Has anyone actually figured out the scale between each zone for roleplay or perhaps how long it generally take to get to one place to another? For example how long of travel you think it take to get from Pig and Whistle in Stormwind to the Blue Recluse if you were to walk by foot? I have been curious about it for along time and was wondering if anyone else has figured it out..
Scale / time frame for RP (Just curious)
I don't know for certain, so don't take this as gospel.
It's my understanding that Stormwind (placed within a real life setting) much like Azeroth as a whole is fairly large. From Pig and Whistle in Old Town to The Blue Recluse in the Mage District I'd say would be within an hours' walk. Say...20 minutes? I've always envisioned Stormwind as the rough size and density as London in the 1600-1700s. That would roughly put the two taverns about a mile apart, if you're using this as a reference: http://www.lisashea.com/lisabase/writing/medieval/transportation.html
(Perhaps there is a better site out there...I just can't find it at the moment :P)
Here's a map for a general visual of London 1741:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Rocque%27s_Map_of_London_1741-5.jpg
In Wikipedia: History of London: Population: This offers that between 1600 and 1700 the population grew from 200,000 to 550,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London
Wowwikia estimates Stormwind's population at around 200,000 in total. That would make Stormwind as dense as London in the 1600s.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Stormwind_(kingdom)
Like you I've always found this notion of time and distance in-game interesting. Recently I walked (not ran, but walked on foot) from booty bay to stormwind. Including a few short delays roughly totalling 10-20 minutes, it took me around 4 hours. Expanded into a real world perspective? That should translate into at least a few days, if not nearly a week.
But again, that's just my personal apostasy :D
An interesting question! What are you're thoughts on it?
It's my understanding that Stormwind (placed within a real life setting) much like Azeroth as a whole is fairly large. From Pig and Whistle in Old Town to The Blue Recluse in the Mage District I'd say would be within an hours' walk. Say...20 minutes? I've always envisioned Stormwind as the rough size and density as London in the 1600-1700s. That would roughly put the two taverns about a mile apart, if you're using this as a reference: http://www.lisashea.com/lisabase/writing/medieval/transportation.html
(Perhaps there is a better site out there...I just can't find it at the moment :P)
Here's a map for a general visual of London 1741:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Rocque%27s_Map_of_London_1741-5.jpg
In Wikipedia: History of London: Population: This offers that between 1600 and 1700 the population grew from 200,000 to 550,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London
Wowwikia estimates Stormwind's population at around 200,000 in total. That would make Stormwind as dense as London in the 1600s.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Stormwind_(kingdom)
Like you I've always found this notion of time and distance in-game interesting. Recently I walked (not ran, but walked on foot) from booty bay to stormwind. Including a few short delays roughly totalling 10-20 minutes, it took me around 4 hours. Expanded into a real world perspective? That should translate into at least a few days, if not nearly a week.
But again, that's just my personal apostasy :D
An interesting question! What are you're thoughts on it?
Edited by Caileanmor on 6/28/2013 7:53 AM PDT
Thinking about it as late London, then that walk would take much longer than 20 minutes. If you assume a person can run a mile in 7-8 minutes, a walking mile would be closer to 15-20 minutes. With the in-game model being completely out of scale considering the number of houses there are in game compared to the number of people living in it, we can make a safe assumption as to relative size being a bit greater than 5-10 miles. Going back to 1600 London, you can use the map of the city proper's area as a reference since it hasn't changed much from then to today (it grew upwards and the metro area grew around it). That's about 625 sq miles. Assuming it's a perfect square, that would be 25 miles across.
So if we make the comparisons to 1600 London and say they are relatively the same size, it's probably 25 miles to cross the city. If you do that at a 15 minute walking mile pace, it would take you about 6 hours 15 minutes to walk it. If you go on a 20 minute mile, that's about 8 hours 20 minutes.
Now you get an idea of how out of scale the city is. Apply that to the zones themselves. If we use Cail's estimate of 20 minutes as representational and the city itself is 25x larger than that, maybe it's the same for the zones. If it took him 4 hours to walk from Stormwind to Booty Bay (which is mechanical not prediction)... it would take him nearly a 100 hours by these rough estimates which is the same as 4 days and some change. But if we took his estimate of how long it would take him like we did above to figure out it was 25x larger, it would be 25x larger than a few days. Or nearly 2 months.
Azeroth is huge.
((And this is no way accurate since it's using opinion as the basis, but you can get an idea of the size of things through some extrapolation. A true trek would take a some days as a minimum walking. Which is why we use flights and mounts, to speed up the trip.))
So if we make the comparisons to 1600 London and say they are relatively the same size, it's probably 25 miles to cross the city. If you do that at a 15 minute walking mile pace, it would take you about 6 hours 15 minutes to walk it. If you go on a 20 minute mile, that's about 8 hours 20 minutes.
Now you get an idea of how out of scale the city is. Apply that to the zones themselves. If we use Cail's estimate of 20 minutes as representational and the city itself is 25x larger than that, maybe it's the same for the zones. If it took him 4 hours to walk from Stormwind to Booty Bay (which is mechanical not prediction)... it would take him nearly a 100 hours by these rough estimates which is the same as 4 days and some change. But if we took his estimate of how long it would take him like we did above to figure out it was 25x larger, it would be 25x larger than a few days. Or nearly 2 months.
Azeroth is huge.
((And this is no way accurate since it's using opinion as the basis, but you can get an idea of the size of things through some extrapolation. A true trek would take a some days as a minimum walking. Which is why we use flights and mounts, to speed up the trip.))
