I've been making myself some thoughts on how to build up the world for SE. I could think of following possibilities:
1) The world is just a bunch of loosely connected locations where you travel through portals from one hub to another (like in Hexen).
2) There is a world map where you see where your current location is, but it's just a simple overview map you can only look at and nothing more, the locations are still standalone (like in Heretic II).
3) A fully explorable, seamlessly connected 3D world, like in Daggerfall or Morrowind. I haven't played the latter (even though I have the CD <!-- s:oops: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_redface.gif" alt=":oops:" title="Embarassed" /><!-- s:oops: -->), but I played the former and it was crappy, travelling was a pain, everything looked the same and because of a very near horizon you couldn't find anything. Though this type was originally planned for SE, either the world would have to be randomized like in Daggerfall and become boring, or it'd have to be rather smallish, like one central town, a couple of villages, and not much distance between them and also other things pretty near. For months, I've been trying to find a way how to build such a world in an effective way (best thing I could think of was to use constantly changing skyboxes which would hold the majority of the world details), but I'm still not sure that it'd be possible to make it with our capacity. We'd be enough mappers to build such a seamlessly connected and big world for the kind of game like Betrayal in Antara, where the whole world is a bit symbolic, since you never fight in it, all fights are in a special screen (check out the Antara demo if you don't know what I'm talking about), but not for the kind of world we want for SE. It seems to me that either quality or quantity would suffer.
4) This is one idea I got only this afternoon, after having played an old German RPG series from the mid-90s. There, you've got a special travel system which allows you to travel in a detailed 2D map from town to town (and the towns and dungeons are in 1st person 3D to explore). In this travel system, you can travel only so many miles a day and then you have to make camp for the night, so that both distances and time get a meaning. Both over night and also on the road it's possible to suddenly be attacked by creatures or bandits or whatever, and while on the road one might encounter NPCs. Food managament is also needed so that the characters don't starve during a travel (evenings at camp you can also send out a character to find water and hunt). I'm not yet sure but it sounds quite cool ATM for me, this could add additional depth to the game, changing its profile a bit. Like with some other RPG touches too I think best would be to offer two ways of playing SE, a more action-oriented and a more complex RPG style. In the first one, travel would be a lot simpler, you just go the map and choose where you want to go and then you're there at once, the program telling you so and so much time went by and a couple of seconds later you're in the FPS game again at another location. And in the advanced mode, one could encounter e.g. foes on the road, in which case the gmae would change back to FPS mode, but with randomly choosing one of a bunch of small generic fight maps made for this purpose, in which you'd have to fight a given group of enemies and then if you survive you'd get back to the travel mode and continue down the road. Technically seen, this would allow us to build a BIG world, as much as a continent, and still be able to make it no matter how much mapper resources we have - there'd be simply so many and so detailed locations as we can finish in time, but the world itself would stand regardless of this.
These are just ideas, I'll appreciate if you'll discuss the pros and cons of any of the 4 possibilities (and also, if anyone has further concepts, just post them here too).