What is the reason we play games? To entertaing ourselves, to take some time to let ourselves go into an activity with no importance whatsoever, taking us, at least for a little bit of time, out of the worries of real life. So when we partake in games, we expect to have fun most, if not all of the time we are dedicating to them. Some are more 'hardcore', or simply have more free time or patience than others and can endure expiriences that would seem extremely un-fun to others. And there is always taste, you can never account for the wildly varying tastes in games (and everything else) people can have.

Now, for some types of games this 'fun all the time' thing can be pretty easy to matain. Fun can manifest itself in a variety of ways, like learning some new game mechanic, perfecting an old game mechanic, watching (or reading) a story unfold, getting to a new place, and so on and so forth. One barrier that presents itself in huge/epic games with they're world traveling, going to places you've been before gameplay. The first time you get to a new place it's like someone gave you the key to a whole new playground. You are just excited to be there, to explore every nook and cranny, and most of us take all of this in as fast as we can. What is left after that? We are left with a boring place we have been to many times before, taking the exact same roads, in the exact same way, to see the exact same place populated by the exact same people saying the exact same things. And this can become boring, frustrating even if the location has to be visited too much.

How can we solve this? Some ideas are: (1) the player should be provided with different modes of transportation, so traveling the same roads does not always seem the same, (2) the world should be dynamic, seeming different everytime the player comes visit, make the world remember the player, the characters he met before greet him, the things he changed stay changed.

Now, RPGs have long since adopted different modes of travel to allow players to get to new places and to old places faster. Some examples are Final Fantasy with it's airshps, the 'Warp' spell on some RPGs, the animal rides in Zelda and the like, the warp rooms in Symphony of the Night, etc. I really haven't seen much of the dynamic world mechanic. Yes, in some games people talk to you differently in the first parts of the game than in the ending parts, but the change feels mostly static, forced, not that the world is changing for the player, but that the world is changing because someone thought is HAD to change at some time. We all know this is true, but we do not want it to seem like that in the game.