Incidental locations and random treasures

Another thing on the MMO front is that I amazed at the lack of out-of-the-way locations independent from the main quest lines.  With so much land (and sea... and other realms) for adventurers to explore one would think that designers should be spending more effort on making such exploration exciting.  What I'm talking about here are things like random cave complexes (i.e. not ones quests lead you to, where you have to do something) but just a little place off the beaten track, perhaps populated, perhaps not.  Perhaps one will reward you with a long forgotten treasure, perhaps one is long ago abandoned.  Perhaps one has subsequently become the lair of some horrendous beast (not one you are sent to destroy) but one you stumble upon through your wanderings.  An underwater cave full of the bones of some massive long since dead, prehistoric beast.

During my days playing WoW I did spend some unrewarding (in terms of the actual game, but strangely rewarding in terms of the atmosphere my imagination lent it) time journeying around the areas way of the beaten track, where no quest-giver will ever send you.  In all those travels I found two strange locations.  One was a little cottage out by the sea, which appeared lived in, but was vacant when I got there.  I hung around for awhile but nothing ever showed up.

Another location was a deep cave system, quite spooky to wander around, which appeared utterly vacant but was still quite haunting and actually gave me the spooks a little bit.  When I later researched these locales online it transpired that both were intended to be quest locations but the quests never got written - or at least for some reason were not included.

In an MMO I'd like to see far more of this stuff.  Far more sidelines and off-the-beaten-track areas to explore.  Exploration is a huge fun factor in these games and yet the games themselves often do little to provide for it.  And things like quest helper utterly kill the sense of exploration, reducing the game to a simple matter of following waypoints on the map.  Pretty much ensuring that the vast majority of players simply won't bother going off the beaten waypoint.

Instead, fill the sea with underwater sea-caves and islands with strange totems, or other peculiar locales.  With clever modular design of things like cave systems, it should not be too hard to do.  I'd even think about employing talented beta-testers to provide them with a simple dev kit for the creation of such places, leveraging User Generated Content where possible to cut down on the man-hours and costs associated with populating the world with dozens if not hundreds of peculiar little out-of-the-way locations.

I'd like to present a world to the player in which no matter which way they travelled, there'd always be something interesting to see, and somethings to interact with.  Reward players for their explorations, with not just items but also a sense of adventure.

Talking of items, another thing that most games fail at is random treasure.  Stuff you find just lying about the place.  With so much history and so much activity, you think there'd be all sorts of hidden caches and dropped items laying about the place, and so there should be!  With varying degrees of difficulty in terms of how hard they are to find.

Again this will reward people for exploring, and leaving no stone unturned.  Random treasures could range from:

• Items dropped by slain adventurers / monsters.
• Hidden caches of treasure left behind by those long since-dead, or died before they could recover them.
• Ancient artefacts unearthed by recent war, catastrophe or construction.
• Pirates' treasure.
• Thieves' stashes.
• Buried treasure.
• Grave-robbed treasure.

And if one thinks about it for more than 2 minutes I'm sure several other types of treasure will emerge.

Between incidental locations and random treasures just wandering around a fantasy MMO world should be fun.