How long is kalimdor

I wonder if we can apply such a theory of "psychological distance between events" to this world, comparable to a train set. Starting with your most simple quest of bringing a message from one NPC to another one at the other end of a settlement, how long would that take in your average size real life village or small town, or in your capital like Stormwind?

How far apart would two warring tribes settle in an assumed medieval real life Azeroth? How long would it take in a real life azeroth for the landscape to change from a lush forest like Ashenvale into a dry and barren landscape like How long would we require to traverse this on foot or horse? In order to understand to scale of Azeroth we need to take all of these psychological factors into account in order to appreciate how grand this world feels to us.

What these games do have in common is that you also play on islands where you can move free. The worlds appear to be massive on foot, in a tank, etc. But once you get in a helicopter or a plane, you're on the other side of the island in 5 minutes. Seeing an horizon which is the end of your virtual reality gives you a sense of limitation of the world.

North America is in an absolute sense alot bigger then Europe, but psychological, Europe can appear to be bigger, especially if you travel by car, because there are alot of old, non straight roads, fancy towns within a few kms, alternating landscapes, stuck in traffic etc.

While driving on the prairies or the desert doesn't give you really an idea how big it is, it's big but nothing happens. Once you're out of it, you don't really have an idea how immense the region was, because it was just all the same.

On ancient maps Europe is always alot bigger then it is in the real world. Because the map makers had to draw in all the names, coastlines etc.

In very detail! But if you see on google earth, Europe is just tiny when compared with north America! Can we measure Azeroth then in a mental-map way? I don't think so. Everybody has it's own perception of Azeroth, so for everybody it's different. Going this fast makes perception of the island smaller. However if you go into walk mode, you are really going slow. But that is realistic walking! Wondering what results you guys get from the yard in x seconds get! I recently flew over some indeterminate snowy waste on the way back to the UK from California.

Canada or America - I just don't know I remember looking out my airplane window again and again and marvelling at the fact that nothing had changed. It seemed to last forever. I live in Scotland and It's possible there to feel quite out in the wilderness after only an hour or two of walking but that was my first exsposure to real wilderness. I guess the only point I'm trying to underline is Azeroth 'feels' very big. There is lots of detail, lots of changes in terrain and climate.

Sure, if you were focused you could run across it in a far shorter time than your perception of it leads you to expect but the point is you never would. You would always be sucked into some local drama or amazed by a particular vista for a while. You have to consider granularity when trying to decide how big a world is.

I've walked in the highlands of Scotland for a solid hour and seen nothing but heather and the same graduated rolling moors and hills. That's not to say it's unpleasant. I love it but the variety of WOW adds to your perception of space.

Nothing new in this post but I felt compelled to write after searching for an answer to the original question. Now I found the official No Answer tm.

Interesting article and discussion. Sorry for anonymous, I don't have an account. First of all, it'd be very boring to the players to walk around for 10 days before they reach the next city. And second of all, designing and filling all that landscape is an enormous task too. Sure, you could randomly generate it but that still leaves the basic question: Why bother if you don't fill those thousands of square kilometers with something interesting? As has been pointed out, other games have compensated by also speeding up the game day.

It can be even more extreme, Ryzom for example also sped up the seasons by an order of magnitude a few realworld days per season, if I recall correctly. This totally messes up the system, but for Azeroth it's no problem because time is 24h standard days. Oh, you could do the hunter's mark measuring trick, by the way. Use duels. Old thread but a topic I'm fascinated with. One thing I have seen in WoW is that a lot of the world design is based more on the time it takes to travel a path than the actual distance, though clearly time and distance are related.

Specifically there seems to be a "30 second rule" in the design of pathways in WoW which I think could also be called the "30 seconds to boredom" rule. That is, it's boring to travel a route more than about 30 seconds without getting bored.

The road will turn, there will be a side path, a distinctive tree or rock, you will reach the top or bottom of a hill, there is a stream, a house, the entrance or exit to a town, etc.

These are in a sense virtual milestones and visual reference points along the path. Players start in the middle, it's 30 seconds to the boundaries of the area.

Now consider that people will get bored traveling the same route over and over, and you can see a game's need to start adjusting for the "30 seconds to boredom" rule. That is where you get things like mounts. It wouldn't surprise me to find that on a mount, it's 30 seconds between larger milestones such as towns, major road branches, caves and so on.

And ratchet up the "30 seconds to boredom" thing one more level and we have flight paths. Again I haven't timed it, but I wonder if the time between nodes on the flight path is 30 seconds? Maybe the question to ask, is how much space there is. Since Warcraft people don't take up any space, there is an infinite amount of space in the world of Azeroth. For instance, I've seen more than people filling the Auction House, a place that really isn't very big at all.

