"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.

I bet you could figure out the land-speed of a typical character....


Continent might be small, but when you run at 30mph, its REEEEALLY small.


/shrug

GW1 uses only like 20% of its map as explorable ares. The other 80% is only stupid boring filler to make the map complete >.>

this sucks most... could we really explore everything of the maps, then would the gameworld feel much much much.... bigger, as we have the feeling now about it....

When I saw the map of the continent tyria for the 1st time, I was somewhat of amazed of this real huge size ... so more I was then dissappointed of the world map, how less of it is really used for explorement for us ....

This isn't only in Tyria so, anet didcthesame shit with Cantha, Elona and the Add On too and that lests a Game imo look absolutely not professional.
When a game gives its players the feeling, as if ever would be huge chunks of the game missing and as if the game would be incomplete ...

I personally would have prefered, when anet would have brought out a 4th big campaign with Utopia, giving us another big continent or 2 contients however to complete the world of tyria, so that they would be able to show us finally a real high detailed full 3D GLOBE of Tyria as world map, instead of this Add On, which is only like a tiny cut off of what utopia could have been, when they would have made it...

A 4th Campaign, with like 40-50 Missions spread on 1-2 new continents being based on the culture of North & South America.
I think a 4th big campaign would have been a much better End to the GW-Era, then this cutted Add On, which was brought to us even incomplete with a missing Hard Mode first, and showing us only mainly the Norns and Asuras, takes away the possibilty for us Dwarf Lovers to play maybe later with Dwarfs and shows us absolutely nothing about the imo most interesting and beutiful race of all the new races - the Sylvari, other that we get the info, that they are "made" through the help of 2 Centaurs.

When I see all those awesome concepts of Utopica, I could personally cry, that anet ditched all this gorgeous stuff to give us instead a ugly short version of it with this Add on, which has nearly no story at all and is otherwise only a packet of 18 dungeons full of reskins.
When Utopia would have come out, the game would have also now 2 more nice professions, from which one would correct the total stupid concept of the paragon. With Utopia we would have also now the Chronomancer and the Bard, because those 2 professions were the concept arts for utopia ...

The bard could have received then all the Song skills ect. of the paragon and the paragon could become then with some concept tweaks somethign more unique, then only a Wannabe Warrior/Angel-Bard, then could have made Anet out of the paragon more something, that comes near to a african Hunter Profession, which would have fitted much better to the african based Nightfall, but that correction woulf have meant, that they would have also to correct the NF lore about those dumb sunspear stuff and that all would mean way too much work and I'm sure, thats the reason, why Anet dissed Utopia, because they realized - it would simple mean too much work to rework their crap concepts about NF with Utopia, so they decided to make the short version ...

poorly >.< *however , everything is only personal acceptance, no fact.*

But the fact, that Utopia would have given us a real Bard profession lets me believe this and it makes no sense, to give us a real bard and to let then an other profession with a wannabe bard-concept in the game, how it is...

I hope for the future for GW2 at least, that we will hopefully see mroe Continents, because 3 is imo simple too less for a real complete world.

Even our Earth has 6 Continents (7, if we count the Antarctis/Arctis with them) (Europe, Asia, Africa, North-America, South-America, Australia)

So we can hopefully await more for the World of Tyria, at least for GW2

I just got a thought...seeing how Anet is taking a long time with GW2, and yes I know that it takes a long time to make a game, couldn't they be expanding the scale of the world for GW2? or at least including more explorable areas then what we have, making the maps bigger? I think that would be really cool if so, maybe we could just have one map of the ENTIRE world, not just the continent tyria or what we have seen in all three continents combined. Just a random thought I had.
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Another thought come to me form reading the post above mine *which I missed b4*, in gw2, Anet could simply give all 3 current continents in one game, then add in what would have been the location of Utopia, and their professions, later on in an expansion or something? I still would love the idea one 1 single map, and maybe making it a 3d map like previously thought of by Phoenix Tears, which would also be sweet, but I am not expecting somethign like that... Would still be sweet.

About six months ago, in a thread (sorry for it highlighting the word miles BTW, that was my search term) in Riverside, I estimated that the size of Elona was only about 5 miles, East to West, by 4 miles, North to South. That was all based on estimation, but still, it showed just how tiny the portion of Tyria we have access to is. I live in a city that is about 40 miles across (just measured it on Google earth ) So even if my measurements were off by a long shot, the portion of Tyria that we have access to is a tiny, tiny space in comparison to our world.

