I have to say i noticed pretty quickly that many of the towns/citys feel empty. The lack of NPCs and things to make them feel like more then building assets dropped on a part of the map.
The first town actually feels the most complete and i think it is helped by the players there, but even with few around it seems active. Guild City on the other hand feels like most of it is a ghost town despite the impressive walls you walk past to get into it. Half of the city is just the buildings with nothing else and the buildings themselves seem like wallpaper at this point. I would suggest either adding more NPCs/city objects or compacting it so it feels less barren and more of the space is being used efficiently. Other places like the jungle area towns feel messy and a bit thrown together.
As for the lack of players i think people wont really spread out to other citys because of the house being your return destination with getting another house not being particularly obvious and overly expensive. Having something like a Return point system that lets you set where you return to as long as you physically go to that spot would help shift people from all crowding only the starting city and leaving what imo should be your next destination for higher level players (Guild City) and making it feel more lively.
I think the Guild city should be revamped. It looks awful and you cannot interact with anything. Not sure why they don’t make all the buildings real even if empty of NPCs for now.
Yea my one pet peeve with MMO’s is lack of interactive cities. This is a big no-no as it makes the player feel “empty world” syndrome. I’m fine with small cities but the cities need to be useful or at least have more than just fake buildings.
I think that there has to be a reason to visit the cities other than for the main quest line or fellowships. I trust that it will be filled out in time.
I don’t think the city looks awful, I think it is pretty but empty. I definitely think some of the NPC’s faces could use some fixing up but in the mean time it’s understandable.
They had purchased the music off the unity store and it had some copyright conflicts on youtube or something so they removed it for the time being until they replace it with something else.
I believe in time GC will become a hub. My dream is to one day be able to enter all the buildings in GC. Right now it’s like all the buildings are just big impressive walls that you don’t stop to appreciate. You just walk past on your way to the stalls or quest npcs