Maybe I'm just evil, but I don't like games that have the "mindless wandering" parts to them. Well, I may like the games but I don't care for those particular parts (Baldur's Gate for example).
I never cared much for it, and in the scheme of the plot I think it's often quite silly. There's a big giant crisis of some kind, but I'm going to stop over in this out of the way, unrelated town to do some questing and whatnot.
I'd rather have much more diverse areas that were still relevant to the main plot. Now if that means wandering across the planet, then yay for both of us. But I don't want to go wandering just because I can.