Guild Wars 2

The world of Tyria is much larger than the game-play representational bits we see. We know from the attack on LA that despite being a tiny sea side resort in game, in Tyrian reality it was a bustling community with tens of thousands of residents. The other cities such as DR and the Black Citadel must be similarly scaled. Yet it becomes too easy to think of the small slices we see as the whole.

So I’d love for the ANet lore team to give us an idea of how large various map areas are. It wouldn’t give away any story details, it shouldn’t be anything secret. Just some idea of how sweeping the distances are from the NPC’s view points

I bring this up because a friend has written a short RP bit with some Seraph trainees doing laps around Lake Doric just as the initial WM attack begins. Yet when you look at the map, the lake’s length is a bit more than DR’s diameter, and pre-draining it appears there were substantial non-bridged inflowing streams at one end and a dam spillway at the other. There are large size sailing vessels, as well as three small towns and a fort, suggesting a lot more acreage in “reality” than what we can trot across in game.

So whether it be straight up in miles, or how long a caravan takes to cross the distances, or comparative scale to known Terran features, or just descriptions like “miles of gently rolling meadows reach towards steeper hills and caverns that stretch far along the eastern edges of the area; on a clear day in New Loamhurst you can see across the lake’s expanse to the tiny towers of Divinity’s Reach in the distance,” I would deeply appreciate a canon lore guide to the world’s actual scale. How big are the villages we see represented by a circle of buildings? How many more towns fill the various maps that we don’t see in game? How vast are the snowy plains of the northern Wayfarer Foothills? Etc.

I think many maps are out of scale, so things squish or expand based on where you are fir gameplay reasons in a map. We know from Ghosts of Ascalon, it can take many days to cross the maps on foot though, so that gives a very rough idea of the area from Ebonhawke to Ascalon. I dont think that scale is representative across everywhere though.

Right, which is why I was hoping for a bit of a lore dump from the story team Not a novel’s worth, just some indication of how they see the setting when designing a narrative for it.

it sure doesn’t feel like it, but there’s also the timescale, if you play as a human Logan will mention he remembers that you first stormed into his office years ago.. years could be anywhere from 2 to 10 I guess.. I’m guessing ~3-4 years. we know the timespan between living stories isn’t realtime, even though it takes months to make the game, it all takes place in a relatively short sequence (for what’s realistic there)

I think they’ve established that the game started in 1325 and has overall gone in step with real time though individual episodes lasted longer in game play than in game time. Eg the assault on LA was all in a day, with the rescue part taking an hour or so, even though we had weeks to play it. It’s currently 1329.

I can wrap my brain around fluid time rates better than geographical analogues. Most likely this is because we do get occasional lore points to nail down the game calendar, but almost never anything to express the true size of the world.

I’d like a yardstick, as it were, something that RPers can use as a framework for telling their own tales set in Tyria.

It’s actually 1330. The year ticked over for the last release.

Ghosts of Ascalon is probably the best reference: it takes roughly a day for the group to get from Ebonhawke to the southern part of Plains of Ashford, then roughly another day to get to Ascalon City itself. This suggests that the distance between Ebonhawke and Ascalon City is no more than 60 miles, probably less.

This indicates that, while what we see ingame has been scaled down from what’s actually there, the nations of Tyria are still pretty small by modern standards, likely more along the lines of city-states. Current-day Kryta, for instance, is unlikely to be more than a hundred miles in either direction, making it smaller than Belgium, although Divinity’s Reach, if to scale with the rest of the map, is probably bigger than Brussels.

To see how scaled down the world is you can go to Honor of the Waves. In the open world the land is really close to the Sanctuary. Like under 50 meters.

But if you go into the instance and can get a glimpse on the land you can see that the land in reality is much farther away than the open world would tell you. So you can get a glimpse on how big the areas must be.

draxynnic.3719:

Ghosts of Ascalon is probably the best reference: it takes roughly a day for the group to get from Ebonhawke to the southern part of Plains of Ashford, then roughly another day to get to Ascalon City itself. This suggests that the distance between Ebonhawke and Ascalon City is no more than 60 miles, probably less.

They set up camp three times. Once before hitting the Dragonbrand (Killeen still alive), once with the charr, and once right outside Ascalon City. They arrived in Ebonhawke in the middle of the night but iirc they left at dawn (I’d have to re-read), and there could have been times they camped which didn’t get brought up too.

But the time from Ebonhawke to Ascalon City, while avoiding charr patrols for half the route (particularly from Ebonhawke to the Dragonbrand – over a day’s journey, and with canyons in-between the two that don’t exist in the game), took at least 3 days and 2 nights (they made it on the third day, but camped for a third night because ghosts are worse at night).

So it wasn’t two days, but at minimum three (iirc, there is a line that implies more time/days passed than shown from when Killeen died and they encountered the charr). Mind you, they would have had to make stops for half to two-thirds of the journey.

draxynnic.3719:

It’s actually 1330. The year ticked over for the last release.

Ghosts of Ascalon is probably the best reference: it takes roughly a day for the group to get from Ebonhawke to the southern part of Plains of Ashford, then roughly another day to get to Ascalon City itself. This suggests that the distance between Ebonhawke and Ascalon City is no more than 60 miles, probably less.

