City Discussion

[Don Strudel]

Post note: click on the thumbnails for a bigger image!

You spend a lot of time in Azeroth, you should know some stuff about the world!
 
First, according to this globe in Booty Bay, Azeroth is a planet with only the two continents that we know and love.
 

Now, lets talk size. How big is Azeroth?
 
The best way to estimate it would be something like this http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/marykay/assignments/eratos1.html
 
I didn't actually try this method because I have a feeling solar time is the same everywhere in Azeroth. Does the sun set earlier in Tarren Mills than Barrensl? It should, but I doubt it does by any appreciable amount. In fact, according to the globe in Booty Bay, time of day should be pretty much opposite on the two continents
 
Conclusion: the globe is horribly wrong, the planet is massively larger than shown.
 
So how else can we estimate the size of Azeroth? Direct measurement. I can run a tape measurer behind my wolf as I cross a continent!
 
But they don't make tape measurers. So I did this-
Step 1- find a large, scale map of Lorderon. http://www.worldofwar.net/cartography/worldmap/easterncont.php  is a good one. I assume everything is properly scaled.
 
Step 2- estimate run speed. To do this we need a fixed distance to measure travel time across. But I couldn't find any track and field stadiums in Azeroth. So instead I used the fact that entities magically poof once you are 100 yards away from them. I carefully found the exact spot where I could back up to and cause an NPC to poof. I assumed it was 100 yards from there to him. I ran and measured the time. 8.75 seconds to cover 100 yards on my wolf. Wolf speed, with carrot, is approximately 11.428 yards per second. Pretty fast.
 
Step 3- run a longer distance so that I can find out how many pixels on that map I am moving per second. Or, equivalently, how large a distance each pixel represents. I ran from the Stead to the Lake in Eastern Plaguelands in about 96 seconds (101, actually, but it wasn't exactly straight and i had to dodge a couple NPCs). So it was 1096 yards from the stead to the lake. that was about 125 pixels on the map. So each pixel is 8.768 yards squared.
 
How many pixels from top to bottom? It's 1808 pixels from Strathmore to Booty Bay (vertical component only). This comes to 9.007 Miles
 
So here is Lorderon next to Manhatten.
 

*obviously, all sorts of measurement error could have conspired to make this off by 25% or more.
 
Our next lesson will be on the crazy weather systems of Azeroth. No rain, but huge jungles! Transitions from jungle to desert in 20 feet! Craziness!

Someone else verified this :

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-big-is-azeroth.html

and gave me credit for doing it first.

And recently this video has been making the rounds of the Internet:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/rooreynolds/videos/26/

Which frankly seems to rip off a bit of my original work without citation!

Source: http://ytrilynth.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=282&start=0

Theoretical Size [of Kalimdor], Scale: 1 hex = 100 miles

 
Actual Size [of Azeroth], Scale: approx. diameter = 21 km


This is precisely the reason why multiple shards/cities is a bad idea; they'd be way too small! We're talking "cities" on the order of 200 acres here. The entire planet of Azeroth is about the size of San Francisco at scale. For reference, Daggerfall randomly generated a continent that scaled to twice the size of Great Britain.

EVE Online doesn't count because it consists almost entirely of EMPTY space. So any attempts to say it's the largest MMOG based on "being in space" fail because those distances only exist as algorithms. However, it IS a game where you can fly spaceships the size of Manhattan. A single titan is easily the size of Azeroth.


Erebus to scale over NYC by aehric, on Flickr

[Aydoo]

From the lore aspect Azeroth was an Earthish sized planet, its just that 2/3 the landmass was actually lost during w/e big event caused the first Shattering or w/e its called. The planet is mostly water. Its as if someone took... the Eurasia continent took out a huge chunk and all you had left was Western Europe and Eastern Asia.

As for weather the game doesn't have a proper day/night cycle nor does it have a weather cycle. It all depends on what zone you are in and wasn't designed to emulate planetary rotation.

[Don Strudel]

I'm using this to illustrate why multiple cities/shards are a bad idea based on standard MMOG design. Namely because they'd be too small!

[Mir]

I'm using this to illustrate why multiple cities/shards are a bad idea based on standard MMOG design. Namely because they'd be too small!

Well, cities, yes; considering the resources even a high-budget game will have available, and the tech limits of the players PC/consoles, an MMO developer can basically choose to make one city to realistic scale, or toss out realism in that respect and go for multiple scaled-down cities.

Unless the game world is mostly empty space, like Eve, the game's probably going to need multiple servers/shards/game worlds to keep the player density from becoming over-saturated

[_username]

Eve has plenty of its own quirks when it comes to time and space.  Most of the ships throughout the galaxy have a warp drive that can accelerate from zero to 3AU per second in about 5 seconds.  AU = astronomical unit (the distance from our own planet to our own star), which is about 150 million km or 93 million miles.  3AU/sec is about 1500x the speed of light.  Yet, you can look behind you as you blaze past planets and stars, and you can see the light that you're moving away from at 1499x light speed.

Planets spin, but don't orbit their stars.  Moons don't orbit their planets, either.  Granted, having so many moving parts would make it an enormous ass pain for those of us who maintain large libraries of custom waypoints, deep safe spots, surveillance points, undock/uncloak safes, etc.  Dual-boxing a cov ops frigate and a stealth bomber in enemy territory is hard enough as it is...if every one of the celestial bodies was moving in real time, most peoples' head would explode.

[Dark_Ghost]

i would like to see a hybrid system. cities are single shards, forcing all players that live in a city to be in that city together. that would allow for more than just one city, which this game will need. I am pretty sure they are going to try to get the major sourcebook cities from V:TM, though that is just a guess at this point.

