MMO maps

Somebody sent me a link to a Karazhan map, and when looking at it I realized that this was the first "drawn" map from World of Warcraft I've seen in two-and-a-half year of playing this. In older games, like Everquest, there were lots of sites with different versions of hand-drawn maps of everything, from zones to dungeons. But among the 8 million players of World of Warcraft there doesn't seem to be anyone able to draw a map.

The source of this problem of course is that nobody needs outdoor zone maps in World of Warcraft. It is trivially easy to make a screenshot of the in-game outdoor zone maps, and so everybody does just that, and maybe adds some points of interest. The other source of WoW maps is the in-game mini-map. This is a bit harder to extract, but it's perfectly possible to do it and get a complete "satelite image" view of Azeroth. The same source can also be used to extract dungeon maps, and that is the basis of all the dungeon maps I've seen.

Unfortunately all these maps extracted directly from the game aren't very good. It isn't always obvious where you can go on an overland map, and where the mountainous terrain blocks your way. As for dungeon maps, they aren't very clear, and especially if the dungeon has several levels they fail completely to show you where you are going. I really miss the hand-drawn maps back from my Everquest days, which were often quite beautiful, and being drawn from a gamer's perspective showed you exactly what you needed to know.

I don't know whether people will start drawing maps in Lord of the Rings Online, but I already got some maps of Middle-Earth. I bought "The Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth" (Karen Wynn Fonstad) and "The Maps of Tolkien's Middle-earth: Special Edition" (Brian Sibley) from Amazon, and of course there are maps with the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books. That of course doesn't give me any game information, but at least I get an independant source of hand-drawn views of the same area. The game is true enough to the Tolkien lore to have all the towns, villages, and points of interests in the right spots.