f13.net

I figured I'd start a semi-fun topic. Which MMO do you think was the best for exploring? For me it was AC1. My friends and I used to just point our avatars in a random direction and go exploring. Most of the time you'd find nothing, but sometimes you'd find a little cave with mobs, or a fort out in the middle of nowhere with mobs, something like that.

On a side tangent, exploration feels mostly dead with todays mmos. They're too small and websites post the whole damn game world in just a few days.

None or SL, depends on how you define exploring.

If you enjoy landscapes and geography, A Tale in the Desert was massive and had some beautiful areas to explore.  I can remember doing nothing but running some days to look for mushrooms, new fishing spots, and to gather skills. 

Exploring as in, not every area in the game is fully mapped. It also needs out of the way areas with no major dungeon or instance close by. You can go find some cliff on a mountainside somewhere that you suspect very few other people in the game have found. Or like in my AC1 days, a fort in the middle of nowhere, populated by mobs that you can happily camp for hours because noone else is around.

Basically, that feeling of being a pioneer or scout or what have you.

Ya that's going to have problems with limitations of content.  The best you can do is play an old game with lots expansions.  I wouldn't suggest ATITD, the landsacpe is boring.  GW's landscape is pretty neat and some people are really into collecting the explorer badges.  EQ2 has a ton of landscape, a stealther class can explore most the outside areas.

Can you even "explore" in todays games? With the ultra complete maps in-game and spoiler sites I'm not sure it's even possible anymore.

Then I am not sure about your definition of exploration.  No game has an infinite amount of places to explore to ensure anyone had virgin territory to visit.

That sums up one of the biggest problems of exploration, too.  In order to have enough space for 'virgin territory', the world has to be nearly empty of people as far as the land:player ratio goes.  After a while, people will realize that they're bored or lonely out of their minds after wandering around for days without having seen another player.

EQ is fun to explore even if other people have already been there before. Just run around as a level 1-10 and try to keep from getting ganked by mobs. There are a lot of zones to cover. Make a dark elf (native hide ability) or a bard (fast run). Pick the PvP server for laughs.

I'll second Guild Wars because the map uncovers for you and there are towns and such which you have to uncover for yourself to get to them.

EVE recently added hidden 'dungeons' that you have to find with scanning probes. Space all looks like space though.

SWG wasn't bad for exploring, at least when I started out.  The landscape was huge and randomly generated (but static), so you could have fun going and looking for scenic areas to plant a house or what have you.  There were also the POIs, which were pretty cool until they put the locations in everyone's data pad.  After a certain point, though, the entire landscape got cluttered with dead buildings, the POIs that spawned mobs were being camped constantly, and that was pretty much that.

Eve seems like it could be fun for exploring the political landscape.  Every 'zone' looks the same, so it's not that you are exploring space so much as you are exploring the political ties involving said space.

Or i could just be making shit up.

On the same note, I've always considered making builds in games for fun a form of exploring...exploring in the meta-game instead of real-game, but exploring none-the-less.

It's not just about size...

At one point in UO, I decided I was going to find a plot to place a house, and over the course of a few days, I traversed the entire world looking for one. It was pretty naive to think it might be possible to find a free spot, but it was a lot of fun discovering neat places - player towns, little monuments, areas with strange foliage or gardens, or cool vendor malls.

UO had (has?) an advantage over more modern games that the 2D artwork allows them to put in cool little areas at low cost, and that a full range of colours can be used without worrying about overflowing texture memory. UO also did a nice job with ambient sound that changes from area to area.

I also agree with Samwise. We had a lot of fun in SWG looking for where to place our town.

I miss sandboxes, that's for sure.

I wonder if instatized world coupled with a random zone builder could did it.  Just break the world into tiles.  If tsomeone runs into a new tile make a random new landscape and make a new instance for tile.  If someone runs into a tile that already exists, load the tile or add them to the tile's instance if it already exists.  I guess it be a problem to download the new tile the first time you run into a tile and the landscape would mostly be boring like SWG.

I remember in the early weeks of Horizons the sheer openness and wildness of the areas.  While some areas had lots of people in them, it was extremely easy to find territory where seeing a single other player was an uncommon experience, and the areas around the hubs/teleporters where players massed tended to taper off quickly. 

