Mounts, Swimming, and Jumping in Dragon Age
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As has been mentioned a few times already, it's a bit difficult to make such a blanket statement like "all RPG's should have feature X" without also stating that your preference is for a particular type of RPG -- because not all RPG's are built equally.
Take, for instance, the presence of party members. If you are playing a lone character (as tends to be the majority of RPG's these days), then complete freedom of movement is less problematic. No worrying about getting seperated from companions. No pathfinding issues. No potential skill issues (such as party member X has no Swimming skill and thus is now annoyingly drowning twenty feet behind you -- if movement skills exist at all, of course).
Another thing to consider is the role such movement plays in the game. Mounts, for instance, entail that you're going to have vast distances that need to be covered quickly. "Well, you should obviously have that, then," you say, "large areas are awesome!" Okay... but what if you don't need that? Not every game is Oblivion. Making vast spaces is only helpful if that's part of the point of the game, and making them means that work has to be drawn from elsewhere. It's a fallacy to assume that one can take the best elements from various different games and combine them to form the perfect game-- all those games had certain elements that were superior because they made trade-offs in other areas. The trade-offs will exist. It will be up to us, then, to decide what needs to be sacrificed in order to make something else better.
Riding, swimming and jumping can be great-- if they play a part in the game. With riding, I'd want to have mounted combat and jousting. I've played "Mount & Blade" (if you haven't, you should), that can be great fun. But notice how it is also practically the entire focus of that game-- that's not an accident. I'd want areas built with riding in mind. With swimming, you'd want to design areas where swimming was required to access parts of the map. Same with jumping. If it's just an alternative to walking-- yay, I can jump! yay, I can swim! -- but they don't do anything, what's really the point? Immersion? Because that word doesn't get trotted out often enough as a disguise for "because I like it"?
Exploration is important, I get that. We want to feel like there's an entire world out there to explore, and arbitrary barriers can be off-putting especially when they make the world feel small (and certainly we've been all over the map, so to speak, on that point when it comes to our games). My point, however, is that exploration is not the be-all and end-all of every RPG, and rather than trying to squeeze every RPG into a single mold one might want to consider why a developer might or might not want to focus on vast worlds or swimming and jumping rather than writing it off as "oh, they must just be lazy and/or behind the times".
