New Zelda Scans: 2 to 3 times bigger than OOT

[Great Rumbler]

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

Real world landscapes are also quite boring for the most part. Ever driven from Amarillo, Texas to Alberqurque, New Mexico? I have, there's NOTHING. For MILES.

This is true. In games people expect constant action.

Well, if we wanted constant boredom we could simply walk across a giant, empty field in real life, this is why games exist.

What it needs is a nice simple warp system where you can just warp to any of those towns.

It works fine. It forces you to plan how the fastest route to an area. Such as one town might closer to the ancient ruins I'm looking for but first I might have to travel to a different town to get a silt strider that will take me to the closer town, or I can go to a town that's not quite a close but I can get their directly. That's the way it is in real life, you can get from Dallas to London without stopping over in New York first.

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?

It was larger than MP AND they were lazy.

Warping is fine but the idea is you have to at least traverse that large expansion once before you can use the warp. That's where the age old concept of "you can teleport to any place you've already been to" comes in, and generally it doesn't hurt immersion

In Morrowind almost all of the ancient ruins and robber caves are in places that are far from towns, so more often than not you'll have to walk for a few minutes to get to it. There's no teleporting to dungeons and teleporting will only take you to the nearest town or fort. Which is the way it should be, there shouldn't be some spell that will automatically take you directly to the dungeon.