While I certainly don't think Horizons qualifies as the best MMO for anything, it is one of the few that managed to briefly hit that feeling of having an actual frontier, even if that feeling was an illusion. 

If the UO world was the size of Vanguard, that would be perfect. I really dug being able to find something interesting and mark a rune to be able to return to it. Shadowbane was interesting as well, if only to get a feel for where all the good PvE zones were and where the player cities were. Man, that game had some potential...

I'll go with UO. It had lots of point of interests and most of them were player made. Still, it was big enough, dangerous enough and mysterious enough to be worth exploring. Even by boat.

Nowadays, being an explorer myself, there's nothing that tickles my interest like the Vanguard world. We'll see if it stays true to the premises, but so far I definitely can't complain. 

Good point.  Making weird builds work was most of what I liked about DDO.

I like to explore a little bit in CoH. As I don't have anywhere near a max-level character, and I don't use spoiler sites for the game, a lot of the areas, especially those patched in after release, are new to me.

It helps that I picked Super Speed as my travel power, so I can zoom about (and even stand still in places) with near-impunity. I explored a bit of Croatoa one time when I went there by accident last week on my 28 scrapper. Seemed neat...especially when I ran by what looked like some AA guns and they proceeded to fire at me as I zoomed away.

I'm of the mind that you can't really explore in diku's. Usually. Exploring in one of these games is more like trying to hop up a staircase 4 or 5 steps at a time. It can be done, but it's generally something that gets you killed a lot.

About the only cool thing they offer for explorers are different classes, skills, and loot combos to dabble with. And that really isn't exploring either.

AA guns in Croatoa? Either you are a much better explorer than me, or you might be thinking of Striga Isle...

CoH/V's use of the Z axis can make exploration quite fun too - a number of new zones have hidden or easter egg areas for players to find.

There are assorted exploration badges on the tops of buildings/statues/etc. in the old zones as well.

Pre-nge SWG. Playing as a miner. I don't know if the resource gathering mechanisms are still in there post-nge. It would be worth trying it out if they turn on collision detection. Or something.

Or maybe aTitD. People devote whole websites to tracking and predicting the migration patterns of mushrooms through that game.

Other people have mentioned the CoX badge system, new zones that come in every issue and it takes at least a month or so to find all the new badges. Also, no auto-attack.

Or you could just play any of several MMOGs out this year that are clearly going to fail badly. It's not as if Vanguard, Conan, DDO, LotRO etc etc are ever going to have enough players to build online spoiler maps anyway.

Yep, in an effort to get this thread to ding 30 I'll agree with eldaec and Samwise that early SWG gave me a bit of fun exploring.  There were little villages and pieces of flavour like ruins or abandoned rebel bases, even sites of ongoing skirmishes you could join in with.  Even after mounts and vehicles went in the worlds were so big that you'd find large areas of uninhabited wilderness.  Also, you could make a "living" out of it with surveying and mining.

I think Eve is the other.  The look is very samey throughout, but at higher skill-levels you can at least make money from exploring as a career: hunting out unmarked belts, complexes and so on.  It sounded a lot cooler in theory than it seems to be in practise, though: like so many things in Eve it seems to require meticulous and lengthy execution.

I know this. And I didn't mean it literally had to be virgin territory, just that it had to feel like it. Sure, others had been there before, but when you and your friends are the only players in sight as you stand on some ledge on the middle of a cliff out in the middle of nowhere it is kind of a neat feeling. That's all I was getting at. It feels like you're a pioneer.

I'd have to agree that SWG had that to some extent, though not as much as AC1, I think because AC1 had lower subscriber numbers and a much larger world.

I count this as my primary play type. 

I think Eve might be the most interesting, but to me it's unrealistic since you can't cloak full time.  That is, you'll get ganked at some point by a PK before meeting a red.  Not a critcism of the game, just a reality.

EQ2 does allow stealth enough that it's realistic to try to move around without fighting everything.  There's enough zones to still keep me interested.

LOTRO is the one game I am expecting will be stable, purty, and with large tracts of land to explore.  It's the one now on my radar to check out.

Otherwise, VG would be the only other.  But it won't be stable for quite awhile and I fully expect it will be empty in lots of areas.  And/Or like SWG, have lots of empty POI models that have no scripted encounters.


