Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Games

World of Warcraft Turns 20 64

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game's influence's 20 years later.

For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a real preview of a future where everyone would connect to friends and strangers online. For another, the game made billions of dollars with a business model combining monthly subscriptions with in-game purchases (including for pets and animals that players could ride), becoming a massive cash cow for Blizzard and pointing the way to future internet business models.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

World of Warcraft Turns 20

Comments Filter:
  • Prior to this, I played Warcraft II. I donâ(TM)t recall the specifics but you lugged two computers next to each other and connected them via a serial cable. It was amazing and free as long as you had the game. The only limitation was your parents yelling at you to go to bed. Ahh, the old good days!
    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Yeah and the best part was you got to stay up drinking soda and eating pizza with your actual friends, rather than alone even if you were still in your mother's basement.

      • Not a bad FP, but not funny enough.

        On the serious side, I think we have gotten too good at manipulating the compulsions of most people. It's just that some people are early adopters? WoW is sufficiently addictive to saturate the available time. An even more addictive game still can't capture more than 100% of the available time.

        Or a bigger problem that some people are more easily programmed to act on their compulsions? My current theory is that I'm lucky to be able to mostly direct my compulsive behaviors i

      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Yeah and the best part was you got to stay up drinking soda and eating pizza with your actual friends, rather than alone even if you were still in your mother's basement.

        Basement dwelling along was still an option. There were options to play over the internet even before Battle.net support was added to the game.

    • "Who wants to sing?"
    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

      Prior to this, I played Warcraft II. I donâ(TM)t recall the specifics but you lugged two computers next to each other and connected them via a serial cable. It was amazing and free as long as you had the game. The only limitation was your parents yelling at you to go to bed. Ahh, the old good days!

      WC2 is a real time strategy game. It supported peer-to-peer networking over serial, IPX, and modem. After Diablo was released and Battle.net introduced, WC2 was update to work with battle.net as well. Regardless of the networking the game was peer-to-peer. It ran on everyone's computer and there were occasional sync checks to make sure everyone's computer agreed. The number of players was somewhat limited, 4, 8, players? A 2D tiles game with a relatively small map which you may see in its entirety during pl

  • A bit baffled in regards to how a 20 year old game still dominates the MMO market. Seems pretty bad as far as innovation goes.

    Of course it doesn't help that I tried the game and didn't enjoy it at all. To each their own though, I just wish we'd get something innovative in this genre.

    • Re:Baffled (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AsylumWraith ( 458952 ) <wraithage AT gmail DOT com> on Monday November 18, 2024 @11:58AM (#64954243)

      There just hasn't been a WoW killer, yet.

      WoW was my first MMO, all the way back in 2004. I've played on and off, (mostly on,) for the past 20 years. I've tried others, (most notably STO and SWTOR,) but they never stuck.

      Why?

      Because unlike most MMOs I've encountered, WoW's never been pay-to-win. You pay your monthly sub or not and you play or you don't. No free tier, no special advantages for being a monthly sub. Once SWTOR went that direction, I left. STO has similar problems. Most other MMOs I've seen are like that too.

      Blizz has also struck a very good balance in making sure that every player, regardless of skill level or ability to commit has access to some form of endgame. Able to play every night at a high level? Mythic raiding and Mythic+ dungeons for you. Weekend warrior? Hit up some LFR and heroic dungeons. Prefer PVP? Arenas and battlegrounds. No other game I've seen can claim to have something for everyone in their player base.

      Finally, unlike the other MMOs I've played, for whatever reason, I've always been able to find people I enjoy playing with in WoW. This could just be a me thing, but I think it's interesting that basically every other MMO I've played has been with a small friends group, or solo. Once that friends group lost interest, (usually to return to WoW,) so did I.

      • by Calydor ( 739835 )

        WoW to me has too much FOMO; stuff got removed before I was done with it, or was locked behind a skill level I simply don't possess only to then be removed forever when that expansion was over. I did not like that.

        My poison of choice now is FF14. Nothing gets removed, nothing is pay-to-win, and the game just feels ... relaxing, where WoW often felt like a chore to get everything done every single week or be forever left in the dust.

        • First, I've heard extremely good things about FFXIV; the people I know who love it, love it. I gave it a try, but sometimes I think not enough of a try.

          As for FOMO in WoW, I guess I'm just weird. I've never been a collector, so if something had time limited availability and I didn't have the time for it, oh well. I don't have a problem with certain items being locked behind a certain skill level, because I'm not aware of any item that's actually permanently locked like that. Example; in Shadowlands, I farm

        • What was locked that way and then removed in WoW? There are some rewards, like Ahead Of The Curve mounts, is that what you refer to? Those are like six mounts per expansion or something. Otherwise, things remain for, like, forever. You can still farm all mounts from TBC on, for example, except the ones mentioned.

          WoW is full of catch-up methods, especially in the latest expansion. What there isn't though, and never has been, is any pay to win.

