I am a big “E”, explorer of landscapes, lore, game mechanics. The “WORLD” feeling is the selling point of LOTRO to me.

You are right that most modern MMOs can be total single player experiences for not only the early levels but far far into the mid or even high to max levels, depending on the particular game. To those used to “PvP” on WoW servers Aion might be a shock dose of more serious and omnipresent pvp.

I agree to Alex, the old “Azeroth” world of Warcraft had more to offer in terms of exploration content.

Interestingly, or maybe I misread Pitrelli, I always found Horde questing to be lacking – Barrens, Stonetalon, WAAAH – horrible zones after the great starter areas. Desolace and Feralas do not look so much better. I always preferred to start in Elwynn as Human.

Wow does tend to separate their zones by barriers. Occasionally this is a soft barrier such as a river (you can swim) or a treeline, but usually it’s a cliff. Eventually you gain the ability to fly, which really seems to open things up a bit. Interestingly they take flight away from you again temporarily in northrend and force you back into a more guided experience.

The one area where there is a lot of explorer content in wow is in the quests. I know I’m the last person left that actually likes to read the quests, but there really is a lot of interesting stuff there. They put a lot of work into making the various (and there are so many) parts of their story fit together in interesting ways.

For example, there are 3 old world areas with worgen, and there is a complex story explaining why they are in those specific places. You only get the whole story by playing through the quests in all 3 areas, some of which are horde or alliance specific, and paying close attention. Another place you fight some corrupted animals by a tainted stream, 30 levels later you’ll find out why that stream was tainted.

In some ways the old world was actually better about this. There are little bits of story hidden away in obscure corners of the world, often without anything to direct you to go there. The story content in the new expansions is very high quality, but the path leading you there is more polished and controlled, which removes some of the exploration.

I’m somewhat proud and yet embarrassed that I knew where you were talking about by this point.

WoW does try to encourage exploration, but it’s somewhat ironic that it is done through the use of achievements these days.

In the beginning when everything was new, relatively undocumented and had not been streamlined by numerous patches, there was an urge and incentive to explore outside of the well trodden quest paths, but these days you’re not so much discouraged as ushered past entire zones in a hurry, as though these older levels were an embarrassment. I think with Cataclysm, Blizzard perhaps wants to be proud of Azeroth again.

Alliance seem to have the short end of the stick on quest hubs and indeed quest stories but I’ll see how it progresses once im further in as Im only level 33 at the minute.