When Nazjatar showed up, it’s at the corner of the Kul Tiras/Zandalar maps, to symbolize its location somewhere between the two in lore, but not big enough to show up on the world map, even though itself is roughly the size of a single zone in-game.
Why didn’t Blizz do the same with Broken Isles and Kul Tiras/Zandalar? As it is, the three of them are geographically humongous compare to neighboring continents, each almost the size of Pandaria (a continent), so much so it’s unrealistic that none of the previous expedition, such as Thrall’s exodus and Arthas’s conquest, to miss out on them in their respective travels.
I understand in-game zones are much smaller than if they were in real world, but zones can still be compared with “each other” because they are within the same context. Even if Broken Isles/Kul Tiras/Zandalar are indeed very big, they could at least not physically appear in the grand world map, for the sake of visual distortion.
A big reason is that players need to be able to see all the different continents at a glance. So while it doesn’t make sense, it’s done so players can have some quick glance gameplaywise.
Also Maps IRL can be fairly inaccurate because, well, Greenland being larger then Africa on the most common map.
The map we are given as players is meant to be a convenient UI, not a lore accurate representation of the continents, their placements, and their sizes to scale with the others.
I mean, if we assume that Azeroth is … ‘vaguely earth sized’ then a lot of the land masses being skipped over make a lot of sense. I mean, the Broken Isles, Zandalar and Kul’tiras could each be the size of Iceland and all conveniently fit in the Atlantic Ocean in a way that does not cause say… the Mayflower Voyage from hitting them. The Ocean between the two main continents is supposed to be fairly massive, and there’s all sorts of room for a dozen mini-islands and large Brittan / Madagascar / New Zealand islands to pop up between them. If we assume Naval travel if just really spotty due to current tech, and the fact that there are literal sea monsters and naga out there to make travel even harder it is not too unreasonable that explorers not returning from their expeditions is more the rule than the exception. If that is the case, then there can be all manner of undiscovered lands just beyond the spyglass of the standard trade lanes.
Yea; unfortunately we cant even compare the sizes of maps in game, let alone on the map. The in game maps are all at different scales. Kul Tiras and Zandalar, while still scaled down, are much closer to their real size than the scaled down versions of Kalimdor and the Eastern kingdoms we play on. Think 1/25th(current islands) scale compared to 1/636th(EK and Kalimdor) scale.
It’s all really confusing the deeper you look into it. Blizzard just hopes you wont.
Even by shrinking Broken Isles/Zandalar/Kul Tiras by half, I’m sure most players could still conveniently click on them without wondering why those three are out of proportion.
And because WoW is a RPG, I see no reason why Blizz couldn’t put forth extra effort to reduce lore incongruence, despite their trend in retconning.
I don’t really agree at all that a halfed Kul Tiras and Zandalar would be as easy to click, but even if they were, there’s no real reason to. The map in its current iteration is neatly organized and easy to navigate. Frankly, if I have to choose between convenience of swapping through zone maps quickly and having a map that was accurately to scale, I’ll choose the convenience every time.
I don’t really feel like my immersion’s been busted because of inaccurate maps. A year ago, my map didn’t even include any of those continents anyway.