Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.
The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
I was referred to Project Gorgon by a friend that used to play a russian MMO that was heavily focused on realistic difficulty. She was painstakingly building a road in that MMO by digging up gravel and moving it one small cartload at a time, then smoothing the dirt (again, with a shovel), and laying down the gravel. Many happy months of gameplay there. (If you're like her and love to role-play carrying gravel. Steam tells me she's probably working on a different dozen Project Gorgon skills by now!)
How about something in that spirit here? Designate a few of the common paths between major areas as player-maintainable roads? (Gain a bit of civic pride, and effectiveness is based on your gradually improving ability to cut stone, craft mortar, and lay stone!) Consume resources to keep roads up and passers-by get a small boost to movement speed? And more frequent travelers accelerate the rate of road degradation? Maybe walking on better roads could make you stay a bit cleaner, too?
I always liked environments that interacted with user activity. Paths created by patterns of movement, roads maintained by pattern of support. There's certainly mechanics in the game for skills like that.
I agree this could be a cool feature, as long as it wasn't open world minecrafting. Being able to maintain fixed pathways would be ideal. Could even extend it to bridges (air or water) that make it easier to reach certain locations (Ratuk...?)