Guild wars 2 actually has a great way of dealing with this, on most mountain tops or just spectactular points in the landscape you get a view point checked plus some xp, a short camera animation starts, and you need them all to completely finish a map ( each map has around 3-4 of them ). Completely finishing a map, which includes quests, landmarks, npcs and more ( been a while .. ), gives you an extra xp bonus.

Nobody said anything remotely close to this. I can feel and understand your frustration about those people, but they are not in here, so you are barking at the wrong tree. I said that due to the nature of the star wars universe, which is taking place on multiple planets, it is important ( in my eyes ) that at least the planets themselves feel more open than they currently do. And +1 on the taxi issue, which is actually a 1:1 clone of the wow implementation. Even the retarded "flying over the way for no reason and making stupid curves all the time" was copied, yay!

Put it in a Beta before the next major content patch, that's what Betas are for after all, finding bugs/issues/inconsistencies with the help of users. If a certain amount of players think it doesn't work on Planet x for one reason or another, you simply disable it for older planets and take it in consideration for the design of upcoming areas. To me it feels more like this time sink in terms of level design is intentional, which makes it even more frustrating tbh.

I am not even disagreeing, in fact I never said there should be flying in swtor, I was only answering to a question as to why this game probably doesn't allow flying. Partially I still think not having flying mounts is a form of content stretching, but I can see where the devs are coming from on this one, so I am undecided on this question. I am with you when you state that it would require a totally different map design ( although it worked pretty flawlessly in wow, since the maps simply feel wider and you can seamlessly fly from one area to another ). My proposal in the op was pretty close to your ideas, a jetpack, so we could at least overcome incredibly annoying obstacles in terms of height differences. I don't see why this wouldn't work in current maps.

Please post a source to this, I would love to hear more of their views on this. Also, to make conversations a bit easier, it might be helpful to label view points as official statements when they are, and not fall back to this argument being "official" after conversation going back and forth 3-4 times. Second, even if this is their view, why should that prevent anyone in here from disagreeing with it? That's what a forum is there for after all, express your opinions, positive or negative.

First of all, we all state our opinions here, and so do you. I am sorry to be the messenger here, but you don't decide what is necessary or unnecessary use of development time. If x players want to see a certain feature implemented or changed, that that's how they feel about it, and there is nothing you can do about this. This harsh way of telling people to stop asking for "unnecessary" things will not stop anyone from expressing their views, but feel free to keep trying. I personally, and maybe some others, would consider features like housing decoration and space fights ( heck, I don't even remember anymore what this crap is called .. ) unncessary features, but there might be people enjoying this, so I am not questioning them.

Nobody ever mentioned bigger areas without content, in fact I specifically pointed that out again in the post you actually quoted. Apparently this still didn't stop you from only reading what you wanted to read.

Flying is always the fastest way to explore areas, and the quickest way to finish quests requiring moving from A to B. So the reason why many mmos don't offer it is because they are afraid to run out of content too quickly. I think they used the same rational when designing all those annoying walls, mountains, fences, edges etc. In mmos time is money, literally. So every way to stretch content is probably appreciated by the board. Even wow does this until today, as in the new expansion areas you can not fly right now ( I am certain it will be changed again, *****torm is here already ), and designers openly admitted that they are afraid of people exploring the maps too fast or not actively enough.

I posted my opinion, yours is different, but thanks for mentioning it anyway. Just one question: How would bigger planets with more stuff to explore not be content? Obviously I am not talking about giant deserts with nothing meaningful in them, sorry for not pointing this out more clearly. This could be anything from world events to pvp areas, daily quests and whatnot. I was only talking about my feelings on the current level design, and by no means did I say that resources should be taken away from other content teams. It was more a post to raise awareness and to be maybe be considered in future level designs, nothing more. So chill out, nobody wants to take away your precious candy, whatever it might be.

I completely agree, also with the examples you mentioned. In the beginning it was mainly those two planets where I felt that I want to explore them, go into those streets you see from the Taxi in coruscant and climb the mountains you see in the background on alderaan. Especially coruscant did not feel like a planet at all. Given the size of the buildings you see and the amount of taxis and people flying around, the content you could really play was ridicolously low.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I agree that travelling faster is generally something I'd welcome, but to me this taxi thing gave me even less of a feeling for this planet. For example I only finished the story line on Makeb ( no dailies ), and I could not even tell the different areas apart from each other, let alone guessing in which direction of the map they would actually be located. But well, I simply hated Makeb tbh, maybe my brain was blocking all input

Hi guys, I played this game when it launched in 2011, stopped after around 6 months, and came back recently to give the expansion a shot. This game has a lot of minor issues that are still not fixed ( camera reset, useless orbital stations, key bindings not saveable for all chars etc. ), but they are not really showstoppers for me. I do like this game, especially operations, pvp and the stories, needless to mention the whole star wars theme including the music. I would like to see this game improve, so I was wondering why this game feels so frustrating at times. I think it is actually the aspect of the missing "open world" feeling, caused by bad level design. In theory this world is gigantic, and I can see how you guys planned to make it seem bigger by letting us travel with our space ship, so we have a whole "universe" to explore. However, I think this worked out in the opposite direction, and level design is adding to this. The way planets are seperated from each other actually makes the game feel more instanstiated than any other MMO around, but I guess this is unavoidable, as the SW lore is just happening on many different planets. So in order to balance this seperation, at least planets should feel free, big and open. But they aren't. No matter at which planet I am, the level design freaks me out and limits me in so many ways that I never feel like exploring a world, but more like following the illuminated line on the floor of an aircraft when the cabin is full of smoke ( at least that's what I imagine it to be like ). No matter which direction you turn, you bet that you will run into an endless mountain standing right in your way. And when you reached the end of the endless mountain, there will be an even more endless wall which you can't cross. At the end of the wall there is of course a fence, and when you have reached the end of the fence, you realize that the path you were looking for is exactly at the other side of the map. Even smaller hills or just layers a few meters higher than myself, 99% of the time you can not find a way to climb your way up. I mean you can use the force and magically move rocks and mountains, but no way you could climb one when it is higher than your hip. This happens all the time, and it is killing large parts of the good fun this game is offering. I see why you are doing it, your way of thinking is probably "longer travels = feels bigger", but this is completely false from my own perspective. The worst example is actually Makeb, with all the different layers and a mob lined up every 5 meters. This planet almost gave me virtual claustrophobia, and without this planet I would have returned over a year ago already. But back then I only made one level on this planet and quit my subscription again, no thanks. tl;dr: Give us areas which are not intentionally trying to frustrate ( I bet you call it "challenge" internally ) us, please give us some feeling of space and freedom in this game, so it feels like we have a world, or even many worlds, to explore. alternative proposal: Give every player proper jetpacks with 10 or 15 seconds cooldown, not working in pvp areas. Thank you.