I did not play 1.0, but I did hear the problem with it was that it was big and repetitive. If you are going to have a big world, you have to pack it full with locations, sights, odditites, NPCs, encounters...and to not place invisible walls everywhere.
Zones in ARR do feel kind of small and full. This was a design choice made to counteract the point above: a large game world feels empty if you don't invest enough time to place enough unique features in it. Just take a look at Skyrim for how a big world full of things to explore is done right.
But even then, you have the problem that, no matter how big the devs make the world, it will still be smaller than it should be in a realistic sense. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of unexplained things: like who can there be twenty NPCs living in a town when there's only three houses with two beds each; goods that exist and are items in-game but that have no production facilities in the game's despicted regions; farmlands that are too small to produce food for the towns and cities, etcetera.
Zones in ARR do feel kind of small and full. This was a design choice made to counteract the point above: a large game world feels empty if you don't invest enough time to place enough unique features in it. Just take a look at Skyrim for how a big world full of things to explore is done right.
But even then, you have the problem that, no matter how big the devs make the world, it will still be smaller than it should be in a realistic sense. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of unexplained things: like who can there be twenty NPCs living in a town when there's only three houses with two beds each; goods that exist and are items in-game but that have no production facilities in the game's despicted regions; farmlands that are too small to produce food for the towns and cities, etcetera.
![[Image: DWv3oGi.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/DWv3oGi.jpg)
