Discussion on Tyria (world)

[Corsair]

The distance generated by the tilt is negligible, as is the fact that we are a good distance closer to the sun during the northern hemispheres winter than in the summer. The sun shines brightest when it is more direct, so unless modified by magic in some way, Elona is roughly equatorial. Also, on the globe itself, if that is intended to be a rough representation of Tyria, then Elona is indeed equatorial.

No ice at the southern pole can be explained by the fact that there isn't a whole lot down there, so instead they decided to make a more stylized version of the area down there; many modern globes do this as well, especially at the north pole. It is very stylized in the picture.

A possible reason why we don't have any lore referring to the moon or star of Tyria, is because the lore wasn't designed like that, and until further notice I will consider them as "just there."

[draxynnic]

Certainly, one of the globes I grew up with had no ice on the north pole - it was concerned with showing continental land masses and didn't bother distinguishing between open oceans and floating ice.

Of course, a simpler explanation could be that that far south just hasn't been explored yet. Looking at 17th-century maps of the southern oceans can be quite amusing, although I'm guessing that in Tyria there's a little less speculation involved with where they place the "here there be dragons" descriptors.

[Corsair]

My guess is, "Here there be nothing that wants to kill you." sort of deal

[Joiry]

Originally Posted by Konig Des Todes

I'm not a geologist or an astrologist or whatever the term may be, so things like where and why the sun is brightest is not my forte. Apologies. But still you're assuming that Tyria acts like Earth, which is why Elona may not be equilateral.

I didn't assume this. I offered it as a possible explanation. And its not a "Earth" thing. Its a physics thing. If you have globe, an atmosphere, a big lightsource, tilt or no tilt, parts of the sphere are going to be hit with more direct light than others.

The first one posted in the thread is the one I was referring to - the one focused on the Orrery not the building of the Orrery. Orreries are heliocentric because it is known that the sun is in the center. If Tyria is in the center, then the Tyrian Orrery won't be heliocentric - that's simplicity and your argument that all orreries are heliocentric is mute. If Earth was in the center of the universe, then orreries would be geocentric.

I was only pointing out how Orreries are defined in the wiki article. I even point out it may be different in Tyria. But, again (and again, and again), Anet draws on our world for inspiration (since we know of no others). It is, in fact, less speculative to think of the orrery as heliocentric and as tyria-centric. Orreries seem to exist specifically to show heliocentric systems.

As for why I think Tyria is in the center, is because as explained in the post in which I linked the concept art of the Orrery on the previous page, it appears as if there is texture indicating Tyria and Elona - though distorted. Along with that, I wouldn't find it unlikely that Tyrians are much like humans in the past, where we believed earth was in the center, they believe Tyria is in the center - as such, they'll make a geocentric orrery, whether the orrery is accurate in that account is not the point, but rather that is what Tyrians think.

See, here I think you're being the sort of "blindly speculative" you decry in others posts, but fail to see in your own. Trying to make out the continents on the central globe is pretty speculative. Especially since the rest of the texturing doesn't fit it at all. And while there are old earth cultures that believed in a geocentric model, it wasn't as certain as the typical textbook seems to make it out to be. The ancient greeks had a much better conception of the solar system than what the medieval church wanted people to believe.

Personally, I'm against all mindless speculation, but speculation based off of something, such as the lack of a southern pole on what appears (to me) to be Tyria, while extremely loose, is not mindless.

I understand your frustrations, and personally enjoy some of your posts against the more clueless posters. But, to me, it seems those with reasonable ideas get a much harsher treatment from you than ideas of an equal level speculation on your part. We all have biases.

[Gmr Leon]

Originally Posted by Joiry

And while there are old earth cultures that believed in a geocentric model, it wasn't as certain as the typical textbook seems to make it out to be. The ancient greeks had a much better conception of the solar system than what the medieval church wanted people to believe.

