I do like a good desert. Despite never having been in a real one*, of all the Standard MMO Landscapes, I often find that the Desert Map is the most interesting. There often isn't a lot in a desert, hence the name, but even so, it is perhaps this very emptiness that I find so appealing.
Very much an Explorer thing, I think, but a well done desert is a truly exotic place; howling winds blowing mournfully through rocky pinnacles, or over wide expansive dunes, which reach on into the distance like a solid sea. Here and there, perhaps, a ruined edifice of a people long since vanished, a statue, a sepulture, eroded almost out of recognition by the perpetual and endless scouring winds. The occasional oasis, or settlement, the wandering tribes, and the empty lone places where the careless traveller can really lose themselves, for a time. Done well, it all comes together at sunset, as the light bleeds red and the sky becomes all colours, but in a subtle and delicate way.
Probably a lot more convenient in a computer game, than for real, but I do find myself drawn to these truly wild places. From the Desert of Ro in Everquest, to Tatooine in Star Wars Galaxies, the northern reaches of Rubi Ka in Anarchy Online and the wartorn planets of Ishundar and Solsar in Planetside (where contemplative peace is hard to find, but does exist!) Tanaris, the Sinking Sands, the Crystal Desert and the Desolation...I've loved them all. Hell, if EVE Online had a desert, I'd go lose myself in that too, although it could be argued that the spaces between the stars, is the ultimate kind of desert.
When it came to Tabula Rasa, I was beginning to get a bit worried. Most of the maps I've seen so far are either temperate forestry (Foreas), or lava-riven moorland crags (Arieki), but I've now made it to the Ashen Desert, which seems to be TR's go at the Desert Zone, and it's another wind-scoured waste of rocky sandstone outcroppings, and in this case, volcanic ash instead of sand. Does the job though, and I'm more than happy to settle in here for the next few levels. Here's a postcard!
Being a desert of The Future, it wouldn't be complete without Vast Alien Machinery littered about the place. the curvy bits are apparently some kind of Brann moisture collectors, which is all very Dune. No sandworms as of yet, which is a shame. Johnny Bane wouldn't know what hit him if I can riding into his CP on one of those!
From my perch above, I sit and drink in the lone majesty of it all, while occasionally taking very careful potshots at the White Oasis Post CP, which seems to be almost permanently in Bane possession. Presumably, not many other troopers feel quite the way I do about the desolation and ash, and a number of folks I've talked to say they hate the generally blasted and alien world of Arieki, much preferring the more comfortable familiarity of Foreas, with its mostly green, and painfully familiar, wooded grasslands. Bleh...give me a desert any day...
*(My only encounter with a real desert was from the window of a very aggressively air-conditioned Greyhound bus, travelling through Arizona and New Mexico. I was three days without proper sleep and probably didn't appreciate it, to be honest.)