still exploring, even if the danger level dropped sharply when you zoned into that random tunnel.

I've been whitewater rafting probably dozens of times now on a bunch of different rivers and rapids and so forth. I was realistically doing less actual exploring when I was rafting than when I was wandering around a new city, looking at the shops and buildings. Exploring /= "danger".

Have you tried Vanguard, incidently? I understand that Brad is back.

Yes and no.  The main point being that not knowing what is there matters for exploring.  Some danger - or at least possibility of something unexpected happening (which in the context of an MMO is PROBABLY danger) matters.   Exploration might not be = to danger, but it shouldn't be = to sight seeing either. 

When WoW: Burning Crusade came out, I decided I wanted to see the entirety of Azeroth before heading to outlands, so I spent a couple of weeks going to every area of the map my character hadn't seen (which was surprisingly large).  But none of that was really exploring - it was just sight seeing.  And I was happy to sight see in that case, but it wasn't really what we are talking about here in my opinion.

There's always an element of danger in real life, however small - despite what Redgiant appears to think. I've seen people get various injuries while rafting, people die and get seriously injured on the roads driving to work all the time, not to mention in their own homes doing minor things. Wandering around the neighbouring county at night, all by your lonesome may or may not be extremely dangerous. The difference is that those aren't "thrillseeking" activities (well, except for the rafting).

Obviously the issue is that we have several different definitions of "exploring", from what you'd call "sightseeing" in WoW all the way to being the first person to climb Everest IRL solo while wearing only shorts, a singlet and flip-flops. Naturally, everyone thinks that their definition is the correct one. Since we have such a huge series of disconnects at the most basic level, I'll probably go back to mostly lurking on this discussion. Otherwise we'll just continue to argue in circles.

A Tale in The Desert for me. I could feel the urge to get out of town coming. Id wait for a baseball game to come on and just pick a direction and start walking with a mostly empty inventory, maybe materials to place a few cicada cages. Sometimes it would be 4 hours of game walking, sometimes it would morph into entire weekends before I ended up back home. For those that have never played, ATiTD had some strong mechanics that encouraged people to wander:

1. Mushrooms - a useful resource. there were like a few dozen different varieties and each one had area and time considerations for spawning. I always had a bunch of the kind of mushrooms that spawned near my compound, but a walkabout was a good way to try and pick up some of the other varieties.

2. Cicada Cages - a test. This was probably my favorite/most hated test. Getting further along in this test permanently  increased your characters movement speed. When the test opened up, Cicada cages were placed randomly throughout the world. When you get near one, your speakers start a buzzing noise. When you find one, you take a cicada out of the cage and are awarded points based on how long its been since someone else has taken a bug or since the cage was dropped. More importantly, once you have enough bugs you can make your own cage (the amount of bugs varied based on the number of cages in the world.) For each active cage you have placed, you generate something like 1 point per minute. Each week, the 7(?) or so people with the highest score gain 1 point in speed and get their score reset.

3. Herbs - a (mostly) cooking resource. These can spawn anywhere, but I always felt like there were more exotic and richer contributions of herbs way out in the middle of nowhere.


Fuck. Now I want to see if there is a new telling starting any time soon. fuck fuck fuck.

As a 100% Bartle Explorer, I can say it isn't the danger, specifically, which adds interest.  Sometimes I like danger.  Sometimes I like a pretty view.  Sometimes I like simple but idyllic.  Chaotic.  War-torn.  Out of the way.  Alien.  Beautiful.  Exotic.  Plain.  Etc.

I enjoy it all, because I want different experiences each time.

My point is mainly that if what I described in the WoW example is exploration, then MMOs already have "good support for exploration" but the general agreement seems to be that they don't, even among those who disagree on what WOULD BE good support.

Did some enjoyable exploring in GW2 this weekend. If you explore sections of the map you will probably find some scenery of interest there, if you hang around you might find that an event kicks off that is basically only for you because no one else is anywhere near. The map is full of hidden paths and inter-connections.

It also gains because in WoW the focus is progression, so the aim is to consume the leveling content and move on before the XP drops. Going off the path will generally find nothing of interest, maybe the playground for a quest you don't have and will generate no XP while exploring.

As to the need for threat and challenge, that's secondary, there just need to be the possibility of there being something to justify the time.

Actually I started the thread to try to get an idea of what people defined exploration as that would exclude WoW and SWToR, because I have fun exploring in both of them.

They both have things to explore, they're just more focused on achievement than some of the games mentioned here.  Even FPSes have something for Explorers.

SWTOR was like anti-exploring- so much of every planet was inaccessible because it was 'out of bounds'. I have never felt more on rails in a game than I did in that one. Part of what drove me to quit.

That's kind of weird to me, since I feel like SWTOR supports exploration much more than most of the other MMOs I've played as my primary game - there are some Area quests that you'll only find if you're trying to expose blacked out map areas, and the whole datacron hunting game. There's a lot of map on most planets that you never get sent to as part of the standard questing path.