[_username]

I say single shard, multiple cities.  A lot of games control your progress through the map by populating it with hoardes of level-X monsters.  Enter before the game "wants" you to, but do so with the expectation that you're going to die if you aggro a single one of them.

Lame.

I say that the vast majority of the map should be open to everybody, with no tacky mobs standing around in a circle jerk while they wait for you to kite them.  However, the more restricted areas would require some kind of roleplay/quest/player-controlled-access in order to get to it.  That is, if you want access to the Vatican's library on supernatural creatures, you have to have very high standings with the Church.  If you want uber high tech, pre-market upgrades to your phone (possibly allowing you to track other people in the in-game map), you need to have access to [cell phone carrier]'s infrastructure.  Just spitballing here, but hopefully you get the gist: if access to new and unusual places is directly related to your efforts, it becomes much more than just an arbitrary, unrelated, immersion-breaking side effect.

[Alan Drayson]

Bleh, I hope we don't have an in-game radar... So much for the element of surprise XD

[Kian]

Wouldn't it be fun though if in EVE you had to pay attention to orbit?

As for multiple cities/shards etc...

I'd love to throw reason out the window and hope for scaled version of the planet (and its cities)  but I won't hold my breath. So long as I log on and open a map to see NYC at one end and LA on the other with some sort traversable middle American in between the Gangrel in me should be happy (watch out for Lupines!)...

[Radical21]

This discussion again, I think Cahalith brought it up last time as well as that absurd diagram of the scale of Azeroth, Irrelevant really for two reasons:
Location in a computer game is just a number behind the scenes.
Nowdays you have HDD that are at least 1-2TB significantly more than when WoW was developed, Internet Connection, Processor speed RAM,  all on a much higher scale than it was back then so it makes sense to say that servers are better..

Gaming companys usually make a smaller world in favor of Themepark, it has very little to do with technical limiations.
Content wise as I already mentioned on more than a few threads . there are procedural algorithems to populate landscape or cities etc.
NYC is one of the largest if not the Largest city in the world so using it as a source for comparison is also a bad idea because the average city is smaller by far.

Otherwise I already suggest you do a game based on VtDA/DA:V

[Dark_Ghost]

i aggree that ingame radar would suck balls.

to the meat of the issue though is not how large a playable area is, it's how big it feels.

Eve feels massive, and it is, but theres not alot of actual stuff inside the world space. SWG/WoW/AO all of these games have good and bad areas, so it really comes down to how the area feels. Plus with out any people, the most beautiful playfields can feel horrible so you have to add in the human element as well.

it's really hard to sit on the client side of things and discuss ingame landmass, like you all have said there are many factors as to what could dictate the actual physical size of a city in the game. I'd like to suggest that we not think about it in how big it should physically be, but how we expect it to feel.

Like i've been to New Orleans, I've read the New Orleans sourcebooks (i am sure many of us have). I know what new orleans should feel like in the WoD. I don't care if it takes me 45 mins to walk from one end of the map to the other, i just want it to FEEL like WoD New Orleans.

[Don Strudel]

Unless the game world is mostly empty space, like Eve, the game's probably going to need multiple servers/shards/game worlds to keep the player density from becoming over-saturated

I highly doubt that. One good-sized city would be enough for everyone. I expect we'd only have a few tens of thousands of players at launch, maybe a couple hundred thousand, but those are the kinds of numbers that can easily fit into a single city.

If we have multiple cities, they would be about the size of, say, a couple hundred acres each, or about one city block. Paragon city is an excellent example:


A real city is about this size:


As you can see, a realistically-scaled city is many hundreds of thousands of times larger than a standard MMOG-scaled city. Hence, we need not worry about oversaturation. Which is only a problem with hardcore PnP fans anyway, and doesn't matter in an MMOG environment. The MMOG does not need to be based on a real city either, and wouldn't resemble one even if it was.

Building multiple cities would be a disservice to the customers.

[Mir]

Unless the game world is mostly empty space, like Eve, the game's probably going to need multiple servers/shards/game worlds to keep the player density from becoming over-saturated

I highly doubt that. One good-sized city would be enough for everyone. I expect we'd only have a few tens of thousands of players at launch, maybe a couple hundred thousand, but those are the kinds of numbers that can easily fit into a single city.

The problem is that, as far as we know, the players are, by and large, going to be Vampires (and as the game expands post-launch, probably other supernaturals).  A hundred thousand Vampires in a single city is a bit excessive.  Multiple large cities could work (if they actually have the resources to create a game world that big), or having a one-city world with multiple servers, with the more typical server population of 2-5K, could also keep the mortal-to-supernatural ratio looking right.  I personally think the multi-server option is more feasible.

[Kian]

Building multiple cities would be a disservice to the customers.

Wha???

[Don Strudel]

The problem is that, as far as we know, the players are, by and large, going to be Vampires (and as the game expands post-launch, probably other supernaturals).  A hundred thousand Vampires in a single city is a bit excessive.  Multiple large cities could work (if they actually have the resources to create a game world that big), or having a one-city world with multiple servers, with the more typical server population of 2-5K, could also keep the mortal-to-supernatural ratio looking right.  I personally think the multi-server option is more feasible.

Again, an MMOG has different needs than a tabletop game. You are the only people who would care that there are too many vampires. It is a non-issue.

If we followed your hardcore view, we'd have hundreds of cities 200 acres in size each, and no one would care what happens on other servers. The point of having a single city is that it allows for events to affect everyone. For example, EVE Online is the only MMOG that has its own newsfeed.