World of Warcraft – the perfect game at the right time
With World of Warcraft, the team at Blizzard aimed to break down the high entry barriers of the then-competition, improve existing features purposefully, and offer the most comfortable, rewarding, and beginner-friendly MMORPG on the market.
The plan worked! When the game was released in November 2004 and February 2005, the low entry barrier, the narrative thread through the leveling phase, the instanced dungeons (where the group was safe from attacks by other players), and the regular sense of achievement were very well received. For many players, World of Warcraft was the first MMORPG that could captivate them.
Thanks to the book “The World of Warcraft Diary” by 3D level designer John Staats (via kickstarter.com), much is now known about the development of Vanilla-WoW, and some of the images used in the book from 1999, 2000, and 2001 even made it to Reddit.
The trailer for the current expansion WoW – The War Within:
It hardly mattered that WoW launched without a PvP system and only a few endgame contents, but with plenty of bugs and technical issues. Many players approached WoW at the time with no expectations, as they had never played an MMORPG before. Additionally, the internet in 2005 was not yet filled with guides and experiences.
By the way: Blizzard’s timing was perfect. Dial-up and ISDN were making way for internet flat rates and DSL connections in more and more households by the mid-2000s. Not a few players probably upgraded or got their first internet connection mainly to play games like World of Warcraft online relatively cheaply and quickly.
The developments of WoW and EverQuest II began around the same time. At least in this competition, Verant Interactive came out on top: The successor to EverQuest was released on November 9, 2004, just under two weeks before WoW.
However, the Blizzard MMORPG was able to build up such a strong pull for various reasons (such as the strong Warcraft brand, Blizzard’s then-still-good reputation, the high accessibility, and the timeless comic graphics) that EverQuest II could never flourish in its dominating shadow.
However, the game was a logical and comprehensive evolution from the first EverQuest, with enormous effort invested not only in content but also in areas such as voice acting and soundtrack. And: EverQuest II was the first MMORPG to feature an integrated pizza ordering service (via guinnessworldrecords.com).
WoW is not only (to this day) extremely successful – peaking at over 12 million paying subscribers – it has also shaped the MMORPG genre specifically and the entire gaming industry in general with its success. Suddenly, everyone wanted to have such a service game (even if it wasn’t referred to as that in 2005) generating revenue for years in their portfolios.
Moreover, World of Warcraft is a phenomenon that has had a lasting influence on global pop culture. There is a movie, novels, tabletop role-playing games, comics, machinima fan films, and mangas. Series like South Park, How I Met Your Mother, Leverage, Family Guy, and The Big Bang Theory feature humorous references to the game.
Likewise, many allusions can be found to Leeroy Jenkins, one of the first internet memes from the gaming world.
More on the success of WoW:
WoW also found a place in essays from the military and research. For example, when the Corrupted Blood from Zul’Gurub wiped out the populations of entire servers in September 2005, epidemiologists used this outbreak as a model for future real-life epidemics. A model that regained relevance during the Corona pandemic.