This indicates that, while what we see ingame has been scaled down from what’s actually there, the nations of Tyria are still pretty small by modern standards, likely more along the lines of city-states. Current-day Kryta, for instance, is unlikely to be more than a hundred miles in either direction, making it smaller than Belgium, although Divinity’s Reach, if to scale with the rest of the map, is probably bigger than Brussels.

I hope you’re wrong, cause that’s a little depressing. Sorry to anyone from Belgium, but that’s fricking small, I was hoping for at least something like UK sized or something. From eye balling the map, that would make Tyria roughly the size of Montana. Its a big state, but its kinda small for an epic fantasy land with multiple races, monsters, and Lovecraftian Dragons. Dunno, just the idea of Tyria being so little is just kind of lackluster.
(Mind you, I’m aware of the maps that show how much more there is in the world, but at this point do any of you still think we’re going to see any of that?)

Ooh, estimates and math. This could be fun.

Going through the book again- there’s quite a bit of room for error, trying to derive an exact span of time from loose descriptions of day and night, but I loosely guesstimate that the trip from the Ebonhawke sewers to the Viewing Hill took about 35 hours of travel. (This is without trying to account for what summer at Ascalon’s latitude does to the length of a day, but since they traveled a good distance during day and night, it shouldn’t make a huge difference.) This includes travel through some patches of rough terrain, and travel after periods of combat and on little sleep… but most of the passages are about how the going was easy and they made good time, so assuming they made as straight a line as they could, I’m going to be very generous and give an upper estimate of 100 miles, and a lower estimate of around 70.

Comparing that to the size of the in-game map, the part of Tyria we can see would be no more than 771 miles to a side. That works out to an upper estimate of 594,522 square miles (not quite the size of Mongolia, four times the size of Montana) and a lower estimate of 291,316 (about the size of Chile or Zambia, or two Montanas).

That is a massive range, and it’s based on plenty of assumptions… but even the upper end still leaves us with pretty small countries by modern standards. To compare to drax’s findings, that’d put the inhabited parts of Kryta that we see sitting between 19,118 square miles (smaller than West Virginia, a little larger than Slovakia, 1.62 Belgiums) and 9,368 (about the size of New Hampshire, smaller than Macedonia, .79 Belgiums).

@Konig: I’d forgotten that they arrived at Ascalon around midnight: I’d thought they went in the same day as they arrived. On the other hand, I’d factored in lost time with being diverted to (and held at) the charr camp.

But yeah, Tyria is disappointingly small when you do the maths. Another consideration is that in GW1 the Shiverpeaks get crossed – by refugees with wagons, while occasionally having to stop while their escorts fight Stone Summit – with two, maybe three rest stops between Yak’s Bend and Lion’s Arch, in terrain that isn’t exactly suitable to maintaining a high pace. This sets an upper limit to just how large the Shiverpeaks, and by extension explorable Tyria, can be.

Hmm. Pre-Scarlet LA was a city of 40K people (per dev comments at the time of the attack), and one of the larger cities in known Tyria. That would fit in with the smaller scale, I suppose, but “disappointing” is a good word. Granted when transport is at the speed of foot if you don’t have a handy waypoint and the fees to cover it small distances can be quite serious. See medieval towns that might occasionally interact with a town one valley over …

Even so, if things jam up that tightly against each other in a world that does have waypoints, it’s hard to see how parochial divisions can remain or people can be ignorant of the customs and nature of the other races/lands.

So, I am doing a GW based d&d campaign. If we go by the 3 day rule of getting to Ascalon from Ebonhawk, taking a straight line, making a reasonable pace (d&d states a normal pace is 3 miles/hour or 24 miles per day over 8 hours of travelling and 2 hrs of rest throughout, which is also the average human walking pace per mile), assuming the travel for 10 hours and take the other 14 hours to make camp, cook, and sleep each night, you are looking at about 72 miles for a full 3 days. However, since they arrived on the last night, this suggests you have to subtract approximately 10 hours of night (assuming summer, and going by the Tyrian calendar which says a year still has 365 days with 4 seasons), which means it is 62 miles.

I then placed the official Tyrian map (so no scaling) on a grid, which shows 444 miles x 504 miles = 223776 square miles. This is more than twice the size of the UK. More than Twice the size of New Zealand. Smaller than Australia’s New South Wales, but roughly 60% bigger than Montana, about 19 times the size of Belgium. Almost the same size as Madagascar. Average COUNTRY size is only 282 square miles.

Now, that’s quite a large chunk for medieval times, especially when we consider Tyria’s population density. We don’t have much to go off of, but saying the LA is the largest/a larger city, if we just say every capital/major city has 40k people, hoping that the excess for smaller cities adds up to the amount of people in small villages around the map.

Ebonhawk, DR, BC, Grove, LA, RS, Hoelbrak = 280,000 people. that’s 0.8 square miles per person. That’s a LOT of space for one person. However, keep in mind this is not considering the skritt, centaurs, kodan, quaggan, and the other primitive races. It might be safer to say 2 square miles per person. That’s still a lot of area for the population.
Read: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm for town and city population. Medieval London occupied 40k people, much like LA. It is important to note that Tyria’s population would be in a severely reduced state, war between various factions, and the threat of the elder dragons and such, along with the typical concepts of illness, even with magic.

Jyenh.5739:

-snip-

All I can say is I hope you’re right.