Edited by Izby on 6/28/2013 9:32 AM PDT
Certain things in a game world don't make sense. Stormwind is not only a huge city (by medieval standards), but presumably also the last actual human kingdom. Much of the day-to-day residential life is completely ignored, because the game purpose of the city is to provide resources for heroes. I honestly don't imagine you'd find a lot of heroes centralized in one place like that, wearing brightly-glowing weapons, parading about with captive demons or huge wild animals, shapeshifting at a moment's notice, or flying about on dragons, gryphons, undead horses or clouds.
To my way of thinking, you're probably looking at 45 minutes to an hour to walk from the Pig & Whistle to the Blue Recluse. You'd have to cross the entirety of Old Town, walk through a bustling Trade District and make your way into the Mage Quarter.
More to the point, realistically, most adventurers wouldn't be hanging out in the Blue Recluse to begin with. It's in the Mage Quarter, and traditionally, wizards don't welcome the company of those who don't share their pursuits. They're too concerned about magic getting into the wrong hands, or some fool adventurer hearing some strange words and seeing gestures, having an inexplicably eidetic memory, and blowing themselves (or an innocent bystander) up by attempting to use magic they were never trained to use to begin with.
Distances in Azeroth are definitely not representative of their actual nature if the world were real. Redridge and Darkshire are outlying fiefdoms under the presumptive authority of Stormwind. But kingdoms tend to be rather large affairs, and rulers typically don't pay a lot of attention to outlying villages unless they're given a national reason to do so: those places collect taxes which are sent to the capitol, receive periodic updates to their militia (usually brand new soldiers, as the skilled veterans are on warfronts or kept close to the kingdom's capitol), and are otherwise left to their own devices.
A good example of this would be in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. The Two Rivers, that the main characters all came from, was technically part of the nation of Andor, but was so far removed from the capitol city of Caemlyn that Queen Morgaise (and later Queen Elayne) was astounded to even discover that it was part of Andor to begin with. In many ways, towns like Redridge, Darkshire, and Sentinel Hill are similar to the Two Rivers.
It should take days of travel just to get from Stormwind to Sentinel Hill. You're crossing an entire forest that, at least by its appearance in the game, appears largely unspoiled except for three small enclaves. Accepting the existence of gryphons, it should still take several hours, and if you also accept dragons, still 2-3 hours of travel unless the dragons are teleporting. Mages, of course, should be able to open portals to just about any location. I think it's a limitation of the game engine that they can only go to places designed for the portals in the first place.
As a result, tight-knit allegiances like the Alliance and Horde maintain would be pretty difficult to keep: Darnassus is an ENTIRE CONTINENT, presumably weeks of oceanic travel, away from Stormwind if you aren't using a Mage to teleport you. Undercity and Silvermoon are an entire continent away from Orgrimmar: realistically, if Sylvanas wanted the Kor'kron Elite out of her city, Orgrimmar wouldn't have time to stop her before she could remove them, resurrect them as undead under her control via the val'kyr, and set up fortifications in preparation for a siege from the orcs (and they'd have to move resources into position for a siege to begin with). King Wrynn's assault on Undercity was much more realistic: he used a Mage to teleport Stormwind's forces there, and went in through a back cave to the ruins of a city on the same continent.
To my way of thinking, you're probably looking at 45 minutes to an hour to walk from the Pig & Whistle to the Blue Recluse. You'd have to cross the entirety of Old Town, walk through a bustling Trade District and make your way into the Mage Quarter.
More to the point, realistically, most adventurers wouldn't be hanging out in the Blue Recluse to begin with. It's in the Mage Quarter, and traditionally, wizards don't welcome the company of those who don't share their pursuits. They're too concerned about magic getting into the wrong hands, or some fool adventurer hearing some strange words and seeing gestures, having an inexplicably eidetic memory, and blowing themselves (or an innocent bystander) up by attempting to use magic they were never trained to use to begin with.
Distances in Azeroth are definitely not representative of their actual nature if the world were real. Redridge and Darkshire are outlying fiefdoms under the presumptive authority of Stormwind. But kingdoms tend to be rather large affairs, and rulers typically don't pay a lot of attention to outlying villages unless they're given a national reason to do so: those places collect taxes which are sent to the capitol, receive periodic updates to their militia (usually brand new soldiers, as the skilled veterans are on warfronts or kept close to the kingdom's capitol), and are otherwise left to their own devices.
A good example of this would be in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. The Two Rivers, that the main characters all came from, was technically part of the nation of Andor, but was so far removed from the capitol city of Caemlyn that Queen Morgaise (and later Queen Elayne) was astounded to even discover that it was part of Andor to begin with. In many ways, towns like Redridge, Darkshire, and Sentinel Hill are similar to the Two Rivers.
It should take days of travel just to get from Stormwind to Sentinel Hill. You're crossing an entire forest that, at least by its appearance in the game, appears largely unspoiled except for three small enclaves. Accepting the existence of gryphons, it should still take several hours, and if you also accept dragons, still 2-3 hours of travel unless the dragons are teleporting. Mages, of course, should be able to open portals to just about any location. I think it's a limitation of the game engine that they can only go to places designed for the portals in the first place.
As a result, tight-knit allegiances like the Alliance and Horde maintain would be pretty difficult to keep: Darnassus is an ENTIRE CONTINENT, presumably weeks of oceanic travel, away from Stormwind if you aren't using a Mage to teleport you. Undercity and Silvermoon are an entire continent away from Orgrimmar: realistically, if Sylvanas wanted the Kor'kron Elite out of her city, Orgrimmar wouldn't have time to stop her before she could remove them, resurrect them as undead under her control via the val'kyr, and set up fortifications in preparation for a siege from the orcs (and they'd have to move resources into position for a siege to begin with). King Wrynn's assault on Undercity was much more realistic: he used a Mage to teleport Stormwind's forces there, and went in through a back cave to the ruins of a city on the same continent.
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