"and for really long distances, you have the Teleporter Pads."
aren't those off limits to the average hunter/ranger/bounty hunter/soldier? and besides, i'm talking about expanding the game world even more by simply applying a travelling interface to link distanced maps (which would not change in size) together (the intended targets would be such a distance apart that it would not be feasable to demand an artist to create a map so large - and it would be impractical to display in "realtime" as the player would just keep running and running for hours)... theoretically with the intelligent application of such an interface one could easily create a game world that would seem to span CONTINENTS at the cost of just a few hours of coding (mostly for those random encounters - the random generation of a coherent map and enemies, special encounters...)