No account here, I'm Scurvyjuice - Eredar Personally I always felt that the "zone maps" didn't correspond with the "continent maps" in terms of scale running up STV takes WAY longer than it appears it should by the continent map. So basing your math off of the apparent "3 times as high as it is wide" size of the continent as opposed to each individual zone could give drastically different results. There is a system of measurement the game system uses for AOE spells and ranged weapons. The game knows and keeps track of how far your character is from everything, creatures calculating agro per character's level , rocks, plants, deadly high ledges, anything and everything in the game and it loads this data into native memory when you load the game so everything is pre-calculated.

That's why WOW's physics engine is tops. There are addons that naturally use the information in the physics engine of the game that pop that info up as a heads up display, namely Quest Helper and Carbonite.

Both of these addons give you distances to quest items or locations. Using one of these, you can measure the distance between two points in the game and then lay a map image onto Google earth with real world measurements and viola, you have a basic estimate of how big everything is.

There's a basic estimate that has been discussed; The eastern kingdom is a little better than 9 miles from north to south, slightly larger than Manhattan. I would have to say it's actually slightly smaller than that. I measured the distance between Orgrimar and Razor Hill using one of the addons I mentioned, taking this measurement into account, I laid a map of Durotar on the globe in Google earth, used the path measurement tool and I came up with a size that is representative of Durotar based on that measurement, scaling durotar until it matched.

I then overlaid and matched up the entire continent of Kalimdor with the correctly sized Durotar. They were followed by Garona , who was eager to hunt out the last members of the Shadow Council. Approximately four years after the end of the Second War , the human brothers, Greydon and Silverlaine visited Gadgetzan in Tanaris.

Kalimdor also refers to the massive continent that composed Azeroth before the Great Sundering. Kalimdor has a huge variety of both animal and plant life. Within this continent, you will find almost every land type; from the ice cold plains of Winterspring in the north, to the hot desert of Tanaris in the south. The mystical woods of Ashenvale , the dry, rocky Thousand Needles , the tropical, lush jungle of Feralas — this continent has it all.

To the north the landscape is primarily coated in thick alpine woodland, typical in areas such as Ashenvale. Central Kalimdor, home to the horde, is far more rugged and barren, save for the safety of Mulgore.

In the south, desert areas dominate the terrain; however, nestled between these bleak landscapes are realms of beauty and wonder such as the thriving tropical regions of Feralas and Un'Goro Crater. After the surviving Highborne were exiled by the night elves from Kalimdor, kaldorei druids wove a powerful spell to close their borders within an eternal mist.

There they remained for thousands of years, hidden by the mist and by the swirling seas of the Maelstrom. Another version is that following the birth of the World Tree Nordrassil , Malfurion Stormrage gathered all the druids into a conclave, where they underwent a great slumber, sending their spirits into the Emerald Dream.

A great barrier of mist grew around Kalimdor, to prevent eyes even in Azeroth from finding the second Well of Eternity. Kalimdoran is a language common to many natives of the continent. The Burning Crusade release. Patch 8.

User Info: chris the sequel chris the sequel 12 years ago 1 No mounting or other speed buffs. I've never done it, but I'm curious. User Info: longnuts longnuts 12 years ago 2 Hah, are you going to seriously try that? User Info: chris the sequel chris the sequel Topic Creator 12 years ago 3 Might, If I get really board someday.

Now that I've played 9. Well, my guild called it quits. How come ION can't talk to us like Yoshi p? How and where do you learn to use guns? Side Quest. What is the quickest way? So, how big would it be realistically? So about the size of the North America, i guess. Post by lonewolfe Yes, if you follow the distance the flight path measures out in hards, it is about 22 miles from the northern most tip to the southern most tip.

HOWEVER, like the other hundreds of threads that have been started like this on various other boards, they are continents Stop trying to make a video game into real life and visa versa. Post by This post was from a user who has deleted their account. Post by jefflovealex If memory serves, in one of the books its stated to have taken weeks for a group of people to get across the hinterlands, So as mentioned probably the size of the northern section of america, Maybe half the size of the states give or take.

Post by lonewolfe The game world is built to scale, so you really can't get an accurate estimate. If memory serves, in one of the books its stated to have taken weeks for a group of people to get across the hinterlands, So as mentioned probably the size of the northern section of america, Maybe half the size of the states give or take.

This times everything. If they built the game world to match the size of the world in the books, you would stop playing after it took you a week to get from Goldshire to Stormwind.

You can NOT judge a scaled down world accurately by counting as you run, or timing how long it takes you to cross a zone and comparing it to a top athlete. Just stop. End of discussion.