The best thing about the map in Fallen Earth is what it doesn't show.
The southern half of Sector One is mostly taken up by the starter towns where new characters come into the game. There's one slightly higher level hub - Odenville - but other than that it's newbieland all the way until you come to the sector capitol, Embry.
Well, almost.
About halfway between Odenville and Mumford there's a small settlement called Simsonville, with several questgivers in a camp nearby. The unwary lowbie, who doesn't notice the group mission icon next to these quests, is in for a nasty shock, because the mutants that have overrun Simsonville are mostly veteran level mobs - i.e. elites - and significantly tougher than anything else south of Embry, and quite a lot north of Embry as well.
It's not quite as brutal as it used to be. At one time all of the mobs in Simsonville were vets, and it was possible to draw aggro from those on the edge of the settlement while passing by on the road that runs by it. Nowadays it's only standard mobs on the outskirts, though that does mean that after gunning down the first few enemies with ease you'll then run into ones that look exactly like them but take four times as many bullets to put down.
Doing Simsonville on-level is a fun challenge, playing out rather like a stealth mission since I can take out the vets one on one but have to run (or die) if I draw aggro from two or more at the same time. This time I did both before I finished the missions.
What truly makes it interesting though is that this small but dangerous quest hub isn't marked on the map. There's no indication that there's anything there at all until you come to it.
Guild Wars 2 has the best map in MMOs - visually interesting but also very well integrated into that game's playstyle. It's a very detailed map, which is something I don't always like, but it works well for that game..
But if Guild Wars 2 has the best map then it's Fallen Earth that has my favourite map. It goes to the other extreme, being extremely vague and sketchy and offering up very little information beyond the locations of the main towns and garages, and the PVP zones. There's also icons that indicate the fast travel hubs, but they were added in later.
It encourages exploration, because you never quite know what's out there until you go and look, and there's no indication of what you might discover along the way, and there almost always is something to find. It might be a small quest hub like Simsonville, or an especially good cluster of resource nodes, or just a weird, unexplained location that might have some quest, somewhere, that leads to it, or might just be there to add interest to the loneliest parts of the map.
This adds a lot to the sense of the world of Fallen Earth being a real place. Not everything is there for a reason.
Some of it is just there.
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