Thanks for the replies everyone =D
I've been thinking about the layout of the maps in the game and I'm currently envisioning the environments much like diablo's random outdoor maps (well, I can't remember how diablo 1 did it, but diablo 2 at least - I may even look into generating them randomly), so basically a large outdoor area with a few (5-10 I guess) buildings/obstacles per cell, only I would leave cell boundaries open instead of having a path connecting them.
I guess this means cells will be pretty small in terms of complexity, so brute forcing should be feasible. I'd need to check each vertex against verticies of the current cell and all adjacent cells, but that should still keep the vertex count in the low hundreds for the most part - only the adjacent cells because I think I'm going to limit view distance to 1 cell width.
There's probably going to be a lot of cells but that's only a linear increase instead of a not-so-linear one.
Here's a possible mockup of some cells to help visualise it (possibly a wee bit more complex than the final thing, but you get the idea), the insides of the buildings would of course be handled separately, there would just be exterior nodes at the corners and entrance(s) (I guess the navmeshes Steadtler recommended could be more useful for the insides).
Doesn't look like a couple of nodes should take a huge amount of time to check viable nodes in real-time as well (for the initialisation of A*), given that most of the time I guess the actor and its destination won't need to go around anything anyway so they'll only need to check each other and no A* requried.
Hmm.. For the real-time creation of nodes for the start and end points, I think it may be enough just to check for obstacles between the two, and add edges between the nodes and the nearest obstacles to them as going around that object is pretty much a given (unless the nearest obstacle is a small one and there's a bigger one behind it, but that's a small compromise). So in the case of the image I made for the first post, only the triangle's and pentagon's verticies would be added to the edges to check with A*.
Thanks =)