Runescape open map6/24/2023 RuneScape's map is made out of " chunks" about 200 by 200 pixels in size each chunk is loaded separately in-game and often has a unique background music track. Sorry, Narzulbur.Īligning Skyrim to a grid helped to make the map seem more RuneScape-like in another, more subtle way. It did mean that occasionally a location from Skyrim had to be cut for space, but I always tried to prioritise keeping the most iconic places. The resulting scale is a compromise: roughly 15% of the map is covered by towns and cities, less than RuneScape but much more than Skyrim. The first thing I did was try to figure out how I could do this while still representing Skyrim as closely as possible. Instead, my plan was to enlarge cities and shrink the surrounding wilderness, just like RuneScape does. Although the map might look like Skyrim, it would not feel at all like RuneScape. Skyrim, by contrast, has much larger areas of open wilderness. I think this is in part because RuneScape is a multiplayer game with an emphasis on player interaction, while Skyrim is single-player another reason could be RuneScape's slightly greater emphasis on non-combat skills (which exist in Skyrim but play a smaller role).Īll of this means that drawing Skyrim in RuneScape's style would not simply be a case of tracing over one map with the colour palette of the other. In the oldest areas, they take up about a third of the map. In RuneScape, cities and towns are inflated relative to their surroundings. The two games also differ in what they emphasise. Skyrim, where "major city" means twenty buildings The world of RuneScape spans several kingdoms (also meant to be country-sized), but is compressed in-game to an area less than five square kilometres. Skyrim, from a story perspective, is meant to be the size of a real-world country, but in-game the world is about 37 square kilometres in size. The challenge with translating Skyrim to RuneScape's style is that the two games treat scale very differently. A city might have thousands of inhabitants according to the story, but creating all of them would be a significant waste of resources if only a dozen are relevant to the player. The wealth of resources available for map-making fans means the style is not too tricky to replicate (despite my limited artistic skill).Īlmost all video games distort scale. RuneScape's retro, pixellated map evokes a lot of nostalgia for those (like me) who spent a lot of their childhoods using it. Why choose Skyrim and RuneScape for a cartographical crossover? Skyrim is one of the best-selling role-playing games of all time, making the eponymous province one of the most famous video game worlds ever crafted. Both titles had an impact which lasted long after their original release: they are still played, they are still talked about and they continue to spawn memes. The player takes the role of an adventurer who goes on quests, defeats monsters and hones their skills at combat and crafting. Both games are set in fantasy worlds with wizards, elves and dragons. Each game in the series is set in a different region of the fantasy continent of Tamriel the fifth game is set in the cold northern province of Skyrim, heavily influenced by Norse mythology. Skyrim, the fifth title in The Elder Scrolls series, was released by American developer Bethesda Game Studios in 2011. The distinctive world map style I was seeking to emulate first appeared in 2004, and is still used in the game' s Old School fork:Įxcerpt from official RuneScape world map RuneScape was originally released by British developer Jagex in 2001. (You can almost certainly skip this section if you're familiar with RuneScape and Skyrim - and if you're here from Reddit or Twitter, you almost certainly will be) After a bit of background on the two games which motivated it, I'll say a little bit about three aspects which brought interesting challenges: the scale, the terrain, and the icons on top. Skyrim map in the style of RuneScape ( full-size version)įor those curious to know more, the rest of this post will describe the process of making the map in a little more detail. My most recent geeky project has been to take the map from the video game Skyrim and translate it into a more retro style, re-imagining it in the style of another video game, RuneScape: A map can also be one of the biggest sources of nostalgia when looking back at a world that was once very familiar. When encountering a new world for the first time, few things fuel the imagination quite like a map.
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