I thought they didn’t have enough food to feed everyone and that’s why Westfall was full of hungry hungry hobos?
Mages, thats why. And magic.
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OP must not have built up his farm in Halfhill to know-- in this game world, crops grow IN A DAY!
Your vapid problem has been solved. But it’s ok. We know you’ll figure out something just as pointless and dim to complain about.
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Aren’t there farms all across those areas? And those farms send a lot of their produce to the city.
What I think would be cool is to see SW and Org both have farmers taking their produce/stock into the city for sale.
That’d be kinda cool.
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Well, you gotta take all the farmhouses into account. Westfall should also include moonbrook. So does the scale bother me? No, not really. The population of westfall isn’t supposed to be at Sentinel Hill. It’s the entire area. Moonbrook, the farmsteads, the tower bordering duskwood, and the lighthouse.
Would I like if WoW was scaled more literally to real life? yeah that would be crazy.
I once saw it noted that the length of the Azeroth’s major continents, Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms (north to south), was probably no more than 25 miles…but that’s the physical in-game measurement. Lore-wise, the planet is supposed to be about the same size as the Earth.
Would you really want it to take you hours, days, or even weeks to travel from one zone to the other, though? Because that’s how long it used to take in the days of traveling by horseback. Be happy it only takes a few minutes (at most) to go from one quest location to another while leveling, instead of complaining about a lack of immersion.
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The world is shrunken to make it manageable
Accordingly to sources, its supposed to take 3 days to travel from Stormwind to Goldshire along the road. Take that confirmed scale and apply to the rest of the world to get Westfall’s true size
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Go to Booty Bay and autorun to Silvermoon City then tell me how small it is.
Not sure why people are disparaging the OP’s legitimate feelings…
Anyway, I do feel some “cities” aren’t accurately represented in WoW. Considering mounts weren’t available until level 40 in the past, I believe cities were underrepresented purposefully for gameplay reasons (imagine walking throughout Suramar, Boralus or… Dazar’alor… yeah).
With mounts being accessible rather early today, I think seeing large cities wouldn’t be an issue. In fact, we’ve seen Blizzard making rather large cities since Legion (again: Suramar, Boralus, Dazar’alor… these are great examples of the type of cities I’m looking forward to).
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While the in-game representation is small… lorewise the zones are big… for example from Stormwind to Goldshire, in-game it just takes you seconds to travel between the two areas, but lorewise, it takes our character hours to travel the distance.
or other examples are like the times when the armies of Stormwind marches up to Lordaeron… in-game it just takes us minutes to travel the distance but lorewise this takes many weeks to months to travel the distance… Also just the simple act of sending a message between the two kingdoms, messengers from Loradaeron took several weeks to travel from Lordaeron to Stormwind, then add many more weeks or months for Stormwind to mobilize a response and travel the great distance…
Also more recently, the Kaldorei army in Silithus, when the Horde invaded Darkshore in the latest novel… Tyrande didn’t even bother to send message to recall the army/fleet to Darkshore, because she knew it would take over a week for message to reach them and weeks for the Army to travel back.
yeah, Azeroth is much bigger than the game is able to represent.
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Here’s some other bonus tidbits from lore:
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Canonically it took the Thrall, the Horde, and the Tauren three months to cross the Barrens (this makes sense from a lore perspective since it’s a barren desert, so I’d imagine they’d need to make a ton of stops to not die from heat stroke and have to seek out scarce food/water, and getting lost.
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Flight from Stormwind to Karazhan, as cited by the Last Guardian takes a day.
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It takes a week to sail from the western coast of the Eastern Kingdoms to the eastern coast of Kalimdor. As stated in Tides of War.
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It takes four days to sail from Feralas to Theramore. Also stated in Tides of War.
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The idea of a fantasy world, game, on that scale gets me really excited.
For the convenience and sake of WoW, i’d like if the game were maybe 2x, or 3x larger. It’s not like we don’t have portals and epic flying to make everything easier.
ESO honestly feels larger than Azeroth, which is absurd. I’d love to see an actual measurment. World of Warcraft obviously is larger than ESO, as we have multiple planets. ESO has their own “outland.” and their own “draenor.” but they’re 1 zone per expansion, not fully fleshed out new planets. But Azeroth vs Tamriel, I think Tamriel is larger ingame currently.
