Interesting discrepancy in our approaches. One isn't necessarily better than the other, but what we tried to do in Achaea, initially at least, is treat every part of Sapience as an area. Not that every part has the same density of mobs or quests (or content generally) but try not to build the world with "area vs. filler" distinction. We were eventually forced to abandon that but abandoned it by sticking in an overlaid grid map system to create distance between the main continent and more remote areas.
Ideally I would have liked to have not had to use the generated grid map approach as I think it's inferior to hand-built content but creating similar senses of distance with handbuilt areas is just so incredibly inefficient. My breaking point was spending a couple days building a 100 room area of grasslands that are part of a few areas leading up to the great unexplored north and realizing that I was adding only, at best, about 9 rooms to a player's journey to get across it due to the diameter.
Anyway, I completely agree that there's a huge difference between "areas of interest" and the rest of the world. If an area is interesting and packed with content I'm definitely willing to read and pay attention to the descriptions.
--matt
--matt
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