After trying my hand at adapting Skyrim's world map to the style of RuneScape, I was in search of another location that could work well with that distinctive pixellated look. Stormwind City, the largest human settlement in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, is one of the most iconic cities in gaming, so seemed like an obvious choice.
 |
| Stormwind map in the style of RuneScape |
There isn't too much to say on methodology. In fact, the biggest practical challenge when researching the map was persuading my brother to let me borrow his World of Warcraft account so that I could fly around and take screenshots of the city layout.
 |
| Stormwind as it appears in World of Warcraft |
For those who are curious, this is what the map looks like without the icon and text label layers:
 |
| Map without icons or labels |
How ambitious a task would it be to adapt the whole of World of Warcraft to RuneScape's style? Obviously the short answer is "very", but we can get a more precise answer with some back-of-the-envelope calculation.
When adapting Skyrim, my quick-and-dirty way of planning out the map was to allocate Skyrim's cities and adventuring sites to RuneScape's 192-by-192-pixel "chunks". Generally, RuneScape has one major feature per chunk, with a few big locations (like cities) occupying multiple chunks.
We can see this in the map below, which takes the official Old School RuneScape world map (as of December 2020) and labels the main feature each chunk. The game world has about 450 chunks of landmass, around half of which contain some kind of landmark. Chunks coloured blue are mostly ocean, while grey chunks are currently "unknown" and appear black on the official map.
 |
| Outline of RuneScape's map (full-size version) |
If we took the map of World of Warcraft's Eastern Kingdoms (where Stormwind is situated) and allocated the main locations to RuneScape-style chunks, we would get something like the below:
 |
| World of Warcraft's Eastern Kingdoms divided into chunks (full-size version) |
If the map above were used as a basis for a full map, the whole Eastern Kingdoms (excluding underground and underwater areas) would take up about 270 RuneScape chunks. The whole map would be 3264 by 8064 pixels in size.
Add in Kalimdor (the other continent dating back to "classic" World of Warcraft) and you have another 300 or so chunks to map. The two continents, with a combined landmass larger than the whole world of RuneScape, would almost definitely make for a mapping task too large for any one person to take on!
