New Zelda Scans: 2 to 3 times bigger than OOT

[A Black Falcon]

You also can't do that with a realistically-sized world where every place looks exactly the same.

Actually, in the real world landscapes have this amazing tendency to look pretty similar within regions... :)

In these uber-sized PC games they give you an ability to do 'super jumps' to traverse huge areas which are usually just deserts... way too boring for me. Or they give you warps or what have you, but the question is begged "why did they put the giant expansive desert there in the first place!?" Since once you learn the technique or find the warp point, those 'vast lands' become totally useless.

Because generally the dungeons are out in the wilderness, and you just warp to the towns... or if you can warp to the dungeons too there is generally a process to it -- like you have to reach the warp point first to unlock it or something. It's a very sensible system.

giant expansive areas suck. Varied content with landmarks and specific key-areas make for an awesome 'world'. Metroid Prime is a great example of that. Even though it's Phendrana with ice everywhere you still have specific cave areas, groupings of ruins, the science lab, key-enemy areas (certain areas produce certain enemies) with land marks as props or in the distance to let you know what area you're in. And the best part is, when you start to get sick of it you're introduced in to a new part of the 'world' that has entirely different themes. It never feels too small, never feels too big and it wont take you long to figure out where you are and what you're doing. All the things you want to hear a woman say.

Metroid Prime is different, it's an FPS/Adventure... and yeah the scale in that game works pretty well. It's good sized and fairly nonlinearly designed (in level design) and feels nicely large while not being so big as to be unmanagable for that kind of game.

I guess what we have to take into consideration is that in "traditional" tales of adventure and derring-do, travel plays an important part. Salam the honorable bandit, crossing the desert on camelback to save his girlfriend, seeing nothing but sand for forty days and forty nights, isn't going 'OH GOD THIS IS BORING' for the whole length of the trip. A player would.

This is true. In games people expect constant action.

Furthermore I believe we can all agree that "warping" really blows as far as immersion and epicness go. Therefore how do we remedy to this problem?

I don't agree with that... :) As I said, when done right it doesn't hurt immersion much, I think. Like the warping in MM, or WW, or Zelda 1 or LA, or Baldur's Gate, or whatever else... it's just skipping over the part where Salam spends 40 days walking through the desert. How is this worse than redoing your world so that desert essentially doesn't exist and everything is within a five-minuite walk of the center point of the game? That's not exactly much more immersive when you think about it!

Morrowind's warp system is pretty good: certain towns have boats of silt-striders [flying things] and they take you to 3 or 4 towns that are nearby, and each town has a different list of a towns for you to travel to. That way you can get close to where you need to go, but you still have to walk sometimes.

What it needs is a nice simple warp system where you can just warp to any of those towns. Of course you shouldn't be able to warp anywhere... the general answer is either to zones or to towns, and since Morrowind doesn't really have zones (its just divided for loading purposes) towns are the clear choice... but you need to make it accessible, so you can warp from anywhere and not just from specific locations. And it really should be one system... having "warping" but making it such an annoyingly limited system is NOT good game design, and Bethesda has realized that and is improving it in their next title.

I agree completely. One of the things I liked about MP was how unique everything looked and one of the things I hated about Halo was how textures and buildings were repeated way too many times.

Halo... was that really large enough (in scale or length or whatever) that they had an excuse (to repeat things so much) or were they just being lazy?

Of course it is, but it's still not very feasible and it likely won't be for some time.

MMORPGs aren't on the scale of the real world either, but they're the best we've got and some of those are very expansive with thousands and thousands of digital miles... we can do better than Morrowind and your excuses won't change that fact.