I know Konig and I work against irrelevant posts, but I would just like to say here that I am incredibly happy you're also familiar with this information. Personally, I'm not entirely sure what to think of this orrery concept art, partly because of whether or not it even matters, and partly because I'm not sure how they would have any idea of how large the sun would be.

[Konig Des Todes]

The part which assumes a similarity between Earth and Tyria is the equilateral aspect.

As for heliocentric or geocentric, it could be either or - and even though Anet uses reality as inspiration, they do use history as well. Given the time frame and technology of the world, it would not be a far to say that they believe it to be geocentric. There may be even a person or group who believes the solar system is heliocentric while everyone else believes it to be geocentric.


As for my speculation, I have already noted that it is highly possible that I am just seeing things, but just to state why the texturing doesn't fit at all, there's two reasons: Firstly, it's concept art and more focusing on the orrery than the planet. Secondly, even in game, the Tyrian globe may not be accurate to our world map due to it being made to be more man-made than a bird's eye view which our maps are. Not to mention that I was speculating that the center could be Tyria for the above - it was still rather accepted that Earth was geocentric during the time before the Renaissance (even though it was through the church's actions mainly), so if Anet draws inspiration on that then it wouldn't be unlikely that Tyrians view it to be flat and then later on just geocentric.

Three possibilities is more than no possibilities.

As for the "harsher treatment" - any "harsh" treatment has been to procreate discussion by trying to get people to fill in the holes that I poke, or hope that they do. But I've been told that pushes discussion away, so I guess to create bigger discussions I should just say "yes that makes perfect sense!" even if it makes no sense then. -_-

[Joiry]

Well, I'd been working on a big post about latitudes and climate, but I ended up going in a different direction (tho I will likely get back to that).

Yes, I know all this is based on a more physics/geology interpretation of Tyria. Yes, it could "just be magic", but, as someone said earlier in the thread, waving the wand is not very intellectually interesting.

So, let's assume Tyria has some kind of plate tectonic sytem. It might be with a more convential spherical planet like we know, but I could imagine some plate system working with a flat world concept as well, just with a different variation of forces underlying the plates.

Kryta has a subtropical climate, next door the very cold Shiverpeaks, and then the temperate climate of Ascalon. Its been suggested before, this is all due to altitude above sea level. The panhandle of Florida, which is subtropical, is about 30 degrees north latitude, but then so is Nepal, Tibet and the Himalayas.

We could imagine there are at least 2 plates, the Kryta-Maguuma plate, and the Shiverpeak-Ascalon plate. Much like the Indian subcontinent plate colliding with the Eurasian pushed up the Himalayan region. You'll note in this map of India, there's actually a fairly flat basin for the Ganges river. It shows you could have a relatively low lying area like Kryta before the rather imposing Shiverpeaks with this sort of plate boundary. The Ascalon plateau would be akin to Tibet, though perhaps not quite as high. From an Ascalon perspective, the Blazeridge mountains would not seem too high, but once you travel east past them, looking back they are higher since perhaps the land out east is at a much lower level than the plateau.

I think there would be at least one more major plate, which would be the Unending Ocean plate. This offers the potential of the Ring of Fire islands to be along a plate border, much like the Pacific Ring of Fire results from plate borders. It also gives a boundary line somewhere in the region of Orr, which I think would fit in nicely.

In fact, its possible Orr is its own mini-plate. Before we learned of its rising for GW2, I had always thought that Orr mostly just blew up, and the "sinking" was more the sea rushing into the vast crater. I've never liked the idea of large land masses "sinking" as if they were a boat (because there is all this rock below that needs to disappear).

As a separate plate, the whole Orrian plate may have been pulled down by the vast energies Khilbron unleashed (we still don't really know much about this). And similarly, it certainly fits with the scale of the elder dragons power to raise it up, something that might "naturally" occur on a geological time scale (and energy). Here's a good map of Earth's plates, available in a variety of sizes. Note all the small plates/boundaries throughout the Indonesian and South China Sea areas. I could easily see that being the case for the Ring of Fire Islands and with Orr as the eastmost sub-plate (but far larger than the other mini-plates), under the stresses of the triple vertex where the three major plates meet.



