Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by ArcheAge

Everyone is on the same server.

I find that enormously unlikely, unless your engine is capable of handling that many people in one instance.

Most MMO servers can only handle ~50k people at a time...including instances.  We're talking hardware limits here, not software.

I don't know,at least read up before you answer.

Check point number 9..

9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.

LOl, what are you talking about instances for?

http://www.mmoculture.com/2011/03/darkness-and-light-epic-mmo-in-making.html

Originally posted by ArcheAge

I don't know,at least read up before you answer.

Check point number 9..

9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.

http://www.mmoculture.com/2011/03/darkness-and-light-epic-mmo-in-making.html

Then they're banking on a game with fewer than 50k subs?  Because at some point they must move some people to another server.  Have you ever played on an overpopulated server on a busy day?  Lagfest, huge spikes, frequent crashes, login queues.

I don't particularly care what the hype says; if the game gets enough players, they simply cannot make that target.  Not physically (hardware) possible.

If you've access to their message board, you might ask them how many i/o events per second their servers can handle before a hard crash, and how they plan to pull off this miraculous claim in the event of a very large player base.

Originally posted by ArcheAge

LOl, what are you talking about instances for?

The world itself is an instance.  So far, only a couple of engines claim to be able to handle 100k players at once.  So far, they've never been tested, because there aren't any servers that can handle that many players.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by ArcheAge

I don't know,at least read up before you answer.

Check point number 9..

9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.

http://www.mmoculture.com/2011/03/darkness-and-light-epic-mmo-in-making.html

Then they're banking on a game with fewer than 50k subs?  Because at some point they must move some people to another server.  Have you ever played on an overpopulated server on a busy day?  Lagfest, huge spikes, frequent crashes, login queues.

I don't particularly care what the hype says; if the game gets enough players, they simply cannot make that target.  Not physically (hardware) possible.

 

Lol,how the hell do you know what they are banking on.

Originally posted by ArcheAge

Lol,how the hell do you know what they are banking on.

Blind faith is refreshing.  Carry on.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by ArcheAge

Lol,how the hell do you know what they are banking on.

Blind faith is refreshing.  Carry on.

Really! again ill ask you: how do you know what they are banking on?

Originally posted by sfly2000

Does it matter?

Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.

Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet?  Adventure in Mongolia!

People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting.  If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you.  You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by sfly2000

Does it matter?

Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.

Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet?  Adventure in Mongolia!

People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting.  If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you.  You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.

 

Asheron's Call has a pretty damn large landmass. But it brings players together in dungeons and specific overworld areas where the xp and hunting is better than elsewhere. Even though you could spend hours and hours wandering the landscape  you never really feel that alone because you could always just recall back to the marketplace or to your guild's mansion or wherever and see other people. At least back in the day it was like that, and still on the more populated servers like Darktide.  But if it didn't have the massive area it wouldn't be the same game. One of the game that is still thrilling is the fact that you can see a mountain peak 30km away and actually run there and climb it without zones or any loading.

Originally posted by mogi67

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by sfly2000

Does it matter?

Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.

Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet?  Adventure in Mongolia!

People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting.  If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you.  You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.

 

Asheron's Call has a pretty damn large landmass. But it brings players together in dungeons and specific overworld areas where the xp and hunting is better than elsewhere. Even though you could spend hours and hours wandering the landscape  you never really feel that alone because you could always just recall back to the marketplace or to your guild's mansion or wherever and see other people. At least back in the day it was like that, and still on the more populated servers like Darktide.  But if it didn't have the massive area it wouldn't be the same game. One of the game that is still thrilling is the fact that you can see a mountain peak 30km away and actually run there and climb it without zones or any loading.

Same gose for Vanguard,it really has a vast world but people still get together and you never feel alone.I guess some people really have no clue.

What the fuck, what's with this hijacking of my thread?

