How big is World of Warcraft?
World of Warcraft has been described as a vast on-line world where you the player get to explore expansive environments. When it was first released players were limited to two large continents with some smaller islands. However expansion packs have added new areas for players to explore increasing size of the game world. But how big is it really? The only way to find out is to do some calculations.
As judging distance is tricky within the game world we will rely on one of the few known character abilities that proactively use distance. The Mage class are one of the primary magic users in the game and can use spells to great effect. One of these spells is called Blink. Blink immediately teleports the caster 20 yards forward (25 yards if a Blink glyph is used). As this is a guaranteed in-game way of measuring distance this spell was used extensively for this exercise.
A screenshot of the map from the second World of Warcraft expansion. Note that although this map is fairly accurate a game generated map was used.
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The first step was to select two landmarks that were some distance apart but were also on the same line of latitude. The Blink spell was used multiple times to measure the distance between the points. In this case it took 45 Blinks to reach the target resulting in a distance travelled of 1125 yards (25 yards per Blink). What we needed to do now was match that distance against a map. The in-game map is only a painted representation of the world so a game generated one was downloaded off the internet.
Once we had the map we measured the distance in pixels (121 in this case) giving us a ratio of 9.3 yards per pixel on the map. After this the map was blacked out and a white background was used. In a graphics program the number of black pixels were counted which represented the game world (1386000 in this case).
A comparison between the artistic in-game map and the actual map created by the game engine.
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We then reshaped the world into a square for ease of use (1177 x 1177 = 1386000). Using our ratio this meant that each side of the square was 10946 yards long, or 10009m long. This gave a final area of 100.2 square kilometers for one continent (and islands). The other continent was calculated at 134.4 square kilometers giving us a total of 234.6 square kilometers (90.6 square miles).
This land area of 234.6 square kilometers includes all swimmable water (not fatigue induced water) and all of the land mass including parts currently unavailable for exploration. However it gives us a good appreciation of how large the area is.
This exercise was repeated with the first expansion pack called "The Burning Crusade" with the new high level Outland zone. This was calculated at 53.3 square kilometers (excluding the new low level starting zones). The second expansion pack called "Wrath of the Lich King" introduced the continent of Northrend which has a size of 78.6 square kilometers. This is interesting as after the first expansion was released there was some backlash over the small size of Outland. This was obviously addressed in the second expansion.
As a fun exercise we also calculated how fast a 100% speed ground mount goes. This was worked out as 45 kph (28 mph).
Although the areas may not seem like much on paper they contain a wealth of quests, dungeons and challenges to test even the most experienced player. It is fair to say that it is the quality of World of Warcraft that has made it an international success, not the size of the game environment.
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