Part 6 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

Don't fence me in.

It occurred to me that this series is turning into nothing but a bitchfest, so I had better clarify that there is at least one thing that I like about World of Warcraft.

I like the scale of the world.

Most RPGs of the 1980s and 1990s tried to create a world-sized map by resorting to … a world-sized map. They gave the impression of large scale by changing to the small scale. Towns and dungeon interactions happened on a different scale than world map interactions.

But then developers tried to get rid of this cheater method by actually rendering the world and having he player’s character run through it just like an action adventure. This had some terrible results at first. Final Fantasy X and XII, while highly detailed, felt like they occurred in regions about half the size of the county in which I live. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind featured  a huge world, but it suffered from “asset reuse” syndrome.

WoW has its own cut ‘n’ paste and pallete-swapping issues, but the punchy art style and clever terrain modeling distracts me from most of these problems. The horizon never feels limited, even has the game babies my weakling hardware. The entire kingdom of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess could fit mostly within Mulgor and certainly within the confines of Mulgore and Durotar. Azeroth is effing huge.

Even though the world is hardly the size of even a small real world continent, that’s a good thing. It’s big enough to give a sense of isolation and danger on long quests, but small enough to keep from dispersing players too thinly and wrecking the social feel of the game.