World of Warcraft has had many, many bad ideas. Today, we take a look back at some of these terrible features.
In more than 20 years, the developers at Blizzard have tried a lot in World of Warcraft. Sometimes popular features were slightly changed, sometimes new features were implemented that failed spectacularly. And sometimes, even innovations were brought to Azeroth that most players have never heard of – because they were so underdeveloped or they represented a really bad alternative to existing things.
We take a look back at the 5 least popular features that failed spectacularly in World of Warcraft.
The first voice chat in World of Warcraft
Today, it’s standard for games to come with their own voice chat, especially in multiplayer games. However, this was not always the case, especially during the time of the “old” World of Warcraft.
So it was quite a sensation when Blizzard introduced an in-game voice chat with Patch 2.2 that guilds and raid groups could use to communicate and coordinate in dungeons or raids.
Well, at least in theory.
The feature failed spectacularly. Not only was the “Voice over IP” variant that was implemented in World of Warcraft absolutely atrociously bad – it also didn’t resonate with the community.
At that time, programs like TeamSpeak 2 or Ventrilo were very popular and were usually used by most guilds. The quality of the voice chat was much better than in World of Warcraft and the use of these programs was well established. No one wanted to switch to a lower quality version just because it was now possible in the game.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that the first voice chat of World of Warcraft was quickly forgotten almost immediately after its release.
By the way: This graphic was used to promote the feature back then. At that time, “Rick Rolling” was still in vogue:
Only with Patch 8.0, the release of Battle for Azeroth, did Blizzard revise the voice chat and better integrate it into the entire Battle.net environment so that it also works outside of the game.
The voice chat in WoW still isn’t really popular – however, there are (at least rumored!) some guilds and raids that sometimes make use of it – unlike the first version of the voice chat.
