Historical Guide to Cantha

 

It’s exactly two months after End of Dragon’s launched and I finally finished the brand new Historical Guide to Cantha! After spending ages staring at both the Guild Wars 1 and 2 maps I have to say they did another terrific job transitioning between both games.

The new guide is fully interactive and will be updated with every season 6 update in the future.

Enjoy!

Links

• Explore the Historical Guide to Cantha
• Download the Historical Guide to Cantha

Changelog

• I’ve decided to split up the Historical guide to Tyria and Cantha. Maintaining gigantic photoshop files with thousands upon thousands of layers is an immense pain. This makes it easier for me to update it in the future
• Almost everything in Guild Wars 2 lines up perfectly with the Guild Wars 1 map, but of course there are some minor differences mostly for technical or aesthetic reasons:
  • The harvest temple has been moved slightly west to line up better to the center of the Guild Wars 2 map
  • Shing Jea Island has been moved slightly south west but everything on it still lines up
  • The battle islands have been scaled up (they’re bigger in Guild Wars 2)
• The guide to Cantha is zoomed out slightly further than the guide to Kryta. Back in the day I decided to make the guide 10,000 x 10,000 pixels because that was the largest the image host would accept. This was a huge mistake because this also meant it was zoomed at 31.39223dfdsfe % (slight exaggeration) which made scaling and updating it a lot harder than it needed to be. The new guide is exactly 25% of the original Guild Wars 2 map.
• Improvements relevant to both guides:
  • A Guild Wars 2 styled navigation compass has been added to the bottom right to quickly navigate between maps and regions
  • The sides of the map no longer snap to the side of the screen
  • Generated URL coordinates are now rounded to two decimals on high DPI devices
  • Ancient urls from before 2017 no longer work. Make sure to update these if you still use them somewhere
• There are 199 points of interest, locations and zones on the new Guide and I probably missed one or two in the process, just let me know and I can put it on my todo list!

Cantha in an alternate timeline

So I was messing around a bit and wondered "how would Cantha look like if we sided with Jormag in the Icebrood Saga?". Answer: cool.

 

Shing Jea Island Map: stitched, cleaned and labeled

Shiver at the Peaks locations

These are the locations you need to visit to unlock the /shiverplus emote:

1. You need the shiver emote
2. When you're at the right spot the chilled icon will show up
3. /shiver for profit

Guild Wars - Interactive Map

Celebrating 15 years of Guild Wars and 8 years of that_shaman today I've been hard at work to create a fully interactive map of Guild Wars 1.

Cantha and Elona will follow next week and the week after and once these are both online I'll make the tiles and json data available free for anybody to use!

Guild Wars - Interactive Map

Realm of Torment Map

It's been a while since I made some GW1 maps but this time I decided to make a full overview map of the Realm of Torment based on the in game map.

• Realm of Torment Map
• Realm of Torment Map (labeled)

Undocumented world map change

The latest patch included a sneaky undocumented map change to the Domain of Vabbi:

• The northern border got a bit more detailed
• They added what looks like a road leading out of it to the north as well

The Domain of Vabbi hasn't been updated to reflect these changes yet but you can already see the new map tiles in game and we can guess what could be up there.

• Before / After

If you're having trouble seeing the differences between the old and new border I've highlighted the changes in this image

Map of Thunderhead Peaks including all underground sections

I've spent some time to stitch together the complete map of Thunderhead Peaks showing all underground sections in a single image. Including:

• Dwarven Catacombs
• The Forge
• The Grotto
• The Auditorium
  

Daybreak Gates

In the last story instance in Fahranur our beloved overlord and ruler Taimi Joko sends his minions to invade Tyria via a bunch of Inquest gates. I've tracked down the images that show where these gates lead to and located them on the map, except for one, an unknown inquest base.

• Inquest Gate Targets

Changes made to the world-map

As you probably have noticed ArenaNet updated the world map in the latest patch and they've made some subtle and not so subtle changes to it. I've already updated my Historical Guide with the updated files so you can get an idea what's there.