I've used the more symbolic, player made map, simply because its a bit clearer to draw lines on. I know the geography is more abstract, but its the major outlines that I care about. There's a lot of ways to shift the plate boundaries around and still get the same basic effect. I let the blue boundary line just trail off because there are just so many possibilities for it.

The Unending Ocean plate might be divergent from the two northern plates - ie it is moving away. It would explain the Ring of Fire volcanoes, and a sort of rift valley effect which is creating the gulf leading into the Crystal Desert and up into the southern Shiverpeaks (this could be a smaller fault/boundary system).

Another idea is that the K-M and S-A plates are a lateral boundary, they are grinding past each other, much like the west coast of the US. I don't know if that sort of boundary would be sufficient to push up mountains as high as the Shiverpeaks (but then, we don't know really how high they are). The thing I like about this idea is it might allow for some other massive change Anet decides to to this region. The transform boundary both pushed up the US west coast mountains, but also produced the Gulf of California. The raising of the Orrian Plate could send a lot of stress and energy through the rest of the boundary areas, causing a fair amount of changes that normally occur over long geologic periods.

Anyway, I've thought of several other variations, but the post is getting pretty long.

Bookend disclaimer: yes, its Tyria, not Earth, we know nothing for sure, it could just be the gods/magic/gremlins/etc... (tho just to throw a random idea out, you could imagine a "sandwich" flat world, with a Tyria as the topside bread, some thickness of toasty hot magma in the middle, and then an underside crust)

[draxynnic]

As the person who's normally waving the "It could be magic!" flag, I actually do like it when people work theories based on the assumption that some aspect of Tyria works in a similar manner to the real world. What I don't like is when someone says "It MUST work this way, because this is how it works in the real world!" No. No, it doesn't - gravity on Tyria may well be caused by angels pushing down on everything else for all we know. In fact, there are hints that there is something off with gravity in Tyria in that even projectiles that would be expected to be lighter than air or otherwise not significantly influenced by gravity (such as bolts of plasma or spears of photons) still show projectile motion.

As long as you don't claim it's the only possibility, go ahead and theorise - I only jump down people's throats if they claim a certainty that doesn't exist.

For what it's worth, your theory is pretty much in line with my own thoughts - I've hypothesised myself that the Shiverpeaks and possibly the Blazeridge Mountains as well represented boundaries between tectonic plates, although I didn't take my analysis as far as you did.

[Konig Des Todes]

I haven't read the whole thing, skimmed most of it, but on the Orr bit: I think what happened isn't so much that the plate fell or split (that's be very hard) but rather that it was a combination of the underground catacombs collapsing and the ground above where Khilbron was exploding upwards and outwards (Khilbron was underground, but probably not as deep as he could of gone, as such the explosion would of forced things both down and up - the ground below him crumbled, the ground above him bursted out).

[TedTheShred]

Caveat: This is meant to instill a sense of scale, not crunch precise numbers.

This assumes that Tyria is a globe roughly the same size as Earth. The Orrey images from the GDC Slideshow in conjunction with the spheres at the Astralarium and the Nahpui Quarter (both observatory-like locales) suggest such.

I've done some math to determine how large Known Tyria is in comparison with Tyria the planet.

It's roughly 0.034%

Here's my math, it's merely conjecture, but it's only meant to give a rough sense of scale:

A Redditer put together a comparison chart of game maps. Part of this chart indicates that the map of Elona is roughly 38,850 km^2.

Elona = 38,850 km^2

This is my start point.

Next, I need to know how large Elona is compared to the rest of Known Tyria. We'll take one of the community maps. I've chosen Jenosavel's Antique Map.

Using some pretty simple pixel counting and cross multiplication, this map represents Elona as 14.45% of Known Tyria.

