Guild Wars 2

What’s your opinion about that? I think the cities/towns/buildings are at least 5 times bigger than in-game, not sure about the terrain and distances though. Anyone knows how long would it take to run from one side of the world map to another without speed buffs?

I would guess the scale is much greater than 1:5 and not necessarily universal. I suspect some of the zones would be hundreds of miles across and realistically take days to travel across. The cities I would describe as being smaller, Divinity’s reach may be a mile or so across. Somewhere, there is a globe of the planet that would give some idea of the scale if we knew the diameter.

In Ghosts of Ascalon, it takes at least 3+ days of night travel to reach Ascalon City from Ebonhawke. And they went more or less straight, whereas we players have to go around – and still take less than 30 minutes. So basically take that distance, and expand it wide enough to take 3 or 4 nights of travel with resting during the day.

Like Psientist said, I think the scaling changes. Arguably, I’d say that the dungeons are the “most accurate” when it comes to locational scale, but they still may be a bit on the small size. Southsun Cove I’d argue may also be rather accurate in size, but the rest much bigger than we see it as making it not so intrusive in the Sea of Sorrows as it seems in our world map.

Aside from the distanced maps like Southsun, however, I don’t think zone scaling changes (that much).

Overall, I’d say the world map of Tyria we see should be at least the size of Europe. Though Orr is repeatedly called a continent on its own right (I presume mistakenly but you never know).

The Shiverpeaks

From where she stood, Devona could look down and down until all below her was lost in a gauzy whiteness that obscured completely where one mountain stopped and the other began. To the west, she could see far into the distance, days ahead of where she stood right now. The Shiverpeaks were huge, more massive than anything she’d ever seen.

P.S. As for height, it’s been said that The Shiverpeaks is higher than 10.000 feet (3000m) above sea level.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

In Ghosts of Ascalon, it takes at least 3+ days of night travel to reach Ascalon City from Ebonhawke. And they went more or less straight, whereas we players have to go around – and still take less than 30 minutes. So basically take that distance, and expand it wide enough to take 3 or 4 nights of travel with resting during the day.

Like Psientist said, I think the scaling changes. Arguably, I’d say that the dungeons are the “most accurate” when it comes to locational scale, but they still may be a bit on the small size. Southsun Cove I’d argue may also be rather accurate in size, but the rest much bigger than we see it as making it not so intrusive in the Sea of Sorrows as it seems in our world map.

Aside from the distanced maps like Southsun, however, I don’t think zone scaling changes (that much).

Overall, I’d say the world map of Tyria we see should be at least the size of Europe. Though Orr is repeatedly called a continent on its own right (I presume mistakenly but you never know).

To the bold;

I think that is very difficult to measure. All of the zone maps are rectangles which can’t be realistic. I think the zone maps are abstracted representations of geography and the scaling fluctuates within zones as well.

The borders of zones are by far abstract representations as it would be pretty much impossible for mountains to form like that – and so would, in turn, the borders of the areas called “Kessex Hills” “Brisban Wildlands” etc. Similarly, due to scaling, places may be ‘lacking’ or hills completely missing, in terms of lore to visuals, as we can’t really expect everything to simply expand – rather, I’d argue that in most cases a small batch of trees is equivalent to a small patch of woods; a single patch of small farmland that barely hits 1 acre is equivalent to a 20+ acre farm.

But I doubt this means that the scaling for Gendarran Fields is any different than the scaling for Kessex Hills, etc.