    • Re:Baffled (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Monday November 18, 2024 @12:21PM (#64954317) Journal

      Personally I think games kinda hit a wall sometime around the mid 2000s.

      There are are few genres (large scale simulation, ie Victoria III (CPU), racing/flight that really do improve with faster frames and richer textrures and higher res ) that burn up a modern CPU, and everything can crack the texture/resolution/fps up until the lasted GPU hits its thermal envelope but for a lot of games like shooters and RPGs I am not sure they are a whole lot more 'fun'.

        If you get the concept and game play right it holds up at this point. If the human interface is going to be keyboad, mouse, and ~25" display, I am not convinced there is a whole lot of experience you can deliver today you could not do with a PS3. Can you jump for 1080p to 4k yes, but with some noted exceptions does that matter for most games? Again I am not say you can't pause it and go 'oh my gosh look the detail in that dudes facial hair' you can but I guess I don't see the 'fun' there. I don't think a lot of folks do either.

    • A bit baffled in regards to how a 20 year old game still dominates the MMO market.

      Sunk cost fallacy.

      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        A bit baffled in regards to how a 20 year old game still dominates the MMO market.

        Sunk cost fallacy.

        Not really. There is nothing preventing one from finding a game they like even more and spending their time there. One can have more than one game. If a person is still playing its because its still one of their more fun options.

        • Not really. There is nothing preventing one from finding a game they like even more and spending their time there.

          That is exactly what sunk cost fallacy does. It raises the importance of something you keep doing.
          Now, I am not saying the game is not fun or not desirable, I'm saying that it's one of the important factors that make switching to another similar game more difficult.

          • by drnb ( 2434720 )

            Not really. There is nothing preventing one from finding a game they like even more and spending their time there.

            That is exactly what sunk cost fallacy does. It raises the importance of something you keep doing.

            What they are doing is having fun, and if something more fun shows up there is near zero switching cost. Your WoW account is still there if you occasionally want to check it out. You lost nothing, you can have two games. Its not zero sum.

      • No, not at all. I quit WoW several times when a new, shiny MMO showed up, but they always ended up doing a lot of things badly which WoW do well. And then WoW has excellent catch-up mechanics, meaning it's possible to go away for a decade, and then start again, and be back in endgame within a couple of weeks.

        WoW dominates simply because it's a helluva lot better executed than any other MMO. There is room for lots of levels of involvement, from truly casual "now and then" play to bleeding edge competitive pv

    • There have been several attempts, but it seems they all were too worried about making the launch date, and not worried enough about delivering a complete product.

      Meanwhile, Blizzard has continued to crank out content (whether you thought it was compelling content or not is a different question). And they've even refreshed the old content in order to keep it somewhat relevant. And they've embraced the nostalgia crowd with their "classic" servers that aren't interested in the 10+ expansions, some of which r

    • Richard Bartle was the author of MUD and MUD2, the first of their kind. WoW is basically a graphical MUD, only differentiated by scale (and graphics) from its textual predecessors. Those who have designed MMOs in the last 20 years have hired Bartle to consult on the topic.

      In his writings, he points out a few things, but two things stand out:

      1) All multiplayer games are essentially the same, as user action results in the rules of the game changing to converge on a single workable paradigm.
      2) Every player b

      • When WoW came out I was already burned out on MMO's, having played MUD's, Air Warrior, Meridian 59, The Realm, and finding Ultima Online just too much.

        I did get into it a year or so later because so many of my friends were on WoW. And a couple of expansions later I left again. I ended up playong LOTR, Rift, Tera and others, but they all have a lot of shortcomings.

        The reason I'm back now is because it's simply better than any other MMO I have ever tried. It's a lot better than the first ones I played serious

        • by HBI ( 10338492 )

          I have a local copy of WoW 3.35 or so and I fire it up every once in a while to cast some spells as a lock or a wizard. It's fun. Scratches the itch.

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        If WOW was the first MMO to be big you'd have a point. The huge numbers of Ultima Online and EverQuest players that existed at both game's peaks kind of poke a great big hole in this theory though

        • by HBI ( 10338492 )

          I still think Ultima Underworld is the best game I have ever played. I still miss the Two Towers MUD of the mid-1990s.

          I think there is some merit to what Bartle is saying, even if we don't _play_ that game forever, we always wish what we were using was like that.

    • A few major reasons:

      First, there is the micro-quest, which really seems to have taken the MMO and RPG world by storm. Simple, almost trivial, quests with instant feedback, which creates dopamine in the brain which gets the player hooked (if not addicted). I would say that this is WoW's breakthrough technology. Since WoW so many other games do the same thing, handholding the player every step of the way. It was even mocked in the Simpson's. Literally the first quest I had when I played it was "deliver thes

    • A bit baffled in regards to how a 20 year old game still dominates the MMO market.

      It's a 20 year old game, but they keep updating it. The experience you get now is much different than the experience you got 20 years ago.

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        I've never understood from anyone I know who plays the game that core gameplay has changed much. Nothing here https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/c... [reddit.com] seems very dramatic.

