I remember the old days of SWG. Being a newbie and staying in the southwest corner of Tatooine without a mount/vehicle. I roamed those dunes for weeks/months. After a while, I think I'd memorized all those dunes, all the various waymarks.

One problem with SWG being so open world was that it made it hard to SOE to place content. Since players had housing and harvesters on pretty much every spot(if you include all servers), SOE had to resort to putting new dungeons in obscure corners of non-housing planets, like Yavin and Dathomir. You had no room to put new content anywhere remotely near the major starports(Coronet, Mos Eisley, Theed, Dantooine Mining Outpost), because they were surrounded by a halo of player housing and cities, building as close as they could to the starports.


But yeah, I loved how big SWG worlds were. 16 kilometers on X and Y axis, 256 square kilometers I think. It was fun to aimlessly wander and suddenly realize you're kilometers from where you started. I noticed it happened to me most often when I was scanning for high quality resources, riding for a hundred meters, sampling, then going off in the direction of high quality resources. Soon you'd find yourself on the other side of the planet and not realize you'd gone so far. It was fun.