I would agree the fatigue zones on Tattooine are kind of annoying in a couple spots. (Hoth never really came up for me, that's the other one I see people complain about.)

In most of the other games you could call my "main" MMO at some point - DAOC, WoW, City of Heroes, DDO - there's either no real exploration at all, or nothing interesting to find in the places you can explore to. DAOC was probably as close as any of them came to good support since useful mob camps were worth finding, but everything else is post-camping. I do like exploring in LotRO but that's entirely about finding book references for me (with a side course of marveling at just how ridiculous Moria is.)

That was my feeling as well which is why people who feel like Falc do perplex me. It's like if there wasn't a quest there they never went near that part of the map, while I can't leave a map area undiscovered.  Plus I wander around finding crafting materials and love to get distracted and just wander. On Hoth there was a huge area of explorable content really because both faction quest areas connected. Same with a few other planets.

A lot of ToR planets weren't very interesting to explore.  I did some, but not to the extent I would in other games.  Hoth, Tattoine, Balmora, Belsavis... I basically wanted off these planets ASAP.  Some of the Heroic 4 areas made it really unpleasant to wander around in, too.

The best exploration in COH is done within the Mission Architect building. To boldly play what no player has played before -- ~500k player-made mission/story arcs, that is. What could possibly go wrong?!  :why_so_serious:

A thousand times this, ideally sweetened with the added wrinkle of uncertainty.  It's nice to go exploring with a specific objective/expectation in mind, and even nicer when you discover something else really cool that you didn't expect in addition - or even instead of - what you were looking for.

Just booted up Skyrim again, and I think one of the big advantages it has in terms of exploration is that it allows you to pick up quest chains midway through.  Most MMOs are really hampered by their reliance on linear quest based progression, I think.

In Skyrim, the world is filled with stuff to do, which rewards exploring.  In WoW, the world is also filled with stuff to do, but it's all gated by quest progression: you can't do any of it without somene telling you to.  In Skyrim, you might find a wrecked house or strange corpse or something else odd and decide to investigate: sometimes it'll be explained, sometimes not, sometimes it'll be a big, full on quest. There might be a quest to take you there, but regardless, once you're there, you automatically start the quest.  In WoW, you can't do jack without the breadcrumb quest that led you there, so there's no point in exploring anywhere you're not led to.

Additionally, in WoW (or most MMOs that I've played) most useful rewards are quest rewards, you generally get crap for drops off of normal enemies and treasure chests.  In Skyrim, almost all of your XP and items is going to come from the enemies that you fight, and the quest rewards are generally pretty junky.  Usually you just finish the quest because you're interested in how it turns out (or just to clear it out of your quest log) rather than because you really want the reward.  So even if you do spend a lot of time exploring somewhere and there isn't a quest there, exploring in itself is a fairly useful activity for gaining power and advancing your character.

Phasing, by the way, is the absolute death of exploration. If you're not even in the world that other people are in, and what you're seeing won't be there once you've done some quest, you don't ever really "find things" that have any in-game reality.

... and you're the only character doing the exploring.

Yeah, not sure how that's relevant to my point though?  I'm saying that a lot of MMOs are just as packed with content as Skyrim (or more packed), but because you can't jump in halfway through a quest, it kills your ability to get to that content by exploring, and the world ends up looking empty.  You have to stick to the rails or you don't get to do anything.  I'm not seeing why you couldn't design an MMO around the idea of allowing quests to have multiple "jumping on" points, or why that wouldn't work with multiple players.

It seems like this is in part what Public Quest systems are trying to do. You sort of stumble into an area where something is happening, and you can just start helping.  In practice, players just seems to ignore them or grind them, depending on their mood.

In who's practice, in GW2 it exactly opposite.  I have triggered a Dynamic Event by myself with no around and 30 seconds have the thing swarmed by players because it popped up on their map.

Lets see if it lasts after release, we saw the same thing in WAR beta too.

That's because in WAR the requirements to beat a PQ got worse and worse while the numbers of people needed to help kept increasing.  The numbers completable solo or duo were miniscule, grindy, and far fewer in number.

Yes, this is certainly true.  And if GW2 has truly improved enough on the formula so it actually works well, then I will be pleased.  I'm merely indicating that the way people played WAR in beta it looked like it was going to be the best thing going.  Only to find out that once it went live everyone ignored the fun stuff for the sake of optimizing leveling speed and loot acquisition.  This experience has made me very hesitant to point at something like this working in beta as evidence it will work the same way in launch, that's all.

Yeah thats my main concern for PvE side as well. As area without dynamic events  is extremely bland and boring.

That must be something they polished out after I left because I sure as heck remember finding npc's in the middle of nowhere with quests, in the plaguelands and that first started zone in the first expansion but others I can't remember as well.

Most of that shit was still there up until Cataclysm, which if I'm not mistaken has added more "I killed a random thing and got a quest" type events to the leveling areas.

