"Planet" Tyria is very, very small.

If you've actually sat back and thought about the approximate size of these "continents", you'd realize that they're about the size of a town or city. I'm willing to bet that these continents are barely a dozen miles across. Guild Wars does a great job of terrascaling than most games (Pokemon, for instance... Pallet 'Town' my ass), but you have to wonder where this land's population of... what, ten million?... finds room to live.

Am I wrong to think that everything is just way, way too small?

(Yes, I do realize that this is a videogame. Do you realize you're posting on a forum? )

I agree, but by the same degree we didn't know about all these underground Asuran tunnels, and considering continents are just "added" I suppose that we only know about a certain percentage of Tyria.

Well, we can run through a huge part of the continent from Beacon's to Droknar's Forge within minutes...

There are just some limitations to the "terrascaling" as you called it. Morrowind and Oblivion had also huge worlds, which added to the flair of the game.

But I doubt it is possible to make an entertaining game with "real" terrain dimensions. It just needs to be reasonable for the demands of the game. EVE e.g. has a really huge universe, sometimes even so huge that it gets annoying.


Imagine all of the empty Tyrian map spaces filled with cool explorables - THAT would be huge!

Judging by the climates we are able to observe within the explorable areas of the game, it's very likely that the world is a great deal larger than just the areas that we can see on the map.

this was covered in some other thread, the world is not small its us that are really really big.

50 Ft tall to be exact.

The Guild Wars world were playing in is just a small percentage of the whole planet(I think)

I expect the world we use for GW1 is just a tiny percentage of the whole Tyrian World. Id Expect this would be comparable to a small part of Chile (desert on one side of the mountains and a Jungle on the other side.

But yea, teh scales are a little bit small. If you think about it, then you can run form one city cenntre to the other in about 10 minutes max (not counting monster encounters). Try that in the real world .

I have to agree. Each area is like a continent. You have Tyria, Cantha, Elona. If they would have kept going instead of bringing out gw2. We probably would have seen plenty more continents.

You have to remember it is a game and to make the scaling even half the normal size. Would have just been a little ridiculous. I might go even as far as saying it would have turned people off to have to travel all day to a new town.

I like the sizing of guild wars. I wish the continents were bigger in the sense of longer campaigns and such.

Yeah, there's probably more than we see and we cant explore everything now. However imo towns are just too small. I dont usually compare gw to wow but tbh in wow towns ppl actually live in there. Gw towns barely have buildings.

If you think GW is too small maybe you should try TES2 Hammerfell. I've heard it takes IRL weeks to walk the whole length of the world. And that's just a couple of provinces, not the complete continent.. thank God they scaled down the world to Morrowind and oblivion..

Lukas, was TES2 not DAGGERFALL? Anyways, I think this example shows that things can also get too big to be really enjoyable.

you still have to know that the world from Proph is just a continent
other lands like from Factions and Nightfall are still there
i think the Crystal Desert leans somewhere against the Desolation i read

Consider we still don't know what is north of the Tyrian continent, and there is still more of Cantha than is seen in Factions (in addition to the unexplorable areas, the continent is not fully seen on the map) - same with Elona.

Plus, then, that would at most probably cover one face of the globe.

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Image:T..._%28new%29.jpg

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Image:Tyria.jpg

These 2 maps combine give the best idea of what we know of the world of Tyria. Of course, this is still just a percentage, as the land is not complete. But, the chances that there is very little land left to complete the map is just as good as there being a huge amount of land left. To me the amount of the game we can explore is probably a downscaled version of the size of something like, o say, France or Germany. Not that big but still not as small as a city. About Tyria being the size of a city, I'd have to say only about half of each explorable part of each continent *tyria would probably be 3 or 4 cities in cize really* this of course, not comparing to the huge cities like New York, Chicago, etc etc.

Those 2 pictures gives me the feeling that, if they had continued with the present model, we would have had 1-2 eastern continent in Utopia and the next one, then maybe northern tyria or southern cantha, than maybe a land in between elona and cantha (out of today's full map).
But then again, GW being a game, you'd expect it to be on a smaller scale than real life.

This happens for reasons of feasibility more than anything else.

When you consider the size of Oblivion - it seems quite large compared to Guild Wars, at least for a single country. It actually takes considerable time to get from one place to another on foot, etc etc. However, even this has been scaled down; the towns are only a mile or two apart there. The entirety of Cyrodiil is only 16 square miles, apparently. The scale disparity became most clear to me while doing the Pale Pass quest; the log recorded it taking several days to travel between landmarks that, in the game, were not even minutes apart.

