Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you’re running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of a two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.
Video game travel always has that weird feel to it, too. For instance, in the Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim, you can run from one city to another in roughly a minute. Even if we very generously assume you’re running at ~15 MPH (which would be crazy fast for any distance), that would put them about a quarter mile apart. At more realistic speeds, 1/8 or so.
In WoW, Eastern Kingdoms is much smaller than you’d think.
https://youtu.be/T4gsxVtJl7A
spoiler
About the size of Manhatten, New York
There is (was) rather infamously a mod for Morrowind which removes the fog. Said fog was required to conceal the render distance limitations of the hardware of its time, but these days basically any random computer can render the entire Morrowind map in one go which reveals that in fact it’s smaller than Disney World. Morrowind has the smallest map out of any of the Elder Scrolls titles to my knowledge, and it’s surreal to see all the towns and landmarks all nestling practically shoulder to shoulder like that.
Skyrim does an excellent job of making its lands look vast, but the geography is similarly compressed. The climb from lush valleys to frozen windswept peaks is only something like the equivalent of a two thousand real world feet, which wouldn’t even qualify as anything more than a foothill to the Rockies here in reality. The Throat of the World which is canonically supposed to be the tallest mountain is actually only 766.5 meters or 2514 feet tall in map scale terms, which isn’t even a third of the way to breaking the treeline in most places.
San Andreas has a similar effect when removing the fog. The map looks comically small.
Gotta suspend some reality though. I get walking simulators are a thing, but to do a quest you would need to travel a couple full days by horse? And filling in that content too, just doesn’t work in most games.