World of Warcraft and our new author Jürgen had never really had much to do with each other until the Alpha for the Legion expansion came and changed everything!
Hey dear readers! I am Jürgen, the newcomer here at Mein-MMO and I want to introduce myself. At the same time, I also have the task of writing a column. So why not do both? Therefore, you are reading a story here that explains both my journey as an MMO fan and my late-emerging passion for World of Warcraft.
WoW, no thanks!
My MMO career started relatively late, namely in December 2005, when I installed Guild Wars and hardly played offline from then on. However, online games were certainly nothing new to me as I had already been pressured from all sides by enthusiastic fans of World of Warcraft in the spring of that year. They said the game was so cool, the world so vibrant, and the quests… oh, the quests, they were like in a real role-playing game (back then, single-player games like Knights of the Old Republic or Baldur’s Gate were meant).
But whenever people enthusiastically recommend something and praise it to the skies, I become skeptical. And WoW was already suspect to me due to its more than mediocre graphics. The game looked hopelessly bad even in 2005. And the deal-breaker argument “it has to run on an old laptop too” was irrelevant to me as a high-end PC owner.
Additionally, WoW required subscription fees. And in 2005, I was just a fresh student and could hardly spare any money for subscription fees alongside the tuition fees that were rampant in Bavaria and the commuting costs to university. There were just too many awesome student parties and other stuff at the time for which I spent my remaining money.
So a particularly persistent friend couldn’t really convince me either when he generously lent me his WoW account for a weekend, likely hoping that the WoW virus would grab me and I would finally come to appreciate this game he considered brilliant.
That went catastrophically wrong. On the one hand, WoW looked as bad as I’d seen in screenshots. Compared to other games at the time, that was already a major criticism. And then most quests were just the worst grinding, like “Kill boars and bring me 20 pig snouts”. Excuse me? THIS is supposed to be great quest design in the spirit of Baldur’s Gate? And I’m supposed to pay 15 euros a month for this (which was enough for five döner back then!)? No way!
When the prophet doesn’t go to the mountain…
World of Warcraft was done for me from then on! And with Guild Wars, I found an MMO that looked better and conformed much more to my single-player preferences with its instanced areas. Yes, I admit it, back then I really preferred to go it alone and only have fellow players with me on special occasions. And above all, I didn’t want to pay subscription fees every month!
Well, the subscription argument soon became irrelevant when I, as an old Barbarian fan, had to try out Age of Conan, and when Star Wars: The Old Republic was released later, the costs were quite irrelevant to me as a Star Wars enthusiast. And since Age of Conan and later Guild Wars 2 as well as my beloved Wildstar, the classic, static hotkey combat systems had become quite uninteresting to me. I needed more action in my MMOs and therefore WoW, with its outdated gameplay, remained uninteresting to me.
Nevertheless, I regularly heard what was going on with WoW. After all, enough of my friends played it, and I later even interned at buffed.de, where I regularly participated in the podcast and caught the obligatory WoW segment each time. And at least the story and the world did interest me somewhat. But at that time, I had so much to do with other MMOs that I just couldn’t find the time to start playing WoW now.
… the mountain comes to the prophet
Then finally came the moment when I could no longer avoid WoW, as I landed a position as an online editor at GIGA and had to write a preview for the new WoW expansion Legion. “Great, I really want to play this outdated thing,” I thought to myself. But well, duty is duty and someone has to do it. So I got access to the alpha and was able to join as a high-level Demon Hunter right away. Demon Hunter! How cool was that? I had already found the good old Illidan totally awesome in the Warcraft 3 expansion Frozen Throne! And thanks to the upgraded graphics, WoW now looked similar to my favorite MMO Wildstar!
I was genuinely hooked and suddenly saw my task in a different light. I built a nasty Night Elf Demon Hunter and dove into the game. Yet I still had concerns. I hadn’t dealt with WoW in 11 years since my first escapades, and now I was supposed to play a hero at level 95? That can only go wrong!
But Blizzard seemed to have designed the new class with people like me in mind. The Demon Hunter played very intuitively, and even the features I had loved from Wildstar and Guild Wars 2, such as double jump and gliding, were possible with the Demon Hunter.
How I learned to love WoW
But the Demon Hunter finally conquered my action-MMO-gamer heart when I got through the first battles. Contrary to all fears, the gameplay – at least for the Demon Hunter – was not nearly as outdated and static as I remembered it. Sure, I basically still had to target the enemy and auto-attack him, but most of my hero’s skills were area attacks with short range that hit everything in front of me. And other skills allowed for quick advances and retreats.
This made playing the Demon Hunter entirely different from the typical WoW heroes, and World of Warcraft had almost become an action-MMO like Wildstar. On top of that, the grippingly staged story about my favorite Illidan and the origins of the Demon Hunters completely captivated me.
After several hours, I sat in amazement in front of my screen and thought to myself: “Hey… this is really fun!” Since then, the WoW virus has finally caught me – almost 11 years late – and my Demon Hunter and I are eagerly awaiting the release date of Legion!
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