And this scale is much larger than Guild Wars, where you can cross the entire nation of Kryta in probably about 10 minutes, if you're going fast enough.

Does this mean Tyria is tiny? That the planet is small, or that we've only seen a miniscule part of the world? I don't really think so. I would point to other games like Oblivion, and guess that what we're really seeing is just another example of scaling.

There are three reasons I can think of for them to do this. Firstly, it takes a long time to create content such as terrain maps, etc. It would not be possible - without extremely large development teams or automated content generation, which is very difficult - to create full-scale maps covering significant parts of a continent.

Secondly, the amount of data generated for such an endeavour would be immense. Without quite sophisticated ways to reduce the size of the terrain and related data (such as procedural content), it would be difficult to store it all on a home computer, never mind ship it.

Thirdly, it might not even make the game better. Travelling gets pretty boring unless you have things to do while you're there. While it would enhance the game for some people - sightseers and grind-happy cartographers among them - it may actually deter more people than it would attract.

That said, I'm hoping GW2 is at least at a larger scale than GW1, although I still doubt it will be full-scale unless they have some pretty substantial technological breakthroughs there.

You can't forget about the area that would have been used in Utopia. Just because the campaign was never released doesn't mean the area doesn't exist over there. And who knows how big that was supposed to be?
And then considering how much of the worlds continue off the maps we have, there could be tons more to explore. It could be an amazingly huge world, but we just aren't seeing the rest of it.
As for where the people of the world live, KC is a giant city, and you walk on the tops of buildings. Could be giant apartment buildings?

I'm guessing Utopia would use up some of the longitude previously unexplored in the game. There's something west of Tyria, and there's something east. Perhaps the setting for Utopia is at the far end of the landmass there? Alternatively, it could be a different continent entirely.

If those structures in Kaineng City are actually apartment buildings - and not houses built around, say, natural landforms - they are even more ludicrous than they looked already. Considering the sheer volume of space within those blocks, the mass of the structure would be immense, and being built the way they are there is no chance the lower parts could withstand the weight.

Furthermore, there would be no natural light at all in the middle of the building. We have to deal with this in real life in some buildings such as malls, for which we use artificial light sources. However, in GW this would probably mean burning candles or oil lamps - a huge fire risk for a weak wooden structure such as this - and even if possible, people would quite quickly realise it's stupid to build in such a way that you need millions of candles a day just for people to see where they're going during daylight hours.

And to cap it all off, if Kaineng City really does span an entire coast of a small continent, the population of that region must be utterly vast - we're not just talking millions; you could probably fit more people in that city than live on the Earth. Very high-density housing over huge areas tends to do that. But this population would place incredible strain on Cantha's resources; there wouldn't be enough space to grow food for that many people, and there probably wouldn't be enough water either. Even if the size of Kaineng City was rationalised, you'd still be looking at many millions of people living in accommodation of that kind of density.

This is how I think of Keineng.

Has anyone played Warhammer and read the lore for that? They have huge cities that they build up just by building and building over other buildings. As the buildings below are crushed people move up higher.

So Keineng started off normal city height, with just one story houses. Then people built a second floor, and a third. Slowly the houses and streets at the bottom became too dark, too crushed and too dirty. So they just built a floor over the top and ground-level moved up.

Given the size of the rocks that Keineng seems to be built on you can assume that some of those huge buildings are supported by the earth itself.

I wouldn't say the population of Keineng is huge. It's not that big compared to a real city, and a large amount of houses are out of use/unsafe. It's probaby got the population of Bristol, albeit in a smaller area.

About this thread in general:
Imagine everything about 10x bigger, then you'd get a realistic representation of Tyria. It's scaled down to fit on our computer, and so it doesn't take years to get around.

I presume you're talking about the hive cities in 40K? Very different technological base.

That said... one thing to remember is that Kaineng is highly overpopulated - it's basically all the people who were forced out of the rest of Cantha by the Jade Wind on that narrow stretch of coast. The Canthan government may even be forcing people to settle there rather than, say, Shing Jea to make sure that there's still enough farmland to feed all those people. Remember that quest early on Shing Jea where it's mentioned that fresh water is piped in to Kaineng from there?

That said, I suspect that Kaineng City isn't quite as populated as all those buildings suggest. Still overpopulated enough to be uncomfortable, but I suspect most of those slums probably went up not long after the Jade Wind, and that the population has dropped since.