Turns out it’s about 80 square miles. To put that into perspective, the island of Manhattan is about 20 square miles. How do I know that? Tobold figured it out. He went through the trouble of figuring out how big a mile would be in game based on how fast a toon could run across it, and then measured the whole damn continent of Kalimdor, then doubled that to account for the Eastern Kingdoms. It’s pretty small for a “world” but as Tobold notes, maybe landmass isn’t the correct way to measure virtual worlds:

“But in the end measuring the size of a virtual world in square miles doesn’t make much sense anyway. If you made a parallel World of Warcraft with exactly the same number of quests and mobs, and the same geography, but just doubled all distances, Azeroth would be 4 times as big. But that wouldn’t add anything to the game. So counting the size of Azeroth in number of quests is a better indicator of game “size”. And in that respect World of Warcraft is easily beating other games that just have more land mass.”

[via BoingBoing]