Unused Map Instances from Path of Fire

It's been almost two months since Path of Fire launched and I haven't seen anybody write about this yet but there's a small unused map instance that we never got to visit.

Facts:

• It shares the same data file as Kesho / Domain of the Lost / The first fight with Balthazar
• There are two "rooms" that are walled off with invisible walls and are separated by a portal
• A second portal can be found in the smaller "room"
• In the north western corner of the map there's a very basic copy of Skritt's Audience making it possible to place it on the world map.

• Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire - Unused Map Instances

the Historical Guide to Tyria - Path of Fire

Hello everybody,

I've just updated my Historical Guide, new in this version:

• Crystal Oasis
• Desert Highlands
• Elon Riverlands
• The Desolation
• Domain of Vabbi
• Fixed several spelling mistakes
• Added new points of interest

You can always find downloads over here.

High resolution maps

Here are all the high resolution maps from Path of Fire, feel free to use them in any way you see fit.

Zones

• Crystal Oasis
• Desert Highlands
• Elon Riverlands
• The Desolation
• Domain of Vabbi

Guild Halls

• Windswept Haven

Instances

• Library of Kormir
• Glint's Lair
• Miscellaneous

World

• Explored world map
• Unexplored world map

the Historical Guide to Tyria Version 3 - Extended Map and Nightfall!

I've been working very hard on this brand new version of my guide for several weeks and with the new world map the historical guide has grown bigger than before, featuring:

• Brand new world map!
• Over 100 new PoI's, outposts and zone borders from Guild Wars Nightfall
• Extra zoom levels and backwards compatibility with version 2 URLs

Small spoiler warning: this map includes this weekend's beta zone (but non of that leaked stuff)

Links and Info

• the Historical Guide to Tyria - Version 3
• Downloads

Downloads will be available at a later stage, version 2 can still be found here. If some things appear off or the old map still shows: CTRL+F5 for a hard refresh or clear your cache.

High resolution unexplored world map

 

Currently doing some finishing touches on the brand new Historical Guide (hope everything will be finished by tomorrow) but I thought it would be nice to share a high resolution version of the new unexplored world map first.

Warning: do not open on mobile devices unless you like to crash.

• 10,000 x 10,000 - 19mb

Dynamic Event Heat Map

I was having a bit of fun with the API earlier and plotted a heat map showing all dynamic events in the open world.

Observations:

• Fields of Ruin is littered with rift events
• Skipping stones is somehow located in the dominion of winds
• There's not much to do in some of the Shiverpeak zones

The size of a certain enemy compared to Tyria - Part 2: adding a body

Unlike yesterday's post this does not feature exact measurements but is more a "what if?" kind of thing I wanted to do, so it should be taken with a packet of salt.

Basically I took Primordus' skull, placed it somewhere on the map (this is to scale) and attached and scaled some bodies of known dragons to it. Result: damn.

So without further ado here are the results:

• Contemporary Dragon (Claw of Jormag, Tequatl, the Shatterer) - This is how Primordus is more or less depicted in GW1. Its wingspan would reach all the way from Divinity's Reach to Arah making it very hard to travel underground without ripping the planet apart.
• Snake-like Dragon (Mouth of Mordremoth) - Bit boring but would be able to travel underground. Would be half a zone wide.
• Bipedal Dragon (Pudgy Mordremoth, Quaggan) - This looks silly... why did I create this monstrosity....

The size of a certain enemy compared to Tyria

In the last story instance you get a glimpse of the head of Primordus. Seeing as it also shows up on your map I decided to overlay it with some locations in Tyria.

tldr: Primordus is big

• Primordus vs. Tyria

Lake Doric - before the attack

I was wondering how Lake Doric would've looked like before the White Mantle attack so I took some time fixing the damage they've done and refilled it with water.

Ascalon - birds eye view

I gave a shot at creating a birds eye view image of Ascalon like I did before with Kryta. It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped due to the source images lacking detail. But anyway.. I thought you might still like what I've put together with these.

• Ascalon - birds eye view
• Labeled version