Best MMO for explorers

[Riggswolfe]

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.

[tazelbain]

None or SL, depends on how you define exploring.

[Nebu]

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. 

[Riggswolfe]

None or SL, depends on how you define exploring.

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.

[tazelbain]

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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.

[tazelbain]

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.

[Kitsune]

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.

[Krakrok]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[trias_e]

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.

[Baldrake]

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.

[tazelbain]

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.

[Rhonstet]

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. 

[WayAbvPar]

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...

[Falconeer]

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. 

[Samwise]

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.

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

[Strazos]

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.

[stray]

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.

[UnSub]

II 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.

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.

[Trippy]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Endie]

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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.

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.

[Soln]

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

[Sky]

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.

[Chenghiz]

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

[Miasma]

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.

[MournelitheCalix]

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.

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.

[Bunk]

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... :(

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Soln]

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.

[Nija]

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.

[Jayce]

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.

[Strazos]

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.

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