You didnt get my point. If the travel distance between 2 points of interests is 100 flight hours in a straight line , vs. when it is 5min, how likely would you deviate from the straight line flightpath in the first case to explore when you could fly for 10 hours into a direction, that wouldnt get you closer to a known goal, and have a high likelyhood of not seeing or finding anything whatsoever?Nanook wrote:It's not really exploration if it's the endpoints of highways, now is it? I personally explored Toride and Cold Star extensively just because there were no highways to lead me to 'areas of interest'. Exploration is all about discovering the unexpected in out of the way places, which highways do not encourage. As for players getting discouraged, that could be solved pretty easily by Egosoft and/or the game itself giving hints that there are cool things to find and see 'out there somewhere'.
With highways beeing the only method to travel fast, distances between two zones are effectively muuuuch larger, because when not using them you are significantly slower. Greater distances -> reduction of density -> exploration becomes much more flying and boredom and less finding. Unless you splatter random loot things all over the space, which would just get repetitive and meaningless after a while.
Or put simply -> faster travelspeed means exploration is more eventfull. Highways where introduced to be able to increase distances in the universe. So relative to the universes size, ships got slower (except when traveling on predefined paths aka highways). So this means only planned areas that where designed to be explored (highway-less areas in XR) are worth exploring. When it is obvious which areas are to be explored and which are not, it's pretty immersion breaking imo, as it's "gamey".