I'm going to read back the last 2 pages, if I notice that people have been perpretrating some stupid pingpong debate that had nothing to do with the OP and that contributes nothing of value to the topic, as in people who have found concrete measurements of MMO's or something else interesting, I'll be reporting some people especially if it continues

edit: alright, read it, if there's no more pingpong debates and thread derailments I'm ok with it.

As for DnL, yep, I know of its size, however any claim that a company can spout up bigger worlds and support a complete game community without using separate server worlds I am sceptic about unless they actually show it for proof. In my search for the world size data I've also encountered several times where the pre-release claims of the size of a world were corrected with actual, more concrete numbers after release. After all, DnL ended up being a failure of an MMORPG pretty quickly, not really something that evokes trust or believability. But only time can tell, we'll see.

Guys, please stop the derail here and let the thread get back on topic. 

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

For a while now I've been curious about the actual world sizes of various MMORPG's, not just subjective perception but concrete figures.

Yes, I know such a comparison between gameworlds has been made earlier, as can be found on this site and others, but to put it bluntly, that comparison and picture is false and a lie.

Not that I know the exact measurements of all the worlds in the games mentioned there, but several of them like LotrO and GW Nightfall are way off the mark, in fact they're so ridiculously wrong that it simply astounds me that all the sites where I found that picture just copied its figures as fact and true, without doing even the slightest factchecking.

 

So, here's another attempt to true worldsize comparisons with what I could discover so far.

Besides actual ingame size in square miles (or km), 2 other aspects are important to figure size out, and that's crossing distance and run speed.

crossing distance: the time it takes to travel at normal speed from one end of the map to the other end in a straight line without hindrances, as a bird could fly it

=> the most accurate way to figure this out, is to run in a straight line for 0.5-1 min, check on the map what distance you've crossed and then use this and extrapolate it to find the length and width of a map or continent in crossing time.

 

run speed: this is the actual ingame travel speed, crossing time doesn't mean much when you can travel in 1 MMO twice as fast at normal speed as in another MMO. It's crossing distance and run speed that give an accurate picture.

=> There's 3 ways to figure run speed out:

1. Use a human avatar of average height to get an estimation of size ingame, and then use this to figure out distances ingame (use a corpse or avatar that lies down on the ground, average human = 1.7-1.8m = x pixels etc)

2. Use the measures that are ingame (eg some spells have a range of 25m etc)

3. The most circumvential method, set your screen resolution at the same measurements for several MMORPG's, then take an object in the distance, for example, 2 inch high in all of the MMORPG's, and then measure how long it takes for you to reach it in each MMORPG. This should result in the run speeds in the several MMO's comparative to each other.

 

Since I'm not the only one who was curious and who did some experiments and since I don't play all these MMORPG's right now myself, I used what I could find on the internet from people who did their tests like described above. If there are people who came up with different figures from their tests, feel free to let me know.

But this is what I found out so far:

 

World of Warcraft

size:     Kalimdor N => S coast and E=>W coast = 10 x 4 miles

Eastern Kingdoms (WoW vanilla) N => S and E => W coast = 9.5 x 3.5 miles

crossing distance: Kalimdor from N => S coast  42 min, from E => W coast 17 min

run speed (source): 14.4 m/h

Comments: source for the size figures can be found here

 

Lord of the Rings Online

crossing distance: Celondim => Rivendell 45 min

size: the current LotrO world map (where Rohan, Gondor etc is still missing) is 16 x 31 miles

run speed (source):  14.6 m/h

Comments: I couldn't find any accurate size or travel info, so I did a test like described above with the 50 min for Celondim => Rivendell in a straight line as a result. The world map figures are deceptive, if you look here you can see what's actually in use (pre-Mirkwood expansion)

 

Star Wars Galaxies

size:  10 x 10 miles for each of the 9 planets (or 10x10 km, unclear for now), 15x15x15 km for space zones

Comments: I didn't find any official statements or test results for that figure, but that's the number that has been thrown around on several sites

 

Guild Wars

crossing distance (source):  Tyria world map is from North to South 38.5 min by 45.5 min (E -> W)

(source 2)  Cantha is (N->S) 27 min by 35 min (E -> W)

size:  Tyria world map is 11 x 13 miles

Cantha is 7.5 x 10 miles

run speed: 16.9 m/h  (7.5 m/s)

Comments: the size is derived from the run speed and crossing distance. I've no info about Elona (Nightfall expansion), but here you can see how the 3 continents compare, and it's nowhere near the enormous size figure for the Nightfall expansion as seen in that earlier investigation.