[Edit] corrected for Engrish

The Gothic or Elder Scroll series.

Wait, what? MMO? Heh. Probably UO. EQ was cool, but slow and difficult to explore. AC1 was good, too, but pretty bland. SWG was so empty, then urban-sprawled...Sam sums up SWG succinctly. The new generation is full of motherfucking cockblocks, so I wouldn't know about exploring them as I'm a dirty soloer.

TES Morrowind had some neat locations, from what I played of it. Oblivion looks like it might but I never played it myself.

I liked exploring in EQ after I reached the level cap so that I didn't have to worry about aggro from mobs.  With all the expansions there were literally dozens of zones I had never even step foot in, most of them were well done although the graphics were fairly outdated by the time I saw them.

All those poor NPCs toiling away through their scripts with no one to watch and interact with them, makes me sad.

Without a doubt Asheron's Call Dark Majesty for me.  To date many of the things that was done in AC has not been equaled since and I find that very, very sad.  I remember starting at holtburg and just picking a direction and running.  It was some great and fun times back when I was searching for specific mobs and had no idea where to find them so I would pick the most remote area possible and "find" them.   I still remember the first time I went exploring and found a Hoary Mattakar spawn.  The Mattakar caves were camped 24/7 and here I found one, killed it, and got myself a hide.   It was some of the best times I have ever had in an MMO. 

To this date I miss that feeling I got when I was rewarded for simply exploring the terrain and the world in general.  I really wish Turbine would have looked at what they did right in AC1 and then made a second MMO expanding on what they got right; instead, of taking the road well traveled and trying to immitate Everquest.

AC1 in my opinion was well before its time, and the genius of that game has been lost in current MMO strategy of designing clones of previous games.

Without reading the rest of the thread - AC1, the first three months, handsdown.

I played on the pvp server, and about a month in the biggest Anti-PK guilds (which were a major minority on the server) fled to a town they had discovered in the southern mountains, that wasn't on the maps. It was an entire town, with vendors, that litterally 99% of the server did not know existed.

It took a twenty plus minute run through the wilderness to find the place, and even at that, there were only a couple passes through the mountain range that could get you to it. It went undiscovered by our enemies for weeks (until my guild leader blew a gasket one day and led the Mercs right to our doorstep...)

That was something I don't think we'll ever see again in a MMoG. They would publish patches of new content, and not tell anyone what they had added. They actually let people find out for themselves.

Then, eventually, someone cracked the data and from that day on everyone knew everything that was new two days after the patch... :(

UO, just because the world isn't segregated into level-based zones, such that if you randomly swim across the river from Goldshire to Duskwood, all the wolves and spiders suddenly jump twenty levels and rape you for having the temerity to go off the planned course of content consumption.  In UO you can at least just go walking all around the overland as a newbie and not expect to be instantly annhilated.

My old house on Europa was in the absolute hinterland boondocks of Malas, so far from town that probably no one beyond the first wave of rune-markers ever visited there on foot.  Certainly I never had.  I'd been gated there by the guy who sold me the place.  Anyway, one day I left my house and just starting running around at random.  I found a good spawn of crystal elementals (nice money-farming monster for middle-strength characters) way out in the middle of nowhere, next to a little cemetery and a white marble shrine.  I remembered the way I went and hunted that spot on a regular basis, being the only person who knew about it.  Eventually I brought a mage friend to mark a couple runes, and it was just a spot for me and the people I let in on it.

funny that exact same tactic of identifying really cool, really private hunting spots propelled a lot of people during early SWG.  Partly to help identify POI's that might help unlock Jedi, and then to be to grind in peace from Bounty Hunters.

I had lot of fun in UO before they added the radar map. I had my U5-7 cloth maps out and was trying to sail to where I thought islands would be and that kind of thing.

I had a lot of fun in AC1 like a bunch of people have mentioned. You could really look around you while in a town, see a mountain range, and run to it. Then you'd have to circle around looking for a way to climb it, and once you found that and made it to the top you could "slide down" by glitching on where some polygons met.

I'll agree with the AC1 thing.  UO was pretty close, but I played pre-UO:R but post-everyone-figured-out-it-was-cool, so it seemed that even the most remote places had occasional traffic.  And certainly every spot remotely capable of containing a house had been explored to death.

