Make the world a 'world'

Hello and congratulations on the huge success of your kickstarter. I am yet another old ultima fan and have been part of the Ultima Dragons for years, my moniker is OldTimerDragon. Now on to my 2 cents...

One thing about many 'RPGs' these days is the experience that when you encounter a geographic area or a new NPC, they tend to serve a singular purpose after which there is usually no reason whatsoever to revisit them later.

To me what makes a world feel like a world is that as the player progresses through the game, old locations/NPCs 'change' making it worthwhile to revisit them again and again.

Gothic II: Night of the Raven did a spectacular job in this area, especially relative to NPCs. Not just a selective and minimal 'here or there' number of incidents, G2 very frequently rewarded players for revisiting NPCs, discovering new information, new rewards, sometimes even additional experience - and many times with little to no clues from the game that revisiting an NPC would be beneficial.

This holds true for geography. It is a lot of fun when a game draws the player back to previously visited places in the world, especially when physical changes take place at those locations. To a lesser extent, new NPCs, new story twists and things of this nature make revisiting locations fun and bring the world to 'life' - or make a world feel like a 'world.'

In short, too many RPGs out there feel like 'levels' of content, which once they are 'consumed' are no longer needed. This leaves their 'world' feeling less like a world and more like, well, a level.