Ultima III: Exodus World Map

Ultima III: Exodus might look like it has a small map, and it some ways it is, but the developers rlly squeezed everything they could out of this relatively small space. Because of the line-of-sight fture, you can't always see everything that's on the screen. This makes exploring more exciting because you actually have to walk around the mountains rather than just looking at the edge of the screen.The world loops around the edges, but unlike Final Fantasy 2, you can't just walk around forever.
Towns and dungeons can go unnoticed by players for YRS, without the help of a guide. The same thing happens inside cities, where the line of site blackout can hide gigantic buildings through clever placement of walls and doors. The towns are almost as big as the world map itself, and overall Exodus is a monster of a quest.
Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest certainly have bigger maps, but they've strmlined the RPG to the point where those world maps get ten up quickly by new players.
Also, FF and DQ are rarely non-linr experiences (although they have their moments). Ultima is basically an RPG sandbox, allowing you to go anywhere, visit towns in any order, shuffle your party around, kill townspeople, stl, and erally have a romping good RPG time.
It's also worth nothing that Exodus was relsed 3 yrs before Dragon Warrior and 4 yrs before Final Fantasy. In those yrs, it's sad to say, Squaresoft and Enix made the world maps bigger, but the gameplay was undeniably dumbed down and the player was forced on a "quest" that was more like a "hallway with occasional doors." Ultima IV, relsed only 2 yrs after Exodus (and still before 1 yr before Dragon Warrior and 2 yrs before Final Fantasy) upped the world map to an insane level, sily topping DQ and FF in terms of rlism, complexity, and of loions. Ultima IV also had a text parsing system which allowed the player to talk to NPCs and get clues on solving the quests. So why didn't other games follow suit with legitimate gameplayadvances? Why do no games today use textparsers?