How big is the World of Warcraft map? With an area of ​​1,200 square kilometers, it is equal to a third-tier city

We often say that "World of Warcraft" is not just a game, but a world. How big is this world?

As we know, the unit used in the game is "yard" (yard), which is an imperial unit, 1 yard = 0.914 meters. In the game, the running speed is 7 yards per second, which is about 6.5 meters. So you can press Numlock (small keyboard), keep running, and then calculate the distance by counting the time. A simple calculation shows that one kilometer will be run every 153 seconds.

A simpler way is to take a bird: it is well known that top riding skills can increase the speed by 310%, which is 6.5*(1+310%)=26.65 meters per second, which is about 1600 meters per minute.

It’s interesting to use this speed to calculate: it takes about 3 minutes to fly from Stormwind to Booty Bay, so the distance is about 5000 meters. Similarly, fly to the northernmost Yongge Forest about 15,000 meters. So the height of the Eastern Kingdom totals 20,000 meters (20 kilometers). To scale it again, Kalimdor is almost 20 kilometers high, the "endless sea" between them is almost 20 kilometers wide, and the width of the entire map is 40 kilometers. Therefore, the area of ​​the entire World of Warcraft map or Azeroth is 30*40~=1200 square kilometers, of which the land area is about 200 square kilometers. According to the surface area formula of the spherical surface, S=4πr², it can be calculated that the diameter of the planet of Azeroth is 20 kilometers, which is equal to the distance between the fifth and sixth rings of Beijing.

For comparison, the diameter of the earth is 12,680 kilometers, which is more than 600 times that of Azeroth...

Or to put it another way, the total land area of ​​Azeroth is almost equal to the urban area of ​​a third-tier prefecture-level city in China. (For example, Liuzhou). In the game, the six main cities (two burned and four remaining) can be understood as the center of the six districts, so the area of ​​tens of square kilometers in each district is reasonable. But there is a problem here, there are too few people.

Even when there are most people, a server does not exceed 5000 people, plus NPCs and monsters, at most 10,000. Considering that there are two main cities that are actually ghost cities (Danasus and Thunder Bluff), there may be four to five hundred people in the main city at the same time. In extreme cases (such as siege), it will reach 1,000, and there can be no more. What is the concept of 1,000 people? An ordinary high school has this number. So dignified in Azeroth, just a few high schools?

In fact, there is a claim to this population density: the population density of Azeroth is 50 people per square kilometer (including NPC), which is about the same as the population density of the earth (51.64 people/km2), and there are many uninhabited people on the earth. Some places like Siberia are 13 million square kilometers (more than Canada). There are only 40 million people in such a big place, with an average of 3 people per square kilometer. In this comparison, there is no such kind of "extraordinarily desolate" in World of Warcraft, and there is no place to see any creatures after running for 1 minute (400 meters), even if it is a particularly desolate and desolate "desolate place", " Desolate place", in fact, there are strange tasks. On the contrary, in some inaccessible "no man's land" such as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, you can drive for a day without seeing people, let alone walking.

Conversely, in the main city, especially auction houses or banks, there are usually at least dozens of people wandering all year round, and the local density is not as good as that of Japan’s “Don Quixote” or China’s Macau (believe it or not, The population density of Macau is 20,000 people per square kilometer) but it can be considered crowded. After all, online games have a data exchange problem. At the same time, more people online will get stuck, so it’s good to be able to do this. Don't forget that the national service was just opened back then, and the road was too crowded to walk, a group of people scolded the server in the chat channel... So, the size of this number is understandable.

finally let us be boldImagine: in the future, is it possible for World of Warcraft to make a version of the "ten thousand nation war"?

Judging from the engine used, it is unlikely. The bravest attempt in this regard was the Winter Grip Lake and Ashland that year. At the beginning, I wanted to do "full map indiscriminate chaos", but the engine couldn’t stand it and got stuck. Later, it changed to linear battle, which made it more interesting. reduce. Now I don’t do it at all. Every time I engage in big chaos and things like that, it’s fun to be honest...

In other words, not all games are suitable for the "Ten Thousand Nations War", and those who fight this The game of this kind of slogan actually did not really realize the ten thousand nation war, either using the leaderboard asynchronous battle, or the character has no action or even can hide the web version. If you really want to make real-time actions and read the article to interrupt the relatively hard-core battle with the difference between the front and the back, it is impossible for 10,000 people on the same screen. On the other hand, this is actually unnecessary. Everyone who has played Okuyama knows that the last alliance rushed to the gate and the tribe rushed to the bridge. At that time, it was basically a long-range AOE, and the equipment may almost die before halfway. The more people there are, the smaller they are. It's better to fight with 5 copies to have the pleasure.

From this point of view, the world of 200 square kilometers is already large enough for individual players. It is said that many people have spent their entire lives in the district where his home is, attending elementary school, middle school, university, going to work, working, getting married... and have never gone out. Such a life may only have an area of ​​tens of square kilometers. Would he think that Azeroth is indeed a larger world?