Just as a brief example, this is “Wintergrasp” in ESO. I’m moving at 100%+ mountspeed, chasing a group of players across an open field.
At the end of the clip it shows you points on the map. The travel distance between two points on that map is longer than it would take to run from one end of wintergrasp and back, twice.
I’m not saying it’s a better game for this reason. It’s just much, much larger, or successfully creates the illusion that it is. And I’d love to see wow be that size.
Because your computer can’t support a game with a 1:1 area scale. The files would be too large to have an entire planet’s worth of terrain.
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Well that’s why the idea of it excites me. When I was little the idea of characters not having square, pixelated faces was alien.
I’m sure in the future, games of unfatomable scale will exist. What I’d give to be a young gamer in 2050.
Like I said, I’d like wow to be a little larger. like twice as big maybe. More real estate for this game wouldn’t hurt anyone. I’m just talking about the scale here.
Just zoom out really far, makes everything seem much larger.
Several responses range from overly snarky to really ugly, while several others are the type you’d normally expect from people who disagree. The forum could desperately use far more of the latter and far less of the former.
Agreed. There were/are technical and game play reasons for the scale of representations, and though some of those have evolved over the life of the game I’m comfortable with where things stand.
The addition of grand cities like Suramar and Dazar’alor, and the improvement in the aesthetics and atmosphere of modern zones, has helped. Importantly for me, Dazar’alor (and Suramar in its own way) has a large, varied, and purposeful populations. It actually feels alive; were it giant but sparsely populated, as has often been the case previously, it wouldn’t feel remotely the same.
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There’s maybe 3-4 outhouses in all of Azeroth, too. Must be some pretty long lines.
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YouTube often recommends to me some guy who regularly posts stuff about Star Citizen.
It’s super cool to look at. I love the Sci-Fi/ OuterSpace MMO concept. I love this ships, the detail. All of that is amazing. I think as far back as Cata I said I’d drop WoW in a microsecond for World of Starcraft.
But more than all the beautiful graphics what I really notice in his videos is that it’s UTTERLY DEVOID of people. He’s just on ONE planet, and the city he was in was so massive, and yet there was no one there. Even if the game is a MASSIVE hit, and blow-your-mind numbers play it, like say TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE!!! … it would still probably only populate 2-3 of the cities on ONE PLANET.
And Star Citizen is based on GALAXIES of planets. Forget every other vaporware meme about the game, I don’t see how they’re going to overcome the sense that no one else is playing in a galaxy of worlds that are just… too much.
Azeroth is PERFECT in its scale. Before I played WoW, I played Asheron’s Call and I once read that it’s landmass was roughly the size of Rhode Island. On a whim/dare, some bloke once ran around the entire perimeter of the Island and I think it was said it took him 5 weeks! You may think that’s cool, but any AC player with an ounce of truth will tell you 90% or more of the game was just a barren, empty NOTHINGNESS. What’s the point???
I would recommend not playing FFXIV then. Talk about small zones. You could probably put 6 FF zones into Westfall. WoW zones I think are great sizes and thank God going into each zone doesn’t have loading screens like FF.
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I get where you’re coming from, and the concern for having an empty game is real.
but the problem is wow’s already an empty game. so there’s no way to judge if the scale is perfect imo.
When’s the last time you ran into someone questing anywhere that wasn’t the current expansion?
dead game world. despite our large population compared to other MMO’s we’ve got one of the most barren, empty games.
I hate to keep using the example, but ESO is a larger scale game than wow. In spite of that, none of its zones are empty. they’ve got plenty of incentives that keep every corner of that world healthy and flowing with players and even localized economies.
This isn’t to compare WoW to ESO and say one is better than the other. Just an example that in 2019, there are games of a larger scale (literal map size, time it takes to cross from point A to point B) that don’t suffer the fate of dead, empty zones.
Every leveling alt I currently have, ranging from 20-66, always sees people in the world. With the excweption of Draenor, as I think most people who have flight just fly around and do bonus objectives and treasure-finding.