I love doing the work of designing and developing map terrain. There is pride involved in manually handcrafting terrain, as opposed to taking a large plane and using a basic brush to push and pull hills out of it. When I was a kid I loved trains and always lived in wonder at the the paths that were already carved out for them, the mountains, valleys, and tunnels they would be led through. I believe this is a similar principle to mapping and carving out the various vehicle and infantry paths present on APB's maps. The knowledge that, at any point during map creation, I can think about how these particular extrusions of polygons will be walked on, driven on, mined, and fought over for years by players is a pretty cool thing.
That all said, Canyon River is probably my favorite recent-ish project, and I'm excited to get back to mapping sometime, although the vast majority of my time is spent fixing and improving things that already exist.
Hm I guess I answered this already above. xD Just the passion for carving out paths and bringing imaginary worlds to life, then watching and playing with other people on that terrain. It brings me satisfaction and happiness.
I guess this is the part of the show where I plug the RA_ShallowGrave thread. The next APB map project could be any of those, really, but there are still things in the meantime that need fixing with other projects, such as with TSR. At some point I may also be interested in helping AR with their mapping. It's a different style than the APB one I'm used to, and I'm interested to try my hand at it sometime. There have also been talks since KOTG's inception of bringing various iterations of KOTG to AR and TSR.