On the other hand I hate explorer auto-generated wilderness with nothing interesting to find…… it is really hard to find the right balance.
That's the key right there and a lot of times developers don't understand this. It has to be interesting. Either with a story, some bauble that you can't find everywhere else or even just a challenge.
Two Worlds missed this by a mile. They had all this wonderfully huge area to explore and there wasn't anything in it. There was a cave thrown in every now and then or a monster village, but that's it. Nothing that enhanced the story. No awesome loot or even a good challenge.
Fallout 1, 2, and NV (a little bit with 3, but ever since I played NV, it just looks sad in comparison)…..had an interesting world to explore. Sometimes cool loot was to be had, sometimes a sidequest and sometimes it was just a little detail that added a little background to the setting.
There is no good way to autogenerate an interesting area to explore. Maybe with Rogues, but that's a whole other type of game.
to me it just breaks the immersion, believe it or not. Here you are, with the mega-evil Magaladon about to kill the king, or the mega-lich Colgatest on his way to necrotize the whole kingdom, and I'm the only one that can do something about it!
You're missing out then. If you play the main storyline quest by quest two things will happen. You'll finish the game very quickly and you'll miss out on a lot of things.
I wasn't joking about linear games. They are fun and I have no idea why people knock them so much. I prefer certain styles of games and can have fun with any of these like RPGs (obviously), action, FPS, Adventure, strategy RT or TB and throw in a horror game every now and then.
I don't really have a preference over which of those styles I play at any given time, but once I start a certain type of game I do expect certain things. I expect a sandbox to be exactly that, a sandbox to play in. I expect my action games to be choc full of adrenaline pumping action and I expect my puzzle games to be annoying as hell sometimes
Oh and I expect to DIE A LOT when playing rogues.
You can't expect a style of game to be anything than what it is supposed to be. Like I do not want in any way shape or form a MMO style quest system in which they tell you where to go and what to do all the time. Keep that crap in the MMOs and leave my SP games alone.