 

Guild Wars 2

crossing distance: Tyria world map from North to South 38 min by 46 min (E -> W)

Comments: I used the HD video footage, the crossing distance of the human capital (huge circle) from one end to the other is roughly 2 min, extrapolated by measuring the time it took a player to travel a street in a straight line.

 

Rift

crossing distance: worldmap from N => S  25.5 min, from E => W 30.5 min

size: worldmap is (N->S) 4.6 miles by 5.5 miles (E -> W)

run speed: 10.8 m/h

Comments: I used the distance meter ingame to measure the run speed, made some corrections to the distance figures based on more accurate follow up tests using map coordinates

 

That was all what I could find so far. Darkfall is said to be very large (see for a comparison with WoW's Kalimdor here), EQ had 350 square miles explorable environment at launch (source), of EVE Online it has been stated that it takes 4 hours to cross the universe from one side to the other and Vanguard was said to be as large as Madagascar - which I found hard to believe - but that's all I could find so far.

This thread is a work in progress, if I find more concrete measurements or do some more tests I'll include it here, but if people have found more concrete info and measurements, especially stuff that isn't in this post yet, let me know and post it in this thread.

The purpose is to get the accurate figures of world size of all the current MMORPG's around.

You may want to add, World War II Online there, it has a 1/2 Scale Map of Europe seamless that is 350,000 km² (135,136 sq mi)....takes days to cross it.

It is the largest MMO landscape to my knowledge

I agree that content density is just as important if not more important than worldsize, but this thread was purely to see how large worlds really are compared to eachother.

Another poster did some great testing, so I'm going to add his findings to this thread, it's about SWTOR's planet Hoth (approx 6.5x5.5 km)

Originally posted by Fed1

Back in Dec 2010 the maps had 200m and 1k grid lines - This made it quite easy to determine world sizes.

 

The starter worlds are about 2km x 2 km w actual playing area. As you level the worlds increase in size up greatly. Hoth for example is about 30 square Km open play area. ( And yes you can go anywhere and cross zones at any point.) There are exceptions to this. Chiefly being the city worlds. City worlds have districts that you MUST take taxis to reach with alot of just FLY OVER area.

Mobs densities vary as well - city worlds - can not avoid mobs. Hoth type worlds much more freedom.  I can take a level 14 and run from side to side wo being killed by the level 40 mobs.

 

For those wishing to explore, once you get your ship, you can go to any planet and see for yourself. One of the things I am looking forward to are new worlds. Personally, I would like more Hoth type worlds and wish Tatoonie was bigger.

His findings made me conclude the following about normal run speed:

About the grid, if it's the grid on the map that could be seen on maps before, if that's really 200m, then I got the following results:

crossing a map square took ca 30 seconds, which makes the normal run speed 200/30 = 6.67 m/s or 14.9 miiles/hour, which puts it slightly above WoW (14.4 mi/h) and LotrO (14.6 mi/h).

Hi, I read first 8 or so pages and the last. I may have missed it sorry if I have,

Is there a *net* measurement of playable / reachable / explorable area?

For example there may be gaps/areas of map that you can never reach, usually backdrops and props. They should be excluded IMO.

Seas should be excluded too unless you can swim in, dive down and explore ship wrecks etc

For example I think in WOW WYSIWYG - since you can fly pretty much over everything and land on anything. I would also include a band of sea near the coast, since in so many cases there are ruins, ship wrecks, offshore quests etc - where you have to dive in.

As an example of areas to exclude, I played a first few levels on Rift and it seemed there were props around, I could not jump off some ledges, that was the beginning place.

Thanks