I think this may be a question of personal preference, as well as what you’re doing in the ‘world’ at any given time.

I know when I go vanquishing (kill every aggressive mob in a zone), or when I waddle across a large zone for the first time, to get a city-outpost map marker so I can instant travel, it certainly doesn’t feel small. In fact, it feels rather large.

To me, Guild Wars feels bigger than WoW. But then, maybe not everyone goes AFK the moment they hop on a gryphon. And epic flight did make WoW seem even smaller.

Guild Wars feels big, yet convenient to me. I hadn’t expected this. Back when I played MUDs, I was one of those people who was really, really against teleportation spells as a design feature, because I felt they made the world feel smaller and more trivial. I don’t get that with Guild Wars (personally), and so have been forced to re-assess why I thought so in the first place.

I think now that it’s because MUDs and graphical MMOs are very different beasts (yes, I know, sillyobvious). When you ‘walk very fast’ through an area in a MUD, the text is just flying by and you’re not seeing it. When you walk very fast (or fly or bounce or poing) in an MMO, you’re still seeing the world *unless* you go afk on a gryphon, and /or you map via GW style city maps. But when you want to get to a specific mob, you still *walk/run/fly/poing* all the way there, past the scenery, which you SEE. In a MUD, teleporting and pre-keying a vast set of directions are almost equal, and neither of them register as ’seeing’ the world.

(Sorry for the MUD digression. Rambly nugget strikes!)

Rob S: One thing to note, I think Champions does “ok” with its instances. I have not yet felt the world empty or small in CO and in general, I think CO needs MORE instancing to encourage teaming. There are other reasons to like/dislike CO, but I don’t feel instances is one of them.

Rob: Interesting point. I think that to an extent, you are correct, instances have become the defacto method for doing dungeons. Still, like anything else, they can be done well or poorly… I think both Guild Wars and DDO have good instances and they are used to do something interesting as opposed to just “find the next shiny”. Unfortunately, those games are so instanced that I find myself avoiding them even when the quality is pretty good.

Christopher: The one thing I did like about Tabula Rasa was the invasion points. I would like to see more and more games have some kinds of dynamic world events to keep the open world fresh and interesting.

Ink: Hey man, good to see you… I need to drop you a line and ask you some questions. Check your pm on mmorpg.com.

I kind of liked how Tabula Rasa made certain “centers” a place where invaders would randomly attack. Of course there were numerous issues with their implementation but I’d like to see someone else interpretation.

Good post

I won’t be playing champions online for the reasons you mentioned and a bunch of other reasons