Why doesn't swtor utilize the entire planet???????

Have you ever considered that they set aside areas for future growth and content?

Shame a lot of people can't understand this. "Why do we have to run around this mountain?" BECAUSE IT'S A MOUNTAIN! They never mention that you can jump down. You just can't climb up.

All games must have rules, must have limitations, must have boundaries or your system will fry and players will exploit.

I don't think what the OP is asking for is unreasonable and you don't have to model the entire planet. Here's what you so. You keep the main quest zones/cities that you have now but like he was saying have other zones that you have to travel to that show they are on other parts of the planet. They don't have to be major cities, just outposts or small villages with some quests. There are already a lack of quests imo so this would be nice to see.

Even if you expanded the zones across large expanses you don't have to have fine detail everywhere. It's like living anywhere, you drive outside the town limits it gets rural, less features and more barren compared to the starting area. This would take relatively little time to model and create an expansive feel to the areas/game instead of being caged to a small zone on an entire planet.

I think even having large expanses between faction areas would be a bit more realistic then the example the OP mentioned. Having a Republic questing zone a long speeder ride across a large expanse from a Empire questing zone would give a better feel of realism to the world as a whole.

So... what you're saying is... "I want to spend more time doing nothing, and paying for the privilege."

You're a very interesting type of customer, but I don't think you're in the majority.

As it is, despite speeders, quick travel, and fleet passes, people STILL want to have magic teleport to everywhere in the game. Do you really think Bioware would invest resources in *increasing* travel time, for the sake of the few players who want to feel they're in a larger world... ONCE? Because, let's face it, once you've driven through a few thousand virtual miles of procedural terrain once, you won't do it twice. So a tiny percentage of the player base will enjoy the content once, and the vast majority of the player base will hate not enjoy the content at all.

This is self-evidently not a wise use of resources.

The only people who are concerned, at all, about how far or near imperial bases are to rebel bases are open world PVPers, and they want to be sure there's high chances of meeting the opposing faction -- something that large, empty, worlds negate. I don't find the relative closeness of bases, in scale miles, any sillier than all the other MMO conventions we accept without thinking -- wild animals that drop credits and armor (and armored opponents who drop weapons or armor they weren't using), "villages" with a population of 5, "cities" with a population of perhaps a few dozen, "killing" the same boss over and over... and I'm not discussing SWTOR here, these are features of the entire game genre. Do you know how many acres of farmland you need to support a large city with medieval technology? Are there that many virtual acres surrounding the major cities in WoW, EQ, or Rift? No? Then why expect that kind of realism in SWTOR?

MMORPGs model a very stylized, very abstract, world, where game mechanics that serve the Skinner Box are the first priority, and everything else, including immersion, is secondary. Over the last 15 years, it's been shown in the marketplace that no matter how much people whine on message boards, when it comes to paying money, "immersion" is much less important to determining resubscription than gameplay. Those are the facts. Adam Smith pwns j00, n00b.

Considering the mini games that existed already in the first kotor, it wasn't unreasonable to expect little diversions like pazaak or an instanced area for speeder racing. Even swg had speeders and areas where you could just zip around that weren't confined and filled with enemies who knock you off in one hit.

This is SWTOR, not SWG at release. They had vision, but they ruined it even before Sony could manage.

Maybe they are saving those extra areas of the planets for new content later on. Maybe an expansion could expand on all of the worlds and add new starting areas to some of them for new classes and species. Maybe they already have plans for this.

Who says that BW doesn't have plans to implement other areas on these planets?

There is a space dock on each planet, it makes sense to me that this space dock will be a launch point to get to new areas on these planets as the content is added.

Just a thought. The game is 2 months old, I am pretty sure you aren't the first one to think of this idea. In fact, I would imagine that very idea has been sitting on the back burner at BW for a couple years now just waiting to be a hot topic again.

BWA was admonished over their full theme park game style where every planet has the SAME style in one small locale, the moment the closed beta program started. They chose to ignore every single major critique and suggestion ever made by their testers. Why should they start listening, now, when it's too late?

I'm sure they'll get expanded in an expansion