I think AC struck a good balance between a huge, mostly computer generated world, but with enough human design to have myriad small places you could level and never see another soul for days, months even.  I played on the PvP server too, and my guild controlled a lifestone in the middle of what was effectively a huge meadow.  It took 10-15 minutes to run there from any town, but once there, you could be assured that you could level in relative peace because no one could be arsed to travel that long just to gank one noob.

Everquest felt huge for the 13 levels I played, but that was probably just the honeymoon not having worn off.

Please don't make me go back. Way too many soldiers or undead. Plus said howitzers.

I beta tested DAoC back in the day and I thought it had a nice bit of explorability to it.  I mainly played in the viking area and always seemed to find some little settlement or abandoned fort tucked away in a little nook of landscape. DAoC felt like a real world at the time more so than EQ or AC1 did. I never went on to retail due to monetary restrictions but always sort've missed not experiencing it more. AC1 had some nice surprises as well but after 6 months I just couldn't stay with it. EQ was more fun at the time. And EQ was huge as well. There were and probably still are little nooks and crannies I haven't seen. I remember rolling up a rogue in Freeport and finding an area I never knew existed even after 4 years or so of gameplay.  The new Freeport sucks so much I don't know how SOE hasn't collapsed in on itself. It pains me to see what they've done to that game. They've broken more than they'll ever fix.

As much as it pains me to recommend it, Vanguard, from what Falconeer is saying may be a good MMO for people who want to explore a huge virtual world, what with the size and draw distance. As an added bonus, you may well find yourself very far from other player characters ;) while tamping around the bush.

That is, unless VG punishes you in the traditional EQ style for exploring, by killing you dead with wandering deathmobs.

that actually is the only main draw for me for VG, but I'm worried about polish or population (world bldg in progress).

It does. Random insane-level mobs killed me when I climbed mountains near the starting area.

Originally, EQ was very good for explorers because invisibility worked (except for the random timer...) and followed consistent rules (invis for live mobs, invis to undead for undead), and a mob's con let you know if it saw you. You could head down to meet your friends in Guk (don't forget to change over invis types!) and skip all the mobs along the way, even if they'd normally aggro.

Not the case in EQ2 where invis is almost laughably ineffective. How is VG about that, since it seems very EQ2ish in a lot of (negative) ways to this sideline observer.

Vanguard has the wandering deathmobs 20 times harder than anything else in an area with huge agro radius. They also transition from one range level of MOBs to twice the range level of MOBs without any visual clue that you are entering a harder area of the world. It is just abrupt. They of course have the exp penality and take a much bigger hit when you explored yourself into an area can not go back to your grave so have to summon your belongings. Lastly they don’t have the little rewards for exploring like WoW gives a bit of exp for going to areas new to you and I think EQ2 does something similar. They do have a message if you are the very first on the server to have gone to a particular place they have flagged but message flashes on the screen and does not show up in text window. Likely flashes to fast for you to even get a screen shot unless you were really prepared.

Last time I tried Vanguard, the lag was so bad that monsters would actually appear on your screen behind you, after you'd already ran past them and you'd already aggroed them a couple seconds before that.

Made exploring a real bitch.

I'd say lag has been fixed in Vanguard. I keep playing the whole game at 30fps with high visual settings.
Still, today something weird happened: I created a barbarian alt to see the starting zone and logged into the game with a bedazzling 5 fps. I was so scared that I rebooted my system, but the the 5 fps were still there when I logged back in. After a little investigation it turned out that there was a pile of gravestones (player corpses) all in the same exact place. Apparently someone got killed by PKs over and over on the (only) respawn point and that generated millions of gravestones in the same identical place, to the point that actually looked like... one (except for the garbled names one over each other). That, of course, need a fix as it was impossible to loot any corpse (including your own) as they were un-selectable. Still, the monstrous hyper-gravestone was the cause for the lag. As soon as I kept it out of my viewing range, the engine revved back up to 30fps, while just a little inch of that horrendous graveston in my field of view killed the FPS to death.

Once again, the road to optimization is a long one. But my point is that any new player/betatester logging today for the first time in that place, has probably fled already and erased the game for good, thinking that 5 is the standard framerate for Vanguard.

