Someone on the FB UDIC mentioned wanting a "Single-player Ultima of the scale of Skyrim" instead of another Ultima Online. That's what I'm working on with my Age Of Singularity Ultima VI fan recreation project. A recreation of ultima VI, but no bigger than it needs to be. The map is currently 3km x 3km, and I'm debating shrinking it to 2km x 2km, but we won't really know if that's the right call until the game is functional and we can get a feel for "travel pacing".
This goes into how I have "stage plates" like towns and castles that function as communities, and these places can be slid around and repositioned regardless of the size of the world landscape geometry.
Also, I'm okay with having pointless wilderness between these towns, the points of interest. The Coin Game on Steam, which I played in its early access version, is an indoor arcade game. Except you go go outside and walk for a looong ways in any direction, and it's like a random rural town. Why? Nobody knows. I wandered around there for a couple hours, more interested in that, than I was in the arcade stuff. This made me realize how fun an "underdeveloped" open world can be to explore, even if there's not much to find.
One of the things I think can make this "pointless wilderness area gameplay" valuable, is if the simulation is strong. In my system, you can build a base anywhere. That feature alone, automatically makes traveling into random strange natural places, an interesting proposition.
If you want to see a similar experience to mine with The Coin Game, check out this episode of GameGrumps:
I could also add a screenshot of the Coing Game here. I'llAddStuffHere.
