Originally posted by Phelcher

Note: You have to normalize land size, by run speed. Not the other way around. Given that the average person runs at a given speed (ie: jogging = 6mph), you use that as a scale to determine world size.

Coincidentally, in the time it takes to run threw 5 chunks in VG, you can travel the entire length of a continent within WoW. Ironically... given artifical barriers and walls, you may have to "run around" obsticles that lengthen most trips, but once you know running speed, all the other calculation become scale.

The run speed of an average person in real life is inadequate for ingame comparisons, since run speed ingame is depending on which MMO can vary from 10-16 mph. Those can be determined by the ingame measures that are being used (ie a spell that has a 25 meter range), as one of the methods to find the run speed.

To assume that ingame run speed will be the same as the average run speed in real life will lead to inaccurate outcomes.

Originally posted by PyscoJuggalo

Too bad D&L was a scam.....

Anyways, why do you need large land mass in games like WoW, you really don't.  It is a raid based game with tons of instancing, with multiple servers.  Landmass is needed for World Sim games that are based around the gathering and control of resurces and trade.  Eve has all those star systems to promote their corp warfare, SWG had all those planets to promote player cities and commerce, Themeparks do not need wide open spaces.

So really size is irrelevant in modern MMORPGs because modern MMORPGs are primarily based upon raiding, which mostly involves instances now.

Large maps also makes one of the MMO player types very happy: The explorer.

It is true that many modern MMOs like Wow is more about running instances with your friends. I n fact Wow would probably have worked fine as a CORPG too.

But large maps do make the open world better. In a game like GW2 it really is a must.

Wow do of course fine as it is but it woudn't have hurt if it was larger.

OP: Yeah, the GW Nightfall number some guy is posting on the net is faulty. Tyria is larger than Elona (Cantha is the smallest map however), I do believe that the Tyria map is somewhat larger than you counted, 10% of possible 20% based on many hours of play in the game. GW is not the largest game out there but it is pretty high still. I hope GW2 will become larger eventually.

Originally posted by Phelcher

Note: You have to normalize land size, by run speed. Not the other way around. Given that the average person runs at a given speed (ie: jogging = 6mph), you use that as a scale to determine world size.

Coincidentally, in the time it takes to run threw 5 chunks in VG, you can travel the entire length of a continent within WoW. Ironically... given artifical barriers and walls, you may have to "run around" obsticles that lengthen most trips, but once you know running speed, all the other calculation become scale.

Most game will never have to be bigger than VG...   I still havn't seen the whole world.

Exept do you take the slowest run speed or the fastest? Where there might be huge difference...

In the mid-90s there was a game called Terra: Battle for the Outland. It was a vehicular based shooter mmog.

That being said, there were times you could spend 2-3 hours driving at "60km/h" and not reach the edge of the world. If I recall the world itself was divided into 2 halves with a buffer zone between them. Each half was 100-120km north/south and about twice that east/west.

As far as I know, the game is long dead, but it did consume many hours of my time.

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Alright, I did some more testing in Rift, and this is what I came up with:

 

run speed: 10.8 m/h

For this I used the distance feature ingame where it states how far you are from a location. I ran for 30 seconds, and see what distance I'd traveled.

 

crossing distance:

worldmap from north => south:  corrected to 25.5 min

worldmap from east => west: corrected to 30.5 min

I ran a certain distance in a straight line, checked how long it took, then compared the distance traveled on the worldmap to the overall size of the world.

 

The run speed and crossing distance led to the following size for the world in miles:

worldmap from north => south: corrected to 4.6 miles

worldmap from east => west: corrected to 5.5 miles

 

I admit, the final result was a surprise, based on earlier tests I'd thought the world of Rift to be as large as 1 WoW continent or maybe somewhat smaller, but that was before I took the run speed difference into account.

Based on the figures above this is how the actual comparison would look like, when you'd put Rift's regions next to WoW's Kalimdor (I picked Kalimdor, because  most people are familiar with the general feel and size of it)

 

edit: I replaced it with the new picture that's more accurate:

 The scale seems off.

Looking at the rift playable world, it can fit inside of the barrens with a little spilling over into dustwallow. There is no way the outdoor playable world can fit in the barrens + bit of dustwallow. The scale has to be incorrect.

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by rokrow

OP's data is very old.

Pre Outlands, pre Nothrend and pre Cataclysm numbers.

 

OPs data was accurate when?  2007?  5 years ago?

 

Why such sloppy work OP?

? Did the continents Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms suddenly grow in size, what used to be a certain time to cross the Barrens suddenly taking double that time?

 

The information for the figures is found in the source links, also what these figures were linked to, the WoW tests done were pretty extensive. Sure, tBC added 2 regions on top of Eastern Kingdoms but it isn't hard to see when following that link what those size figures mean. But I'll add 'WoW vanilla' in the OP for those that don't want to bother reading source links.

If you're not using "current" world sizes, then maybe you should change your signature line from "

? What point are you trying to make?

You only need 1 continent of an MMORPG as a baseline to get a grasp of how large one MMO world is in comparison to another one.

Originally posted by rothbard

I think the game world "physical" size is really irrelevant if the design of the game arbitrarily breaks the world into tiered regions.  Eg.  in one area you find lvl 1 squirrels, but over in another spot lvl 2132 squirrels are the norm.    This is of course done to support level based tiered progression, but in doing so it makes what might as well be two entirely different worlds.  The lvl 1 toon is for all intensive purposes locked out of the lvl 2000+ squirrels area, and the lvl 1 squirrel area has no relevance to the high level character.  