I don't know that "I killed a random thing and got a quest" is really encouraging exploration, since you don't know ahead of time that killing a specific mob will give you a thing or even that there's a thing out there to look for.  You're not going to be cruising along and suddenly go "hey, that one hyena that looks like every other hyena looks like it would be really interesting to fight for some reason, let's go do that".  It's just something that you sometimes bump into while you're doing something else, generally.

I don't mean to imply that WoW has NOTHING that starts off the beaten track, but it's the exception rather than the rule.  And even if there are guys standing around in the middle of nowhere, it doesn't fix the problem that if I run into their widget or whatever without getting permission from them first, I can't pick it up.  Like every time I ride through Ashenvale, there's some area where everything is flames and tentacles and Malfurion screaming battle cries and I have to ride through like it's a Disney World ride because I levelled up in a different zone and don't have the appropriate quest prerequisites to do whatever it is that happens there. 

Malaki reminded me of PQs, and I do think it would be a benefit for explorer based games to switch to a more PQ based system.  Maybe instead of getting a quest to kill ten ostriches you get a quest to go to a specific place and at that place is a PQ to kill ten ostriches that you can do even without the breadcrumb quest (they don't all HAVE to be these ten stage "kill fifty elite monsters" quests like they were in WAR).  Or something like that, I dunno.

Or you could not get the quest at all but just wander around and discover the event to kill off the invading ostrichs, then do another quest to go steal their eggs or something. Like guild wars 2 maybe? Appearantly originally guild wars 2 wasn't going to have the "heart" quests at all but it was felt that it was too nebulous for all the people used to being led by the hand around zones so they put in the heart quests.

Champions Online also had PQs, with less stringent requirements than WAR (from what I saw, admittedly limited) and nobody did them. Hopefully that won't happen to the GW2 ones.

I kind of doubt it judging by the beta but release may be a different animal. Except I don't think you can level efficiently just killing mobs so..

CoH/V has proto-PQs; zone events where something would randomly trigger and there would be a call to (depending on the zone) deal with the Ghost Ship / put out a building fire / stop a Troll rave etc.

They were fun for a while, then players ignore them. Once they've worked out the time / benefit analysis, the majority move on and leave the new players to get excited about those events.

Same happened with ChampO (at least when I played). You'll get people joining in at the final stage, but the actual trigger events leading up to that stage are usually done by individuals / duos.

Anyway, my point with Skyrim is that it's much, much easier to feel like you are exploring when you are the only person to come across something, not when you get a location question of "Explore the Lost Ruins of Khjouinl Koudq" and there's four PC teams waiting outside the door doing /dance emotes.

Same thing happened in Champions that happened in WAR.  They were pretty active when the beta was going on, but soon after release everyone stopped doing them. It also didn't help that the higher level you got the more of them required groups past the first stage (like WAR).  So while the low level stuff was pretty accessible, the higher level ones simply couldn't be soloed.

GW2 Dynamic Events are not a sideshows like in other games.  They are the meat and potatoes of the PvE experience.  During BWE it was always worth your will to do the DEs.  In many cases completing a DE would simultaneous complete a heart (think regular quest).  Two birds for one stone xp.  The only time I have real trouble completely them solo is if I am under-leveled or I get lazy and stop dodging.  Obviously the scaling isn't perfect, but it pretty good.  What other game can you go on a impromptu raid with 60 strangers? 

Obviously we haven't seen the whole game, so we can't say 100% what is going to happen but I think it is safe say that it DE are much more elaborate and harder to ignore than any previous PQ system.

I think the thing with dynamic events, public quests and so on is that they have to auto-scale to whomever is there. Toontown, of all things, sort of had that--if you were just fighting a cog yourself, you got one spawn; as more people joined your line, the next group of cogs was tougher. On a more elaborate scale, that's what exploration-triggered content needs--it has to be doable by the explorer himself/herself if he's the only toon around, but scale up and up and up depending on how many people are there and participating.

I think this is generally speaking true.  But it is also neat to find stuff that you can't do alone.  One issue I have with MMOs in general these days is that the world is created far too much with my character in mind.  One of the things I'd really like - I guess this is similar to what Rift did - is have totally random spawns that do stuff on the map.  Maybe they have a task to do, and they either do it and despawn, or a player finds them in the middle and can stop them.  Basically, just things that happen that indicate that the game world has some sort of existence besides for the fun of the players.  I guess that sounds a little weird when talking about a game, which DOES exist for the players, but the best exploration things I've seen in games tend to be when I come across something that makes me feel like I am NOT the center of the universe.

There are events in GW2 that probably aren't going to be soloed.  Not a huge number from what I've seen, but they do exist.  There are others which can be soloed, but would be much easier with a group due to how they are structured.

If a game is centered around the player, then I don't see why we pretend otherwise. Not being centered around the player shouldn't be "centered around groups that have to be formed through deliberate social effort": the alternative is "centered around all the players acting in aggregate" or "centered around a procedurally generated world w/autonomous agents as well as conscious players". Making a lot of content that requires people to form into coordinated groups of 5-50 people or so is a bad idea if all the things which change or are explored or experienced matter only on the level of individual characters.