WoW cities don't really feel like cities

[Bitehattori]

its because the scale is down. I saw somewhere that it would take a month to get from north to south barrens if they made it to scale.

I think it was in WC3 where the Orc grunt is like ''We've been moving through this land for X! I'm bored!''

[Aeula]

It's weird, when i first played wow and came to stormwind I thought 'Oh this must be one of the smaller cities in the game'. I genuinely thought the alliance capital would be bigger.

Had a different effect when I first saw Ironforge though, THAT felt like a city.

However I expected orgrimmar to be a collection of small huts with a big one for the warchief (The first time i'd heard about a 'warchief' was when I was sent to org at the end of the ghostlands questline), basically like a mongol camp, imagine my surprise to see steel buildings and spikes everywhere, that felt like....well overkill, I never liked org really.

Silvermoon felt like a true city too, It's still my favorite in the game and has always fascinated me, I expected a more grand entrance though, it felt literally like a side passage (Which is what it was supposed to feel like considering the rest of the city is damaged)

But yeah, it's a split of opinion for me, some cities feel like 'cities' other's don't.

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In lore/canon, Goldshire has a population of 7000.


Yeeeaaaah....

In beta goldshire used to be HUGE, by they had to downscale it severely.

[Suikoden]

In lore/canon, Goldshire has a population of 7000.


Yeeeaaaah....

This both frightens and intrigues me.

[Gadzooks]

and that's not a bad thing, in fact it's a good thing.. it only becomes a problem when people have to travel around a lot, so they messed up there a bit, should have provided a lot of conveniences at every major base so you didn't have to fly back and forth for minor crap, the only time you needed to do was once in a blue moon special zone finishing or story arc finishing events that would grant you an audience with the king or warchief.

I know, that's why the dreaded FedEx quests in vanilla were so painful.

Blizzard has always been all about making players make meaningful choices...or were. Flights were long, so you couldn't go from Southshore to Booty Bay in a blink of an eye - you really had to want to go that far. One hearthstone, so you chose your "home" carefully (and when rested exp mattered, that mattered more). Limited bag space so you have to choose what to keep carefully. Etc. You had to physically find flight points and dungeon entrances.

That's one thing that I don't like about WoD - a lot of those choices we don't even get to make - especially in professions, but that's for another thread.

[MrSerious]

In lore/canon, Goldshire has a population of 7000.


Yeeeaaaah....

hahaahaha... wait, what?

that's a tight fit for 7000 in those two buildings.

honestly out of all the MMO's I've played WoW probably does the worst job of depicting a large city. But I never let that ruin the experience, sometimes spending a long time trying to get somewhere can be annoying.

[huth]

I was looking at warcraft 3, and the cinematics of Lorderon and Dalaran, and i was left thinking.. that in game, they look like miniature versions of what I saw.

That's because they are. On purpose. Making them realistically scaled and constructed would both be boring and not very cost effective to do. Or do you really want to run through large housing districts with no features of any interest to you just so the cities are more realistic in size and street plans?

Lorewise the southern coast of Northrend is 800 miles long. It's not even 8 miles ingame. The entire world isn't to scale because large areas of mostly empty space are boring and a waste of resources to make.

[Bathory]

While the story of WoW is canon, I wouldn't take what you see literally. First of all, the scale of the continents is much bigger than what you see. There are mentions in some of the books about a multi day trip from a distance that you can run in about 3-5 minutes. The world can't be as big as it is supposed to be due to computer limitations and practicality. About the cities, there are the same limitations. Some of these cities have thousands of people living in them. While modeling housing and public service buildings for all of these people might seem cool at first, it would get pretty boring. The cities are approximations of what the actual canon locations look like. If you want to see what they're really supposed to be like, wait for the movie.

This is how I always imagined it was. The game gives us the small version of the real world of Azeroth.