Maybe this should be in the Vanguard thread, but Nija's post summoned it here. Lag doesn't seem to be an issue, especially in open spaces and uncharted lands, and any solid computer should be able to handle exploration out of the cities and main hubs pretty well.

I mean network lag. I cruise along at 30fps as well (and 30fps isn't a good framerate - it's just the best that Vanguard offers) - but the NPCs wouldn't load until I was literally on top of them. They need basic shapes loading at 500 meters, or a decent visual distance away. Tiny specs off in the distance so you can approach and see what they actually are.

It's been a few months since I've played so maybe it's better now. But from watching a year's worth of content patches and "fixes" I really doubt it.

It was SWG for me.  With my camps able to take care of my wounds, I would stay out in the field for weeks at a time.  I remember roaming Dathomir, on foot, when people were scared to go anywhere near the place.

For those that enjoyed exploring game systems, it was also a wonderous thing.  Convoluted formulas, experimentation, and random resource spawns.  Cracking the BE Tissue formula was one of the greatest bits of fun I've ever had in a game.

Rogue Stealth ftw.

For that "no one has ever been here" or "where the fuck am I" feeling, ATITD is the top.  Too bad it's like being in a university architect program.

I have to agree with ATITD landscape being dull.
Even if I don't like World of Warcraft too much I think it is an ok game for explorers. Nice but not perfect since there is so much to see and so many interest points but sometimes there are spawns which doesn't seem to fit at all in the landscape.

For example you can go in zone A and find centaurs level 5. Then you go in zone F and find centaurs level 15, and in zone K there are big centaurs level 50.
Basically you can't say "centaurs are strong" and "murlocs are green meatballs", they are simply mobs with some stats and whose shape and color are random selected from a pool of possibility.

EQ1 and 2 do a great job in keeping an alive and "realistic" environment. So yes, if I had to choose I would say EQ2. Sadly levels will be a restriction to how much you can explore, but anyway you have a lot of things to see and a lot of fun NPCs to speak with at every level.

Another reason IMHO that AC1 succeeded as being a great MMO for exploration was that a lot of the top items of the day could be gotten chiefly through exploration.  With the Dark Majesty they improved upon this.  To name a few:

1.  Siraluun feathers...
2.  Olthoi Spawns for high end currency drops
3.  Golems for both pyreal motes and the diamond golem drops (forgot what exactly they dropped for the diamond shield)
4.  Frankenstein Bow,  This was a really impressive quest IMHO because of the three grades of bow that could be produced based on tradeskill and materials.
5.  The chests that were everywhere that dropped really nice loot in the Dire lands and the Obsidian Plains.
6.  The masks were cool =), I loved the idea of the Virindi
7.  Shadow Armor
8.  Mattekar Armor....


I guess the point I am trying to make is that AC succeeded in exploration because there were very tangible rewards for exploration. 

SWG isn't bad since the population is so low, you realy can be all alone. You won't be the first to see it, but you can get "lost" on Endor or Dath or Yavin 4 pretty easily. By lost I mean no one else around.

I was sure someone would mention Dark & Light. Their game world is touted as larger than any other ground based game in existence. And since the game basically sucks, the population should be low enough to get you the same result. To top it off, and unless I am mistaken about the details of how it works, you can "explore" the world for free with one of their membership plan options. If that is indeed true, and you have full access to explore the whole game world for free, then it seems to be risk-free to do. And you can take hot air balloon rides if you want, lol. 3D flight rocks.

Tip for anyone who wants to try exploring in EQ: Pick the Test server.
You get all expansions for free. doubled XP gain (in case you want to do any levelling), and /testbuff buffs you to L25 + what used to be reasonable newbie gear, five years ago.

Plus the community is better than on most live servers (provided that you don't act like a moron).

Yeah, I think the best exploration time I ever had was in SWG beta. The first master doctor (Timzai) invited me (Tale, near-master doc) and two master combat medics (Kalyn and Mycroft) to see what we could find on Yavin IV.

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/swgbeta/yavinmap.jpg)

Three things you have to understand about SWG at that time: 1. There was no transport other than walking/running. 2. When you died, you left a corpse with all your gear on it, and had to run back. 3. We travelled east on foot for two hours of real time, so we really stuck our necks out. But we always managed to keep alive a doctor with a rez kit. (Edit: this was also without buffs.)

