So what is good support for exploration.

[Fordel]

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.

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:


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.

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

[Ingmar]

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.

[Phred]

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.

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

[Rendakor]

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.

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.

[Count Nerfedalot]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Kail]

1) Lack of fast travel, or auto travel, whatever.

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

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.

[Azazel]

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.

[Rake]

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

[Dark_MadMax]

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

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:


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.

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

[Count Nerfedalot]

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.

[Lantyssa]

More specifically, the mechanic that the Agro Range varies depending on our level.

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.

[Count Nerfedalot]

More specifically, the mechanic that the Agro Range varies depending on our level.

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

I'll throw early SWTOR 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.

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

[Lantyssa]

Gah, yes, SWG. 

[Xanthippe]

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

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.

[Malakili]

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

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Redgiant]

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

[Lantyssa]

Daggerfall-like random dungeons.

[shiznitz]

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. 

[Pantastic]

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.

A lot of games now are designed the way Chekhov said stories should be written, where every part plays some vital role.

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'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 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.

[Azazel]

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.

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.

[Malakili]

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".

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.

[Azazel]

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.

[Bann]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Phred]

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.

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

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.

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.

[Ingmar]

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.)

[Phred]

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.

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.