World of Warcraft Reaching Record MMOG Sales

Drac8 writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft has reached record sales in the first day, selling over 250,000 copies, and 200,000 accounts have been created. As of 5:00PM PST tuesday the game had over 100,000 people playing."

What about Europe?

[Red_Deth]

250,000... and thats 2 months before Europe even gets a look in. :(
How about SKorea? Do they have WoW yet?
/me counts the days untill he can play WoW again.

Re:Blizzard one of the few left....

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh? Valve makes two good games, and you suck their dick. ID makes 8 or 9 and you get all pissy because your machine wont run doom3?
ID made it so sidescrolling games are possible on the pc (they invented the buffer swapping trick you can see in commander keen)
ID made it so First Person Shooter games are possible at all (too many tricks to name, all thanks to John Carmack)
ID made it so games based on their engines are both possible and the norm, lowering the devel cost
ID made a ton of great games. Commander Keen, Wolf3d, Doom1/2, Quake 1/2/3, RTCW, and Doom3 really isnt that bad.

Valve took Quake1 and modded it a little.
Valve took their modded Quake1 engine and modded it a little more (HL2). Everyone is praising them for their great physics -- Its not theirs, its the Havok engine that they licsened. Exact same as Painkiller or Max Payne2. The only thing thats valves in that engine is the facial expression engine, and frankly I think thats some licensed NVidia code.

Valve also took a bunch of third party mods and took the fun out of them. Compare Counter-Strike beta5 to CS1.6 -- They turned a skilled action game into a strategic newb-friendly game (aiming doesnt matter anymore, bullets are random even on the first shot). They screwed up DoD in a similar way, and TFC is an abomination on TF/q1.

Valve would not be here were it not for ID.

ID opensources their games when they have new ones out(usually we get new sourcecode every 3 years or so). Long before they, they create linux and mac binaries. John Carmack personally even contributed greatly to linux gaming, not just by porting his games but by going so far as to write drivers and other such hard tasks.
Valve doesn't even have an openGL renderer, no linux binaries, and has buggy anticheat that will BAN YOU FOR LIFE if you catch it on a bad day in winex.

HL2 might be fun, but don't kid yourself, ID is a better company.

Re:And so...

[code-e255]

World of Warcraft runs very well on older systems, so the first part of your post is totally irrelevant. Saying WoW isn't worth the money because the first two days after launch weren't smooth is irrational. Even if Blizzard could've forseen the high demand for the game, they would've needed way more servers than (later) necessary for the thousands of newbies. Once people level up and people spread out accross the world, the game's going to be fine.

Not surprising in the least

[couch_potato]

Why am I not surprised? I played in the open beta, and it was, hands down, the most impressive MMORPG that I've played, ever.

Everything in the game smacked of polish, polish, polish. Making a character was super-easy, pretty, and fun to do. From there, getting into the game is a snap, and your first mission is placed right in front of your face. I barely had time to experience any of the multi-player aspect of the game before the beta was over, because I was so busy doing missions.

As I'm sure you've heard by now, it's hard to feel like you're on a level treadmill in this game. The mission system gives the game the feel of a single-player RPG, and the amount of polish/smoothness that Blizzard put in helps retain that feel, but you can't ignore all of those other players running around killing. Despite the hordes of beta-testers, I never once had to wait for a spawn or do any 'spawn-camping' or anything mind-numbing of that sort.

All in all, a great game, and I would recommend it to anyone who doesn't have any other priorities (job, family, politics, etc), because once you start playing, all of those other not-so-important things in your life (like eating, bathing, and face-to-face socializing) will suddenly not be so important anymore.

Get your free Nintendo DS! No BS! http://www.ds4free.com/default.aspx?r=64402 [ds4free.com]

Re:Blizzard one of the few left....

[Zork the Almighty]

I've been playing Blizzard games since Warcraft I (PC) and Blackthorne (SNES). I haven't played them all, but I can't think of a single "bad" game they've ever released. Flawed or unbalanced gameplay, sure. That's bound to happen in multiplayer games. Blizzard puts in the time to correct the problems though, and that's what really sets them apart (sad comment, I know).

Re:Blizzard one of the few left....

[CountBrass]

Valve is way ahead of Id in two regards:

Firstly releasing a game that takes 3 hours to install and get running, and requires you to re-install practically every driver on your system. In contrast Doom3 ran smoothly out of the box.

Secondly in intrusive copy protection: CD Key *and* online authentication every time you play *and* you still have to keep the DVD in the drive.

Bugs. Doom3 never stuttered, it ran first time and it never crashed to the Desktop. HL2 does all 3.

Re:You ain't kidding

[Bombcar]

bnetd ain't gonna cut this one. The servers contain hordes of information, but bnetd just facilitates an IP connection between the computers. The WoW servers are massive, backed up by a huge Oracle database. If you can rewrite them, you'd probably get a job at Blizzard.