List of oversized* zones (roughly) in order of offensiveness

I have a few things to say but I'll give my list first

The List:
- Azak Bog
- Chimeral Wetlands
- Matlan Waterways
- Infested Barrens
- Jungle Ruins
- The Drowned City
- Deshar
- Traitors Passage
- Valley of the Titans
- Mawdune Mine
- Hunting Grounds
- Grelwood

Honorable mentions:
- Freythorns
- Titan's Grotto
- Ogham Farmlands
- Jiquani's Sanctum

Notes:
Aggorat is also very large but it has actual "signposting" to help navigation and is thus not an area I have a problem with.

The honorable mentions are largely maps which suck to navigate but not due to size. Ogham's farmland is often quite small but it is very easy to miss Una's lute box, Freythorns sucks because the movement areas are very small and you must do all 3 rituals before fighting the king of the mists. Titan's Grotto is a literal maze with very few connecting paths so it is very easy to go in the wrong direction and backtrack excessively. Jiquani's Sanctum sucks mostly due to the soul cores, but the size, layout, and wait for the "energy" all contribute
Most of these entries are listed in reverse chronology but that is not the reason for the ordering, the oversized zone's simply get worse as the campaign continues

"Methodology"
I've played through the campaign a few times now, I collected my own thoughts, compared with posts from reddit/youtube/discord friends, and went back to walk through areas I was concerned about. I went through most of them by hand just now without fighting monsters, taking the minimum time I could to find every quest/doorway. Example, for Jungle Ruins I walked until I found the Vemon Crypts, Silverfist, and the door to the Infested Barrens.

Thoughts
GGG released a "what we're working on" announcement on the forum with a paragraph that reads

"

Many players are reporting that areas feel like they are too large. Normally when this is the case, the main reason is due to other concerns such as monster life or player damage being incorrect, or just a lack of entertaining content in the area. However, we are checking to see if there are any outliers that players are spending too long in to see if any changes to area size need to happen.

In the meantime, we did notice that there are some areas that don't have sufficient checkpoints, so we are doing a pass of adding some more of these.
This post is largely in response to this as I fear they are missing the point of complaints.

I do agree that the issue is not necessarily the size of the zones, but the alternative causes they list miss the mark and fly into nonsense space. Many of the "problem zones" already have many things to interact with, in fact I believe it is the cause of the issue for many zones. Having so many things you're required to interact with means you are forced to spend more time wandering every crevice of the zone to find npcs, quest items, side doors, etc... This is probably most evident with the Infested Barrens and Jungle Ruins. Adding more points of interest only increases non-linearity and increases backtracking, adding to the issue. More things to do and find in a map doesn't make it better, it actually makes traversal worse.

Checkpoints also do not help solve the issue. Most of the time when you finish doing a side area for a quest and return to another area, the zone instance has reset entirely and you have to traverse it all over again. Even when the area doesn't reset, you still have to navigate through the vast majority of the area due to waypoints having a very short range, where if you miss something of interest in a map, you'll have missed the waypoint itself as well and thus are unable to warp to it and it is rendered useless.
Monster health may contribute to the issue but it is not the core problem in my opinion, and that of many others.

What I do think could be the cause of the issues aside from the size itself, is movement speed and traversal abilities. Player movement speed is massively lacking in this game and almost all movement skills have been removed (as opposed to PoE1). This is fine if areas are balanced around it, but even getting 20% movement speed on boots can be a struggle in the campaign, and very few classes have access to movement skills, this has resulted in traversal being slow and boring, even if there is "content" to get to, it ends up feeling like a forced trek rather than self motivated, where traversal itself is enjoyable, because there is just so much of it. I'm not sure movement skills should be added back, but base MS and the boot situation could certainly be adjusted. That being said, its fairly clear the intent of this game is slower game play, including movement, at least in early levels, so accordingly they should reduce zone size.

There is one other thing which can greatly help with this issue that I havent addressed, but I did mention it in passing above. That is Signposting. Signposting is when you signal to players what content is interactable, where to go, what to do, etc. In path of exile 1 there is a lot of sign posting, though some of it is very subtle. There are consistent changes in maps that indicate the direction you're supposed to go in the campaign. Some areas have dead bodies laying at the correct doors, some area's have broken pathways off a road leading to side areas/quests, etc...

There are many of these hints and guides in the PoE1 campaign and they're largely missing in PoE2. Many people have had issue with zone size since 0.1.0 but I have refrained making this post until now, after we've had time with the campaign to learn pathing, and some areas do have consistent pathing, like the Aggorat as mentioned above. Many areas which are painful to navigate could be made significantly better by simply sign-posting which direction certain quest areas are in and where players should go. There are still areas which would suffer from size even with signposting (like Matlan Waterways) but areas like traitors passage would benefit massively from having indications of where to go for the Halanai gates vs where to go for Balbala.

Thank you for reading. I've posted this on reddit as well (awaiting moderator approval), the formatting was made there so apologies for an errors here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1jtdnlj/list_of_oversized_zones_roughly_in_order_of/

tl;dr: waypoints dont really help, and more content exacerbates the problem. Zones need reduced size, or players need more movement, and signposting quests/side areas would help in both cases.

i just posted a suggestion to help this problem as well

#1 on the minimap let the fog of war be revealed like 2-3x larger than it is now. this would really help us with finding our way and not taking deadend tracks so much

#2 make it so we can teleport from a checkpoint on the minimap just by opening it and clicking it. having to walk to checkpoint in order to teleport to another one is still just as bad, and i agree more checkpoints aren't the solution.

checkpoints should probably always be visible in order to avoid the instance reset thing - if this is even possible for them to do

I dont even think we need to go into detail. They know exactly what they are doing by making oversized zones and paths that lead no where. . Artificial content to waste time.

At least put loot in chests, so we can maybe find an upgrade for spending 10 minutes walking to the wrong edge of the map