With a little help from the beta boards and some luck, we were probably among the first to see some of the PoIs. The furthest point we reached was the death star debris crater in the far east, then ran for two hours back along the beach, with the planet Yavin above us. It became a legendary trip that we still talked about on the live boards, even though we were on different servers.

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/swgbeta/yavin2.jpg)

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/swgbeta/wool1.jpg)

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/swgbeta/yavin7.jpg)

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/swgbeta/yavin6.jpg)

It's sort of like looking at pictures of that likable dead uncle that never got anywhere but you miss him anyway.

So far for me I would say Asheron's Call 1 offered the best pure exploring experiences. The map was very very big in relationship to player population. There was interesting landscape and some cool little discoveries here and there. There was a tower with a chest in it that I remember finding way down along a difficult-to-navigate coastal area in the Direlands where the chest had nothing but a message from the devs to whomever found it in it, for example. Tons of spawns in areas where no one was really hunting, some fun areas where you had to handle aggro very caerfully. I remember with a relative lowbie deciding I wanted to see this "Teth" place that everyone was spamming for portals to in Arwic. So I decided to run overland to it rather than take the portal. I had a big aggro radius, so it was a very scary run where I almost died a bunch of times. I think that was about the best explorer experience I've ever had.

SWG is a close second: in the Beta, I went all over the place, and the sense of size and scope was very attractive, along with finding many POIs (though many of those turned out to be much less than they appeared to be, or were unfinished until well after the game went live.)

God, yes, I miss my ranger days out on Dath and Yavin, not a soul around but the Rancors and Woolamanders. And later as a jedi, looking for safe places to hide out and work on my skills.

You know, I still kinda miss the simple gui of the original SWG. It doesn't draw as much focus.

And that's what it should have done. The, "let's copy WoW's interface and draw all the ADD kiddies" interface was just plain stupid.

Damn, this thread is giving me nostalgia for SWG and AC1.

Be strong, Riggsy.

I'm pretty sure $14.99 could cure that in a hurry.

Someone in my monarchy found a leveling spot way out in the dires where you could base yourself in a cave and hunt golems all day long, and no one would ever come bother you.   The mobs at this cave were much lower level than the ones surrounding it.  Getting there was a skill in itself; not only avoiding the mobs but also remembering the route. 

It was a huge timesink but I didn't mind so much.  I could tell no one went there often because I died once, and returned a week later and my body was still there. Apparently no one had entered the landblock since I was there last, so the corpse did not decay.

Adding another vote for AC1.  The game world was BIG and continuous.  You could get anywhere on the map you wanted, if you tried hard enough (glitching up mountains, etc.)  As said above, you were "rewarded" because you could find random golem spawns in the middle of nowhere and collect motes, or run into a mattekar and get a hide for some cool armor.  Or you could find a lifestone in fuckoffville nowhereland and live there by yourself or with your few buddies and have your own space in the game that nobody would find, even/especially on DT.

There was also the fact that mobs didn't insta kill you if they were N levels above you.  You always "sorta" had a chance, and you could almost certainly run away (while strafing quickly so they didn't nuke your ass), and at the very least, you knew that the area was scary (but not unexplorable) and it gave you something to come back to later to fight.  But you won later by the same mechanics, and not because the mobs no longer destroyed you immediately with the help of a compare_level() function.

I remember in beta at like level 20 being run through the dires by Amose from the portal exiting Mayoi.  Avoiding shreths and ash gromnies left and right, dodging war spells from undead and shit, finally making it to the bastion of Fort Tethana and being safe!

All of this is contrasted with WoW where you get insta gibbed by shit higher level than you, zones are all very obviously contrived with exactly two exits and your leveling path through the game is a guided tour, and you have quests to go everywhere.  You can't explore in WoW beacuse not only is everything extremely small and local, there's really nowhere to go.  The best exploration experience I had in WoW was when I used the totem bug to give myself 5000 agility/strength permanently and ran through a series of elite zones in the north of the eastern continent, then bugged through an impassible barrier and explored an unfinished zone.  I found the giant tree of life or whatever from WC3 and archimonde's giant, dead husk wrapped around it.  Plus the zone was really beautiful, and devoid of trash mobs that litter the landscape everywhere else in the game.