Elona = 38,850 km^2 = 14.45% of Known Tyria

Some more simple math and I'm able to coax out some more important numbers from this percentage:

Tyria = 98,132 km^2 = 36.5% of Known Tyria
Cantha = 35,059 km^2 = 13.04% of Known Tyria
Elona = 38,850 km^2 = 14.45% of Known Tyria
Battle Isles = 2213 km^2 = 0.823% of Known Tyria

Known Tyria = 268,856 km^2

Now, this Known Tyria number includes bodies of water, and seeing as how we don't know distances between Cantha, Tyria, Elona, nor the Battle Isles; so let's remove all but lakes, bays and channels:

Adjusted Known Tyria = 174,254 km^2

As we all know, Earth's surface is 510,072,000 km^2

Finally the last comparisons, with an added Earth-Counterpart for sense of scale:

Tyria = 98,132 km^2 || Switzerland
Cantha = 35,059 km^2 || Taiwan
Elona = 38,850 km^2 || Guinea-Bissau
Battle Isles = 2213 km^2 || Comoros
Known Tyria = 174,254 km^2 || Uruguay
Earth = 510,072,000 km^2

Ramifications?

First and foremost, there is so much more planet to explore!

Even if my estimates are 100 times too low, we'll have only discovered 3% of the whole picture, an area the size of Russia.

What we've played is akin to the Mediterranean conflicts of Earth's ancient Byzantine empire. A tiny slice of the world's history.

[4thVariety]

The oceans are just a puddle on the crust of the Earth, if you look at it from a planetary scale. Something sinking to the bottom of the ocean is therefore a pretty ridiculous notion.


How one could pull it off (in fantasy settings)

Joiry is right with saying the huge shiverpeak mountain range and the volvanic activities around Orr is already an indication for there being at least two tectonic plates, if not three. Those plates push together, most likely forcing the "Krytan" plate beneath the Ascalonian plate and pushing up the Shiverpeaks in the process. If the Lich somehow chipped the crust in a way that Orr became its own tectonic plate, then it would have instantly become a very very weak link. The overwhelming mass of the surrounding plates would have caused a spike in pressure against the newly created Orrian tectonic plate. Behind Orr, there were also mountains, so the pressure was already there, it just discharged by raising those mountains. Depending on how the new crack in the crust is shaped, the new-found orrian plate would have started to raise or to sink. Right now the new fault line points away from the center of Orr the deeper the crack goes. This is why the surrounding plates slide on top of the orrian plate pushing it down. If the Zaitan creates a new crack, one that makes the orrian plate more shaped like a wedge with the tip pointing towards the planet's core, then the whole thing could rise again, albeit not in one day. Simple physics on a ridiculous scale.

[Sirius]

I would like to point out that the comparison chart is complete bollocks - the amount of content in the Nightfall map is far less than that - but that's because of downscaling, so it's not unlikely that the reported size is how large it's supposed to be.

Even then, yes, it's a lot smaller than any Earth continent.

[Harjubal od Uo]

It's important to keep in mind that the maps that we have of each individual area are metaphorical or representative, not literal.

There is not, literally, only one village in all of Ascalon. There are not, literally, just a few walls and a giant tuba making up the great citadel of Fort Aspenwood. There are not, literally, only two or three buildings in the entire city of Kamadan. All of the areas which we actually walk around in are just representative of much vaster distances and much more elaborate architecture which lie between all of the metaphorical landmarks which we're allowed to see in-game. Everything that we see is there only so that we can get a general feeling for what each part of the world looks like, not so that we can actually explore every last centimeter of each continent.

I do suspect that the world (travel) maps are likely accurate in relation to the general topography and geography of Tyria (especially before being revealed), but trying to calculate how big a particular area of the world is in meters or kilometers by counting how many steps we take, or using any other sort of calculation which relies on measuring the actual zones which we can walk around in, would be completely inaccurate because the game engine just can't show us that the Plains of Jarin are much, much larger than the kilometer or two across (if that) that we actually walk in-game. Or that the entire Jade Sea is much larger than the lake-sized slice which we're actually able to explore.

