Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

GW2 so far looks like it'll be 1.3-1.5 times the size of WoW vanilla, with the advantage though of Tyria being one contiguous landmass with underwater exploration to be done as well.

Having underwater exploration as a really major part of gameplay could be a huge advantage to expanding the GW2 game world.

It better, with all the time and effort they seem to be dumping into it!  :D

Would you end up counting GW2 as having more square feet of surface if all the bodies of water are traversable and full of content, or are you already counting bodies of water in other games?

Originally posted by Meowhead

Would you end up counting GW2 as having more square feet of surface if all the bodies of water are traversable and full of content, or are you already counting bodies of water in other games?

Hmm, that's actually a good point you make. I was counting the whole worldmap in GW2, which is so far measured to be 13 * 11 miles. While I was having solely the continents and islands in mind when it comes to WoW.

Guess I regard the water and underwater areas in GW2 of equal value as the landmass areas in GW2, while for WoW I regarded the sea areas of no importance compared to its landmass, purely the continents of WoW

Originally posted by Elikal

Maverik, do you update the 1st post to the always most recent conclusions?

 

Well, dagnabit... but some people telling me here LOTRO is 300 times as big as WOW? NO WAY! I mean, hell, I am no WOW defender, really, and I loved LOTRO waaay more... but 300 times... that just CAN'T be right! I mean, 3 or 4 times or even 10 times... but that... that just sounds totally out of whack! So, what are the latest news in sizes? Can someone make a simple size-list in sqaure miles and square kilometers from 1 to 10 or so for us simpletons so we don't have to dig the entire thread? ^^

One of the big issues i always had with this discussion was that people's perception of time and distance is warped - particularly in games.

Like I said, as humans our perception of distance is based on two main factors;

1/ Travel time

2/ The difficulty (or danger) of travel.

Time is interesting because our perception of time changes depending on what we are doing and what we could be doing.  As a real life example - ask people how long they have to wait at traffic lights?  Many people will tell you "ages", "forever" etc.  Press for a time and they will say "At least 5 minutes..."  Well, when you actually time it you will find that 2 1/2 minutes is about as long as it gets - ever (most light phases are much shorter).  People think it takes longer because they see the time as 'wasted'.

In MMOs you find that people see travel (particularly on "Fed-Ex" missions) as wasted.  Often they think they have to travel for 'miles' or 'ages' when in reality it will usually only be 60 seconds or less.

The difficulty of travel is a big factor in MMOs particularly with wandering mobs.  2 minutes of uninterrupted travel can turn into 10 minutes of travel with combat and that also makes us think that environments are bigger than they really are.

When I started doing this there were two "big" MMOs out there that people said took 'days' to cross.

WWIIoL and EvE.

Players use words like "massive", "huge", "forever" and "ages".

Yet when you ask players to actually take a stopwatch and make a measurement - they go silent.  Often (I think) because they discover that the world is not nearly as big as they thought.

In the case of EvE - while many people quote 'days' to cross the universe - one player timed it and suggested "about four hours".  (This needs confirmation though)

In the example of LotRO - a lot of it comes down to scaling.  This (again) is why I don't like to use miles or kilometres in my comparisons.  In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings there are distances and clues to distances given.  If people chose to use these it only adds considerable confusion to the arguement.

For example the Buckleberry Ferry to the Brandywine Bridge is about 10 miles IIRC(?) yet in LotRO you can run that distance in 70 seconds - applying that scale to the world would give you a massive run speed (approx 520mph or 820 km/hr!) and greatly warp any dimentions you gave after.  Using that would make LotRO measure 600km from Celondim => Rivendell - making it twice the size of WWIIoL.

Alright, for Archeage there's also a general worldsize known now, from this source:

The size of ArcheAge’s world is about the size of original WoW’s before its expansion came out.

So, it'll be roughly the size of WoW vanilla as the ArcheAge devs state.

Here's a preliminary worldmap from the closed betas (source)

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Alright, for Archeage there's also a general worldsize known now, from this source:

 

The size of ArcheAge’s world is about the size of original WoW’s before its expansion came out.

 

So, it'll be roughly the size of WoW vanilla as the ArcheAge devs state.

Here's a preliminary worldmap from the closed betas (source)

 

 

Guess he was pretty humble or didnt consider that rougly 40-60% of WoWs map in Vanilla where empty mostly uninhabited and useless ocean, dead and empty flat zones, dead and empty copy paste hills or dead copypaste hills with some random few trees planted on them.

While the whole ocean of AA is available for actual gameplay with isles actually offering some point to the players both through the city/housebuilding system and naval shipcombat, some stuff above some campffire in a deserted place and WoWs "vegetation" and environmental details or lack thereoff fades in shame compared to AAs. Its not just... well... moving through empty maps for no reason and exploring some groundtextures.

I wouldnt compare my game to some bloated empty maps. It could only give a false impression of the vast size of AAs world and its actual "worth".