This is off topic, but....you just clearly illustrated what, in my opinion, is wrong with most modern MMOs. No part of the world should become "irrelevant."  A "living breathing" world should always be relevant regardless of how "old" you are. Of course this would bring me to the question of the wisdom of levels. I'm a fan of skill based games, so you might imagine what I think of levels anyway.

Anyhow....sorry for the off topic comment, but I felt it needed to be said.

On topic:

Yes, size DOES matter.

4 hours to cross EVE's universe? Even using jumpgates that is massivly wrong. EVE is MUCH larger. 

EVE wins without even a close matchup for size of universe. If you measured it in miles, even more so. 

At first I figured the OP didn't include EVE because it is simply not even close, or fair to compair other MMO size to it.

Originally posted by Evile

 At first I figured the OP didn't include EVE because it is simply not even close, or fair to compair other MMO size to it.

Well, as a first reason it's not land-based so it's hard to compare. And secondly, I did try to find hard data just as with the other MMO's but couldn't find any, so that's why

I mean, I also still haven't any concrete data of EQ, Vanguard and AC which should be easy to be determined, so let alone EVE.

But, if people have data about the size of EVE or links to it, feel free to share. I've learnt that SWG used 10x10x10 miles cubes for their space areas.

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

? What point are you trying to make?

You only need 1 continent of an MMORPG as a baseline to get a grasp of how large one MMO world is in comparison to another one.

Wow, that's just wrong on so many levels.

To show how large an MMO world is in comparison to other games, you include all zones/continents.

I mean.. otherwise it would be as silly as to for example overlay WoW's Kalimdor on a map of Darkfall.. :-)

Well, you might find it silly, but I don't and apparently the maker of that map didn't either.

In fact, it gives me a pretty good idea how MMO's compare to eachother when laying one continent next to another of a different MMO, especially if I'm intimately familiar and aware of the size of 1 of the continents used.

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Well, you might find it silly, but I don't and apparently the maker of that map didn't either.

In fact, it gives me a pretty good idea how MMO's compare to eachother when laying one continent next to another of a different MMO, especially if I'm intimately familiar and aware of the size of 1 of the continents used.

You need to take into account if game A has 10 more continents of the same size, where game B having only that 1 continent in the picture. It's simple really..

I would hope some one nitpicky enough to look at the size of a game world would know how many continents there are in total and would as a result be capable of piecing that together on their own.

Or is this an argument of 'assume everyone is a moron'?

Only showing one continent to one continent is functional because it's not hard to extrapolate a single point of reference across repeated segments since you've all ready established comparision of scale.

Originally posted by Wuushu

You need to take into account if game A has 10 more continents of the same size, where game B having only that 1 continent in the picture. It's simple really..

I don't see where you got the impression that I didn't.

Where I don't mention the complete worldsize is when I don't have those exact figures, so if you see any MMORPG on my list where that's lacking, please feel free to provide the figures and numbers that you think are missing, preferrably with source link.

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by Wuushu

You need to take into account if game A has 10 more continents of the same size, where game B having only that 1 continent in the picture. It's simple really..

 

I don't see where you got the impression that I didn't.

 

Where I don't mention the complete worldsize is when I don't have those exact figures, so if you see any MMORPG on my list where that's lacking, please feel free to provide the figures and numbers that you think are missing, preferrably with source link.

In your initial post under "WoW", you mention two continents. This to start with is incorrect. It has 4 continents + 1 more expansion worth of zones losely fit together. I don't have exact measurements of these standalone continents but it would serve the argument of the OP to mention these for sake of accuracy..

Kalimdor

Eastern Kingdom

Outlands

Northrend

+ Cataclysm zones

Thanks!

It's not game size that really matters. It's the level of depth the world has. We don't want games like Daggerfall do we? I think it has the largest world but it is randomly generated and everything feels generic. SWG is another game with a massive world which comes to mind. Yet the world lacked level of depth and a lot of it was just a wasteland.

If you have a massive world, make sure it doesn't all feel the same and make sure it's not just a wasteland with little flora/fauna or other details...

You know back on page six this point was somewhat addressed.

Notably with a 'read the source links' comment on that WoW data.

By adding those zones it doesn't suddenly change the original stats about traveling distance. What it does is increase the overall size of the world, but the scale stays the same.

Which leads to two points.

1) Listing the other continents only serves those completely unfamiliar and incapable of looking at a scaled Kalimdor and realizing what that means for the same scaled versions of the rest of the map means.

2) The data for those continents would have to be provided and combined with the rest, which is not provided in the source material it's pulled from, and as such can not be commented on factually until presented with factual data.

Originally posted by Wuushu

In your initial post under "WoW", you mention two continents. This to start with is incorrect. It has 4 continents + 1 more expansion worth of zones losely fit together. I don't have exact measurements of these standalone continents but it would serve the argument of the OP to mention these for sake of accuracy..

(etc)

You apparently misunderstood my first post, especially if you're convinced that I only think there are 2 continents in WoW (which is a bit insulting, when I think of it).

I posted the examples that I found in my OP, I never said in my OP that I did otherwise.

Originally posted by fivoroth

It's not game size that really matters. It's the level of depth the world has. We don't want games like Daggerfall do we? I think it has the largest world but it is randomly generated and everything feels generic. SWG is another game with a massive world which comes to mind. Yet the world lacked level of depth and a lot of it was just a wasteland.

It's the combination of the size of a world, the travel options and the content it has that provide the feel of  of a world's vastness or lack of it.

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

It's the combination of the size of a world, the travel options and the content it has that provide the feel of  of a world's vastness or lack of it..

Ah! Then I have to admit i got derailed from the initial purpose of the thread! With the above I agree that only perhaps the largest of any available continents within any game is needed to describe what you just reiterated for me. Cheers!