2. Create Environmental Variety
With the amount of time us lovers of RPG's spend with each game we play, and how much of our gameplay consists of exploration and discovery, a game not having a wide range of environmental variety is a cardinal sin. A cornucopia of settings to visit is one of the key factors that keeps an RPG from feeling stale and tedious after a certain amount of time spent with the game. Variety provokes that sense of wonder and desire to explore that is unique to the genre, and failing to provide this is a crucial mistake. With RPG's increasing steadily increasing in size as the years go by, it is understandable that the re-use of some in-game assets may be necessary, which is fine if it is done selectively and with with tact. A textbook study for developers of how NOT to do this is Bioware's Dragon Age II, a game whose lack of environments almost single-handedly sank the entire ship (I wrote about this in more detail in a previous article, which I refer you to). The Washington DC sewer systems of Fallout 3 is another case that comes to mind. Explaining that sense of relief I felt when I finally emerged from those redundant tunnels would be hard to do in words. RPG's encourage you to spend more time out in the game world than any other genre out there, so developers, please do all you can to keep that game world fresh and dynamic. The fate of the (game) world may depend on it!