France Expansion

That makes sense. I had always envisioned an ever expanding map of each world, sort of the way Watopia kept growing.
Watiopia for all the cool bespoke stuff
Makuri… all the great riding out that way… could include Aus…
Italy… all of the iconic italian climbs and Strada…
France… huge selection to pull from there too… maybe have a separate Europe map for the classics stuff from east to west north of france
UK… not as much iconic stuff but there’s plenty to pull from there
Richmond/… USA rides… Washington climb, mt Lemmon… lots here too

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Well, looks like Makuri’s getting all the love - see today’s announcement of forthcoming expansion

Zwift shared a post on Instagram: "This winter, one of our worlds is getting even bigger. Here

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They had hinted at this when they released the Neokio expansion… something along the lines of Makuri rivaling Watopia in size and scale… I’m all good with more roads.
I’m pretty sure they don’t want to dilute the density of users so I suspect there is a size threshold they have in mind.

I like this idea. I agree with the general concensus though that we could be done with some expansion on the existing maps. I’ve often noticed even in watopia, opportunity for adding more into it. What about a route from desert flats to the epic KOM without cutting around the end of titans grove. Or a descent down towards the jungle from the other side of the tower climb. Even some sort of climb up the canyon mountains at the north side of the desert flats whereby you can ascend a tunnel up to the railway bridge the follow a wider route around the desert connecting back to mining town, even cutting across to titans from here also.

Doing this and adding more roads to connect these popular circuits opens up the opportunity to get creative with routes.

Deep down, I would like to see more mountainous areas for real big climbs. We have ventoux alp du zwift, epic KoM and Innsbruck for biggish climbs, ventoux is screaming for the other two routes to be added and agree France would be a go to map if there was simply more roads to ride. It’s certainly large enough to get a bit more creative.

A little late after having 11 worlds in the game eh?

Maybe, I’m guessing that’s why they rotate the guest worlds. I’d just like to see each world about the same size… Richmond, Bologna, and Paris are too limited (boring).Having lots of big worlds would still work with the rotation I think.

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Zwift really shot themselves in the foot by not joining smaller worlds when they were made or linking them to Watopia so you could easily ride from one to the other.
One big world of it all joined up would be great, you could still pick the routes you want so start in each place but then could go somewhere else from there.

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I like the idea of continuity within each world. Having a Europe map, Eastern/Asian, North American, African, South American, and random Watopia all would have enough diversity within each region to be interesting. Lots of room to grow and expand all of the already started maps too.

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Can’t figure out why they split the two France maps though… that seems like a miss in my opinion.

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I bet there is a size threshold for each world too, for a few reasons… loading time for potato computers being one good one. but also think of how spread out it would be if there was one huge world? too hard for people to connect.

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Less hard than not being able to at all as they are all separate.

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It’s a virtual universe though… couldn’t they put in some type of teleportation gates/arches for going to other worlds?

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I’d prefer connection between worlds and fewer “small” worlds like Paris (How can that not be a part of France somehow?) if they can’t connect them. The issue with having them all connected I presume is how it would look on strava - today you ride in london virtually, but on strava it shows up as a london location, if you ride france it shows up as france. If you connect london and france they would have to break how all the segments are formed in strava I imagine which would reset all segments etc…

Now, if for instance they created Makuri right net to wattopia they could connect them without this issue, if it’s a computer resource issue they could then have portals or something like that to switch between wattopia and makuri, but still have strava segments that make sense etc… That’s not the direction they went however.

I got the pleasure to ride the Richmond course when the collegiate nationals was used as the test event. There is some great riding around there is they wanted to give that world some love but yes. All of those worlds need some love. It is a shame that Paris and France aren’t tied together like London and box even.

This works on games where you can have a few seconds of load time between areas, but that could get pretty annoying during a workout, especially if your data pauses.

Let’s be honest. Most of the Zwift Strava segments are overrun with bad data. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to reset them, even if you’d also lose/reset your personal segment times for easy comparison.

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Why do they need to be different areas? I like this idea to stich the smaller worlds together would open up a lot more routes. Wollongong World Course - #17 by Freighter

Back on France for example. doing laps of Paris is quite boring but if it was put in the middle of the existing France world it could be combined with the rest of France roads.

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When a world is labeled as event only, personally that’s a red flag that it’s not a great place to ride, due to the lack of effort on the design side. But I’m all for merging these underdeveloped worlds, especially if you look where they are on the real map, it’s a pitty that they haven’t been given more love, that reflects the real roads around them.

I think Richmond is one of the best courses to race, I’d love to see that get more love for sure… Boloney can just go away imho :sweat_smile:

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I’ve also seen the problem that the current GPS data is spread across the world, so the game would have to split your ride into separate Strava rides rather than just 1. If they combined worlds, it seems like they could just make new GPS data next to other maps’ data, even if it didn’t match something IRL.