I think this shows that there is a lot of room for expansion in further GW chapters.

This is *exactly* what I'm talking about. It takes me half an hour to bike 13 miles; it takes half an hour to walk your character from Western Istahn to (skipping the Ocean) Eastern Vabbi.

But Guild Wars is really big for game-world. Especially compared to most offline game-worlds. But if you compare it to a MMORPG-world, it's maybe not that big (most free2play world's are much smaller though), but still big enough for me (and I think most players).

morrowind and oblivion were just a province each, which is why it seemed to be scaled down. the first game, arena, however i think is the biggest game made to date. think its about 17 million square miles you can explore or something ridiculous like that. eds mmo ftw

bike 13 miles in half hour, i dont think so tim!!

Z0MG MY MESMAR CAN RUN AROUND THE WORLD IS LESS THAN 80 DAYS Z0MG!

Cast Dwarven Stabability ya ya ya
Cast Echo he he he
Cast Dash go go go!
Cast Dash again yeehaw!

Seriously, if there were no mobs to fight, my mesmer would reach one end of the world the world to another with its constant +50% run speed ^_^

It wouldn't be possible with a reasonably-sized art team (i.e. less than about the size of the gaming industry put together) to flesh out the millions of square miles of terrain you would find in a full-scale world. They'd have to generate the vast majority of it procedurally, and focus the artists on more memorable places such as major cities and mission areas.

That said, it would be interesting for someone to take the step to doing that. It's probably where MMORPGs are going, since worlds are getting progressively bigger and more detailed at the same time. A subset of this technology has already been seen in Daggerfall and, more recently, Oblivion (for things like placing trees and making all the dungeons from blocks); however, so far nobody has tried to implement a fully-fledged procedural terrain/area generator into a highly detailed game. Daggerfall was relatively primitive and un-detailed; Diablo 1/2, Hellgate: London and Oblivion simply randomly joined hand-made areas together.

If it's small to us, imagine how small it is to the Dragons or the Gods.
XD

Well, think about it, Europe was small until the 16th Century and people started exploring the world... maybe we just haven't seen all of it?
But yes, I see your point. What we can actually go to is quite small.

On the other side of the world is Azeroth.

lol. qft 123456

I'm still hoping that GW2 will have a 3d global map that makes Tyria, Elona, and Cantha small. Those continents look more like Kingdoms and not actual continents, let alone countries.

Actually, a couple of weeks ago, when I was (incredibly) bored, I measured how long a mile would be relative to the whole map of Tyria (it being the biggest of the 3 continents). I did this by using my warrior, activating dolyak sig, and given that the average grown man's walking stride is roughly 2-3ft (from the back foot's toe to the front foot's toe), I figured that Tyria (the continent, including the GW:EN territories) is roughly 12 square miles. I agree, that's ridiculously small.

So running to Droks is pretty much equal to running to your friend's house about a mile away. That is if ice imps, rock-throwing giants, and bird-men attacked you on your way there.

All 3 of the continents could probably fit snuggly on Manhattan island

What really makes me mad is the fact that Anet crammed Mountains, jungles, planes, deserts, and volcanic islands into an area that small. It's almost insulting to our intelligence lol. Oh well. All in the name of a virtual world that's aesthetically pleasing.

And now that we know this, ANet knows we know this, and will make Tyria 5x the size in GW2 so we won't be able to run anywhere without it taking hours .

All joking aside, I really do hope that Tyria (as a world and continent) will be much bigger in GW2, the bigger the better.

I hate it when I'm running from LA to San Diego and monster encounters make it take 30min longer

I knew it!


In all honestly, I also hope they improve the land mass and explorable areas in GW2. I imagine they will because it seems one of the most important reasons behind creating a new game engine, but I hope they do extensively.

100% Agreed. Even if they completely trashed the idea of having an actual world map and just gave us a sort of rough, not-to-scale map with few details, sorta like in the LOTR books, I'd be happy. In fact, I'd kinda prefer that, assuming they'd give us smaller, more detailed maps of individual areas as well.

Hopefully they'll at least wise up and make a world that's geographically possible.

Yeah, GW should have been alot more sim'ish. I mean, if you go to Kamadan, there are literally no buildings. I mean, there's that temple thing, but no homes or anything.You have a real good point. And the homes that do exist in the game are in explorable areas.