Because it isn't.
"Hey, there is something to do every few meters!" is very different from "This game is designed in a way that doesn't force you to travel back and forth a lot".
In fact, as I already pointed, if you take a game like Skyrim as example, both statements are true. There are things every few meters and yet you are essentially forced to travel back and forth a lot while playing the game.

To say it all I'm not even too fond of the idea of having "always some point of interest quite close in every direction" because empty spaces can fulfill their legitimate role in open world games (i.e. a vast steppe can be the ideal scenario for a chase on horseback or a fight with an unique large monster -Shadow of the Colossus comes to mind- and a large intricate forest can be an ideal area to disorient the player until he can find some map/relevant landmark to orientate himself, etc) so once again I'm not sure why that statement should put at rest any concern.


Yeah, well, that's exactly what we all were hoping for, isn't it?
Which doesn't mean that raising some preventive concerns about how they are going to handle this is pointless.

"Guys, no need to worry about it now, let's just wait and see" is a damn poor argument, because when we'll be able to see it, it will be too late for any feedback about this specific issue.

Which doesn't mean anything, really, and it's not even related to this issue, so I'm not sure what's supposed to prove.
Hell, Skyrim is probably designed with the very same philosophy in mind (in fact there's always something else less than 30 meters away) and you can see the results playing the game.

Just because "there are always other things to do very close" that doesn't mean that pacing and content distribution will be handled properly.

Feasible? Sure. Easy or cheap? Not really.
But I wouldn't demand feature parity with the unmatched king, something at mid road would be more than enough. Something like Gothic 2 or Risen, for instance, games that borrowed some of these things without going to the insane scale of U7 or Serpent Isle.

They are already moving on the right path, according to what they announced so far.
The ability to jump and climb are potentially going to add a lot to scenery interaction and NPCs that will finally react if you steal their stuff are also a (potentially) great improvement.


Generally speaking? I do. But I wouldn't expect or demand anything like that for a product like this. The truth is: the mass market expects and demands voice acting and it would be a risky approach to go for more quality content disregarding presentation and production value.


well, to be fair, when these games were produced, they used to be the top dogs even in terms of technology.
Pushing boundaries was some sort of trademark for Origin.

On modern terms, their games would be the equivalent to Crytek-tier tech superiority paired with some super-ambitious and hardcore-niche depth in design.
Their slogan was "We Create Worlds" and man, they lived up to their ambitions.

Well, a lot actually.
Take any single village or city in that game.
For a start, with the exception of few generic and repeated guys (town guards, for instance) every single NPC in the game was a unique character, with unique dialogues, sometimes unique interactions, its daily routine of sleeping, eating, going to work, etc.
And it wasn't just a cosmetic thing. You actually learned a lot of useful things talking to these characters. Even not strictly related to the main plot but about the world and its secrets.

There were even characters that said different things to you according to where or when you talked to them and who was around at the time.
Outside of dialogues, NPCs reacted to what you did around them. They complained if you broke stuff, they became upset and/or called the guards if you stole something, etc.
The world was also highly interactive, not just a pretty backdrop. Virtually anything on the screen was usable in some way.

Seriously, I think that game still is the unmatched pinnacle of the genre after 20 years, when it comes to this stuff.
Of course, the combat system was crap, but let's not go there now...

Well, let's put it in this way: I'm not particularly skeptical about the idea that what they are promising is possible (a huge, detailed world, with a lot of attention to details and without giving up a thing about plot development), because others used to do it on regular bases (Ultima, for instance, or Gothic 2 plus NotR).

On the other hand, I wonder if they actually have the talent and the excellent designers required to achieve such a goal, especially considering how even the small world we've experienced in TW2 felt pretty much empty and lifeless in most areas, regardless of how gorgeous it looked.

Take Flotsam as an example: an incredibly pretty and believable village, but most of the NPC there were just lifeless dolls wandering around, you hadn't half of the NPC interaction you could expect from Britannia in Ultima VII or Khorinos in G2.