It's been a very telling thing to me in games over the years where you could just wander and go somewhere you would get absolutely murdered if you weren't extremely careful and even places where you were sure to die.
I think it's an essential part of making anything feel 'real' and 'free' to be able to explore as you will even if you can get into terrible trouble.
Games where you cannot even encounter things that aren't designed for your level (which when catering to the lowest common denominator so as to get market share means 'safe') are very lacking in excitement.
This is one thing where I'm sure Pantheon will satisfy ;^)
Good times exploring a dangerous world!
Agreed Sir Fish...heading out into the great unknown, surrounded by danger, is a grand adventure. Fun comes in many flavors, sprinkling a significant chance of death just intensifies the taste. Scrumptious.
I agree entirely. The chance to go where no man has gone before. And die miserably. Priceless.
I hate games that almost force you to die if you choose to play conservatively and carefully. A game where a wyvern that can one-shot you flies around lowish level areas. What was that game? Oh - Vanguard. And I will almost never criticize Vanguard ((bows hastily in the direction of its grave)).
But games that don't allow you to foolishly head out and dodge one-shotting mobs if you want to are worse. I have often done it myself - not for the thrill, not to explore, but to get delicious wonderful chunks of ore or lumber that were never intended for one as puny as I.
Exactly! I did the saame thing in EQ1 back in the day. I raan my lowly Dark Elf mage from Neriak to the Field of Bone to meet a friend playing an Iksar just to see if I could. Took me forever avoiding mobs, waiting for them to path out of my way, etc. It was a blast and something I'll never forget (and plan to do something like it in Pantheon). Fun times.
So on this topic I was actually thinking one day about the difference from EQ to WoW when it came to traveling through zones without needing to fight things.
Back in EQ if you watched the patterns of mob movements you could often find ways to weave your way around roaming enemies and essentially sneak / snake your way through a zone safely even if you were very under-leveled for that zone.
In WoW on the other hand it almost seemed as if every single section of a zone was specifically designed to have mob pathing that never really opened up enough of a gap for a low level player to sneak through. In fact it almost seemed as if mob pathing would adjust to your actions to cut you off and make it harder for you to get past without getting agro.
Like if you were running across a field and a bear was pathing to your right, so you turn to the left to go around it, suddenly the bear would seem to see that you were going left and would suddenly turn around and start pathing to the left. So you stop, re-adjust and start running to go around to the right instead and then suddenly for no reason it would turn back to the right to cut you off again. So you stop again and back away and try to go around to the left again and what do you know the bear changes his mind again and starts going left again.
Now perhaps this is all just coincedence that you find the one bear in the field who has no idea where he's going and keeps going back and forth, but I've actually stopped in those situations to watch and see if the bear's roaming path is just a short back and forth, but when I am not trying to walk around it the bear actually has a much bigger roaming path that it follows. It's only when you try to get past that it seems to do this mirroring of your movement. It's happend so many times in WoW that I would not be surprised if there is some AI built in to make it much harder for you to weave through an area without being harrassed by a mob.
