A Land of Loneliness...

So there I was, bouncing along on my way from one bit of crime-fighting to the next through the skyscrapers of Talos Island in City of Heroes and I noticed a small red dot on the corner of the zone map. I'd seen it before of course; a transfer point from one zone to the next, many times in fact, but had never actually taken the time to investigate further. I was always on my way to somewhere else, usually to stop some madman or another from destroying the world, but today I was determined to confront my ignorance, and bounced on through.

The other side was an entire zone I'd never seen before, despite more than nine months of play; Dark Astoria. Almost immediately I could see why I'd never heard of the place, in game or out. It is a Hazard Zone, designed and balanced to be appropriate content for groups of three to five Level 21 to 29 players, which is quite specific. No monorail travel links, no facilities apart from an obligatory Hospital, no contacts and no task forces. Practically no reason to be there at all, compared to anywhere else of that level and just to drive the point home, the entire zone labours under a very thick grey fog which reduces visibility down to about 80 yards; not helpful in a game with such extravagant travel powers. Atmospheric, but also extremely oppressive.

The backstory is that the place is a ghost town, which turns out to be true in more ways than one, and throughout my entire time there I was the only player in the zone. Here was one of those fascinating quirks of virtual geography that crop up in nearly every MMO; the abandoned places.

Very much a subtle quirk of player densities and unanticipated use of the geography provided by the game's designers, these desolate wildernesses are not necessarily an indication of game-wide decline and three zones over there might be hundreds of players, all going about their business. But for one reason or many this particular region of the world will end up seeing little or no visitors for days at a time.

One very simple reason is access; if a place is especially difficult or tedious to get to, for not much reward, few people will make the extra effort involved. The more remote locations of Star Wars: Galaxies, such as Rori, Talus and Lok showed very little player housing or any other evidence of civilisation, simply because they took a lot longer to get to than the areas near to the main travel hubs of Tatooine, Naboo and Corellia. Similarly, many of the more remote outposts in Guild Wars, like Maguuma Stade, Camp Hojanu or Eredon Terace see little or no passing traffic, simply by virtue of being well off the beaten track of each campaign's storyline progression.

Sometimes, despite being easy to reach, better alternatives are on offer, be it for progress, loot, companionship or prey. City of Heroes' Dark Astoria seems to fit this category, and just outside is the infinitely more amenable Talos Island, with hunting for levels 20 to 27, along with full facilities, travel connections, auction house and shops, around twenty mission contacts and far less troubles with basic visibility. In my MMO youth, I spent a great deal of time hunting in EverQuest's Swamp of No Hope, a Kunark zone aimed at Levels 1 to 25. A somewhat dismal place full of swampy water, rampant angry plant monsters and lots of visibility obscuring trees, and for the new Iksar, any one of three other zones would offer a far more attractive experience; Lake of Ill Omen, Field of Bone and Warsliks Woods, so the Swamp sank into a dismal state of appropriate neglect, which suited me fine, being on a free-for-all PvP server and wanting some place to hide. But the presence of more attractive alternatives near to hand meant the place rarely got a serious look. Modern day EverQuest, with its fifteen expansions is particularly prone to this effect, but is hardly alone.

Game mechanics and the channelling of players, inadvertent or otherwise, can have a large impact on the popularity and useage of the more remote zones of an MMO. Anarchy Online offered a surprisingly large world, Rubi-Ka, to play in, but also offered an innovative instanced mission system as well. This had the effect of providing on-demand bite-sized adventure through any number of mission doorways. A popular system, this did somewhat reduce the need for players to hunt outdoors in the old manner, and as a result while many zones saw a lot of travel to and from mission doorways, far less people actually stuck around to explore the more remote playfields. Distant places with exotic names like The Longest Road, Perpetual Wastelands and Broken Shores became mere mission destinations, if visited at all. City of Heroes, with its easy availability of mission doorways as an alternative to open world hunting and exploration can also suffer from this at times; more reason never to visit Dark Astoria and its like.

With a more mechanical approach to world design, the problem of abandoned places can be avoided. EverQuest II went with a very precisely drawn out geographical level progression, with each land being a more or less required play-through before tackling the next. Prior to the Echoes of Faydwer expansion, at any given level most players had two choices of zone that would be appropriate, leaving very little room for slack or unused zones. Ironically enough, Lord of the Rings Online's Lone Lands are often busy, and are also part of a similarly tightly structured level-progression via geography, and there is little slack in the regions appropriate to each level as the player advances.

As a game grows, with new lands being added and new options introduced in expansions and content patches, it seems a natural process for the older content to lose appeal and become less frequented. Remedial initiatives such as the recent addition of Zaishen Coins for rolling daily quests in Guild Wars, or simply flat-out revamps of abandoned zones can do much to breathe new life into these places, but perhaps there is no urgent need to reclaim these unintentional wildernesses in the name of efficiency.

I spent a good hour or so super-jumping about Dark Astoria, partly tracking down the Exploration Badges and History Plaques, but also just absorbing and enjoying the atmosphere, which was only half a thing of initial world design. The sheer emptiness of the zone was also an important part too. There is always time for the bustling action of travel hubs and group missions, but it is also nice to escape to the really wild places now and then, to enjoy a therapeutic bit of solitude even in an MMO, and this is something that would be hard to do if every land in the world was a bustling hive of activity.

Where do you go in your online worlds to unwind and seek tranquillity? Do you have a favourite wilderness that no one else seems to know about?