Originally posted by Sukiyaki

While the whole ocean of AA is available for actual gameplay with isles actually offering some point to the players both through the city/housebuilding system and naval shipcombat, some stuff above some campffire in a deserted place and WoWs "vegetation" and environmental details or lack thereoff fades in shame compared to AAs. Its not just... well... moving through empty maps for no reason and exploring some groundtextures.

I wouldnt compare my game to some bloated empty maps.

Tbh, I'm more interested in how the landmass size between WoW vanilla and ArcheAge compare, so now I'm wondering whether he meant the size of the landmass of WoW and AA, or did he mean the worldmap of both games as a whole?

Originally posted by Robsolf

Slight correction on SWG... that's 10x10 km.

This is determined by the coordinate interface.  coordinates are in meters, and you can go +-5,000 x or y.

One final correction on SWG.  Each of the original 10 planets is 16384 x 16384 meters, or 103.64 sq mi.

Yet another example of why you cannot use "metres" or "kilometres" or "miles" in this project.

How long does it take to cross one of these zones?

Originally posted by lizardbones

Any guesstimates on how big this makes Rift's Telara?

I want to know this as well

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by lizardbones

Any guesstimates on how big this makes Rift's Telara?

I want to know this as well

Here's a comparison with WoW's Kalimdor, explanation of the size and figures is done in 1 of the posts on the first page.

To me Vanguard FEELS the largest and Rift FEELS the smallest.....thats all that matters to me dont really care about actual size of the world.

Anyone have an idea of how big Ryzom's world is? I asked in-game, and was told it takes 2 hours to get from one end of the map to the other, and that didn't include the whole underground area (not sure how big that is). It could take longer because there is tons of animals and stuff that want to eat you, making the journey slower and therefore make the world seem bigger. But was told it had a big world...just not sure.

(edit)

According to this...

http://www.worldofryzom.com/cgi-bin/wor.pl?page=faq1.html

-----------------------------

• How big is the game world? 

A : The world is over a hundred square kilometers in size. 

--------------------------

Think that was before the underground part too.

Not sure how big that would be compared to say WoW or other games, I imagine smaller than VG?

Rift actually isn't that small.  It seems small because you can just teleport to whatever zone you want.  If you travel from northwestern Stillmoor (over by GSB) all the way to the Elites in Droughtland, it's a fair distance even on a 110% mount.  It's not as big as FFXI or VG, but it's not small.

I am sure it has been said somewhere before in this thread but its not the actual size of the world that defines it but the speed at which you can go places and travel. is there fast/instant travel, are their mounts, whats the walking speed/run speed?

Darkfall felt huge even wtih a mount because there was no fast travel unless you had extremely expensive bind stones. 

WoW and Diablo II feels like such small worlds because of how easy it is to get EXACTLY where you need to go.

In reference to a previous mention of Anarchy Online. It's a been while and my memory may be foggy, but I once ran my meta-physicist from the NW corner of Avalon to the SE corner of Southern Fouls Hills - no planes, no QW, just running, and it took about 30 odd minutes real time. This was going via Varmint Woods/Upper Stret East Bank.

Found some more info and put them in a picture.

First the whole world of Tyria, incl all the continents of the expansions (Cantha, Elona, EotN areas) with Kalimdor in it as size comparison:

And Asheron's Call's  Dereth, Darkfall's worldmap and the 2 largest continents of Vanguard, Thestra and Qalia (Kalimdor as comparison is in the DF worldmap):

I think besides SWG and maybe EQ those are the biggest MMO worlds of the MMO's still active.

AC's Dereth is stated to have a landmass of 576 sq miles, and VG's Thestra continent a landmass of 112.5 sq miles.

Ok, I finally did some digging and testing into Everquest worldsizes.

Some trivia:

- it takes as long to cross the zone of West Karana in a straight line as it takes to cross Kalimdor from east to west coast, or from Michel Delving in LotrO's The SHire to the Forsaken Inn in the Lone Lands or from the Forsaken Inn to Rivendell as the crow flies.

- the crossing distance of all the zones between Qeynos and Freeport in Antonica taken together is about 1 hour. That is, measured from east to west border in a straight horizontal line for each zone. Which means it'll take longer than 1 hour to travel from Freeport's harbor to Qeynos at normal run speed.

As far as zoned worlds can be compared to seamless worlds, when taking the sizes of EQ zones into account, this is how EQ's continent Antonica would compare with WoW's Kalimdor in size:

I was interested to see the Vanguard data here - since I have been playing the trial for the last couple of days.

By my estimates it would take 7minutes and 20 seconds to cross each 'chunk' based on my trial runs on the Isle of Dawn.

So the scale given by MMO.Maverick pretty good.

Cross linkage FTW http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/315457/page/1

I think it all depends on the complexity of the MMO you are playing. Some worlds are user friendly where you can explore without any danger or requirements. Where other ones you can end up on paths of destruction.

It all varies, most of them are middle size, that could expand a little more/better.

This may hae been posted on a seperate page, but you guys really haven't played Uncharted Waters Online much, have you?