Originally Posted by
peaches
This isn't the case. Personally I've never played a game where you lose your gear upon death (was this an XI feature or something?), and they've still had some awesome exploration. Even in the dreaded WoW exploration was great. Lots of variety, fully open world, enemies you could actually get useful loot from by killing, random high level rare-spawn monsters in areas called Elites I think where you had to be a bit higher level, or with 2 people to take down, but they dropped something good.