Knights of the Old Republic

[A Black Falcon]

BG games have fair amounts of territory to cover, but not huge, huge amounts. In BG1 you do spend a lot of time wandering around the wilderness, but in BG2 they tighten up the zones a lot... that's how the game is almost twice as long but actually has the same to fewer zones in the game -- less pointless wilderness... and you always have a place to do, and of course parts of the world are off limits until you get new skills. But it doesn't make you go there NOW -- you'll have to do all the main story elements in specific places in order, like usual, but there are lots of sidequests too...

Torment works differently -- the first half of the game is almost all sidequests. There are a few required quests in the first half of the game, but its a VERY few. It is so open and you can do so many varied quests... its really great. The second half is a lot more linear (with more combat, too), but that's okay because while it loses much of the open-endedness the story works perfectly with the game as it is. Storywise the second half wouldn't make much sense and would have to be very significantly larger and longer to be as open-ended as the first half... and they were trying to keep the game from being too long. So it is kind of odd that halfway through you get this path to follow, but IMO anyway it works great.

Oh... and how small is small? I know that comparing a 2d game to a 3d game is hard, but how would they compare to the size of BG zones? Or is that really not a valid comparison?