Fable

[A Black Falcon]

In a top-down game it does not matter because you're only able to see a small section at any given time, but in an over-the-shoulder third-person game, having a hundred tiny environments versus having a few gigantic environments that let you see very far away, making the world seem that much larger, makes a humungous difference.

But this logic cannot and will not be comprehended by you since you seem to be alien to the concept of open environments, preferring to stay inside small, confined areas like your house.

Small? They aren't small! Some are pretty large, actually... okay, so there aren't huge open rolling plains in KotOR. There are broken up zones with pieces that are about the same size and Infinity zones. But still they are good sized. Generally they are long in one direction and smaller in the other one, but that allows you to go for a good amount of time to get across zones or fight things... they don't need to be any bigger, honestly. That'd just lead to tedium if you had to fight as often as you do when you go across zones for the first time. This is for outdoor areas of course, cities are quite different... but for the outdoor areas, breaking it up is actually better than some of the alternatives if you have multiple zone enterances -- and most of the zones in this game do -- because it lets you take multiple paths to your target than one big linear zone...

As for cities, I think a better thing would be making it clear that these are just parts of the city and not the whole thing, like BGII does -- with how the zones in the city are clearly non-contiguous. Because they aren't exactly large enough to represent whole cities. At least with BG I/II you have the excuse that that clearly isn't the whole city... but with this contiguous zone structure you could take it to be the whole thing and that's deceptive. And kind of stupid. With this many cities I'm not expecting every one to be as great as Amn, but these things are just too big to make credible Beregosts.

As for being able to see far, generally in one of the two axes at least a zone will go about as far as you can see... in the other yes they are frequently quite narrow. Oh well. But that's why they put vistas of being able to see far into the zones... and it's also why areas are often so large and open. Topdown wouldn't have had those massive long terraces on Taris, for instance... Dantooine would probably be similar, though, if somewhat different looking (ie missing the views into the distance that you get with third person).

So, as I said, my complaint isn't about zone size. It's about variety. As in the lack of it. As in how they copied giant areas so much. Sure, making actually unique areas for each zone would be hard. And yes, BG has lots of copy-art in buildings and the like. But all of the outdoor areas are unique in that game! 3d let them get bad habits of how easy it is to copy, as NWN indellibly shows... now it may not be as bad here as it was there, but it's a definite problem when I visit a new city and you've got multiple large areas that are identical in all but who resides there, I think. As I said they should have just restricted it to inside buildings and stuff.

On that note, where are the houses? There aren't any non-essential homes! Sure, in BGII they went well on the road to making every building count for some quest, but BGII has a massive number of quests to you still have a huge number of buildings... and some aren't relevant to anything. In KotOR you have a few of such buildings in some cities, but not nearly enough, IMO. Especially once you consider that it has a much more normal quest-load than BGII. :)

So yeah, the fact that areas are broken up into multiple zones just isn't a problem to me. My problems are with other things. Clearly it is to you. So we disagree. How shocking! :D