Interesting Tidbit: How Big Is Azeroth?

A friend linked this to me yesterday. I thought it very interesting, interesting enough to share.

Question: How Big is Azeroth?

It takes quite some time to completely explore every corner of the World of Warcraft, Azeroth. But how big is this world in square miles or square kilometers? While other game companies brag about the size of their worlds, Blizzard is keeping mum about this. So I had to go out and measure it myself.

If you have a look at the continent of Kalimdor, you will see that it is roughly rectangular, and three times as long as it is wide. So if we could measure how wide it is, we would have its area. And the second continent, the Eastern Kingdoms, while being shaped more irregularly, has roughly the same area. But how do you measure the widths of a continent?

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And that, m'lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped.

use the length of something inside the game as a legend. Like how the far a mage can cast polymorph (i dont have a mage and have no clue how far u can b and cast it im just using it as an example.)It usually says somewhere 20 yards or something. Use that.

I have a BETTER idea. Why don't we either A) Realize we are talking PIXELS man, PIXELS, and should just drop it or B) go off and kill Onyxia, she's starting to get lonely.

Benjarro:
I have a BETTER idea. Why don't we either A) Realize we are talking PIXELS man, PIXELS, and should just drop it or B) go off and kill Onyxia, she's starting to get lonely.

Are you crazy man? She deep breaths more this patch!

When you account for the time it takes to travel, on foot, across the realms, it's either one of two things:

1) The world is smaller than the smallest of asteroids we've ever been able to view in a telescope, or

2) everything is "giant" scale on the world.

Personally, I'd consider #2 to be the more appropriate answer, if we were trying to relate the size into real-world terms. However, this is counter to distance measures used for spells, travel speed, melee ranges, etc. This, too, can be countered by saying "our terms of 'yards', 'feet', and other units of measure are on a larger scale, as well, due to our larger sizes.

Oh we could go on forever with this, or we could just say "it's big, but not too big." ;)

I wouldn't mind, one day, seeing a game come along whose world is quite literally as large, if not larger, than the planet Earth, in real terms. That would be some serious work, and make for quite interesting gaming.

I agree - would definitely be interesting. Would be interesting to watch the subcultures develop as well, because you know that would happen.

Hi, Here is a bit more on distance, height, velocity and the physics model used for falling in WoW.

Have fun, Prym

http://homepage.mac.com/prym