So, appreciate the consistency of the worldmap, such as it is, and assign whatever random kinds of numbers you want to its legend, but don't try to draw any sort of real correlation between the worldmap and the actual areas that we walk in. That would be like trying to draw a correlation between the actual size of the Earth and Epcot at Disney World. One is real and the other is just a metaphor to give you a general feel for what's actually out there.

[Operative 14]

Originally Posted by TedTheShred

What we've played is akin to the Mediterranean conflicts of Earth's ancient Byzantine empire. A tiny slice of the world's history.

This I think the main gist of the post though. Yes, the estimations are just estimations and the argument that the world on the map that we walk around in is only a representation of the world and does not literally represent the world has a great deal of merit. However what I've always thought is that Tyria, as we've played it, was more representative of a Mediterranean Basin with many local powers vying for control over a relatively small part of the world. I think just saying that what we've seen is the entirety of the world, or at least the Tyria/Elonian/Canthan portions of the world we've seen is akin to, say, the Eurasian/African/Indian supercontinent really boxes in and limits the chance for expansion.

Just wanted to ask;

Anyone notice the scribe mentioned the travel time between Cantha and Kryta?

Originally Posted by SCRIBE RETURNS FROM INVOLUNTARY OVERSEAS JOURNEY June 29th

After a long sea journey with inedible food and terrible weather, I arrived in Cantha… and promptly boarded the next ship bound for Kryta. This vessel was packed with salted reef lurker meat and stunk badly, but the winds favored us and we arrived back in Tyria in a week’s time.

How far can you travel on a sailing ship, with good winds, in a weeks time?

[Harjubal od Uo]

That's a great catch, Operative 14.

I'm no mariner at all but online sources say that a caravel, which has a very similar profile to the ships that we've seen in-game, would make an average of about 4 knots per day, 8 at their top speed.

Since the wind favored them, let's say that the Scribe was making about 6 knots per day which would be about 1,800 kilometers after a week's travel.

For comparison, the width of the Atlantic Ocean is about 2,800km between Brazil and western Africa, and the Mediterranean, at its widest (I assume that means between Venice and Libya) is only about 1,600km wide. The Mediterranean doesn't have nearly the kind of storm-tossed reputation that the Clashing Seas do, however, so this might not mean much in terms of the ease of crossing.

[Imrahil Greywood]

Originally Posted by Harjubal od Uo

It's important to keep in mind that the maps that we have of each individual area are metaphorical or representative, not literal................

-snip-

My thought exactly.
The only thing i could think of which accurately represents a populace is Kaineng city. But then we see that 7 fields in shing jea are feeding all of kaineng.

[Konig Des Todes]

Yesterday a friend who keeps tabs on all the sites that's been giving interviews says they discussed maps - and how in GW2 it'll be like google maps.

I gotta find this site so I can link it... and read it.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by Konig Des Todes

Yesterday a friend who keeps tabs on all the sites that's been giving interviews says they discussed maps - and how in GW2 it'll be like google maps.

I gotta find this site so I can link it... and read it.

Yes I remember that they said things about zooming and stuff but I don't remember where it was from.

[Thalador Doomspeaker]

I don't know where the guy got it, but I found this in the Map Speculation thread in Tyrian Assembly:

"Finally, we discussed maps. Maps may not be the most thrilling thing ever (that honor goes to high-speed dinosaur shootouts in space), but in massive open-world MMOs, they're an integral part of an enjoyable experience. "While it's not groundbreaking," admits Game Designer Ben Miller, "it's certainly a solid, core part of the overall game." For Guild Wars 2, the team looked at a lot of the newer mapping technology that has sprung up throughout the internet, and have utilized many of the same techniques as sites like Yahoo and Google Maps to make it easy to use, including the ability to click-and-slide and zoom in. Getting from one side of the map to another in the game world will likely require the use of an Asura Gate, which can be found in the main cities."

[sandor]

Found it's the IGN article about traits and stuff(killing time without killing)
http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/110/1102939p1.html
Here is the link