        • Oh, I was referring to two things:

          1) The game has expanded dramatically. So you can experience Pandaria, Daenor, the Broken Isles, etc. New storylines, adventures, items. In the original game it was just Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.
          2) Gameplay has been tuned to reduce grind, like the level squish. Modern WoW is less grindy.

          So yeah, I think a lot of the reason people keep playing is just "Oh, there's a new continent, I want to go explore it now!"
          • by skam240 ( 789197 )

            Sounds like what I understood the updates did then. Great for people who enjoy WOWs model but nothing terribly new in terms of innovation.

            • Sounds like what you're saying is that you never understood why people liked WoW in the first place.
              • by skam240 ( 789197 )

                Why would that be?

                • I can only guess for you.

                  For me, I fully oppose grinding games, I don't like games without an ending, and for RPG style fighting games there are many, many options that don't involve a subscription.

                  That said, I appreciate the multiplayer aspect of it, but "getting and coordinating a team to go fight a monster" is a skill I admittedly do not possess.
                  • by skam240 ( 789197 )

                    You opposed grinding games but you play WOW? Everyone I know who plays WOW says that "the real game" doesn't even start until max level. There's zero wrong with enjoying the game but that's like the definition of grind even if it currently takes less effort to reach that mark then it used to.

                    Don't get me wrong, I've played and enjoyed games with heavy grind elements before and probably will again but to say you opposed grinding in games but play WOW seems pretty preposterous to me based off both my own expe

                    • You opposed grinding games but you play WOW?

                      That's why I don't like WoW. You might have your own reasons.

                    • by skam240 ( 789197 )

                      So as I said from the very beginning then, WOW does not represent any form of modern innovation in MMO game play. Despite you initially refuting this claim and claiming things like "less grindy" was meaningful innovation you seem to be on board with the fact that the game is still a grind.

                    • I didn't say I personally like it. I said I understand why people still like it. It's still better than Genshin Impact, or anything with a Pay 2 Win model.
  • And the players just turned 50.
    • It had a surprising number of players that are much younger. I played for a while when they relaunched classic realms and a lot of the people I played with were in their early to mid-thirties. They vaguely remembered playing the game in high school and having fun with it and came back for that reason. I think a lot of them wanted to experience parts of the game they might have missed out on when they were younger and couldn't play as much as they wanted.

      Maybe all of the older folks were still playing ret
      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        It had a surprising number of players that are much younger.

        General industry stats show two massive age spikes when player age is graphed. One around 15 and one around 35. At lease for PC based games.

  • I enjoyed Everquest I and a good chunk of Everquest II befor I even went to WoW. Then it got boring when they introduced PVP Arenas. This gave a direction to the game that I didi not like and I quit.

    • Same here. Now I'm back to playing EQ on Project 1999 and loving it :). I think WoW was a good off ramp for some of us longtime EQ players. Wow was it's own game of course, but if what you enjoyed about EQ was the "sim" quality it had, then WoWs "arcade" feel was never gonna scratch the same itch.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    The focus of the game has always about how you choose surround yourself with a community that supports your playstyle. There's casual dad guilds taking it slow, there's pumper guilds racing through content trying to parse. There's pvp guilds, there's social guilds, there's everything in between.

    Despite the ancient graphics and 20 year old mechanics, the game still resonates with people. I've been talking with friends since the announcement and we're all excited to start again Thursday for the new classi
  • I played WoW probably way too much in my 20s and a bit in to my 30s. The storylines were amazing, the gameplay and raids great. I think somewhere along the way it lost its edge though. We went from regicide, blood, murder, death, demons and soap opera like stories to one of the most recent expansions with transgender Dragons in it being a highlight. At the same time Blizzard removed the /spit emoji because "it was offensive" (and/or because folks were spitting on people who rode store-bought mounts). To par
    • Dear Slashdot. The above post is hatespeak, if should have been moderated out. Either the original post goes--or there is proof-positive that Slashdot has an offical Anti-GLBT stance.
      BTW, there transgendered person on the original WOW team, anyway.
      • " Dear Slashdot. The above post is hatespeak, if should have been moderated out. "

        Thicker skin might be required to visit many parts of the internet which may or may not agree with your ideology.

        People give words power over themselves.

        You can either be part of the club that demands everyone else cater to your every whim and idea or you can choose
        to simply ignore such things and live a much happer life.

        The choice is up to you.

      • Were there transvestites on the original wow team, or did someone who worked on the original wow team later become a transvestite once it became trendy in advertising?

  • I was asked to hold down the run keys, while the project manager talked. : ) I was also the 2nd person to really see the first continent, when the viewer parsing it.
  • Games like World of Warcraft no longer interest me as many of them all have the same underlying structure.

    Give players never-ending collection quests to earn mundane gear or reputation which allows to purchase
    slightly better gear. The best gear in the game requires you to raid with a guild which effectively equates to
    a second job.

    At some point, once folks have the best gear, you drop out an expansion and start all over again with the gear,
    reputation and level grind.

    Wash, rinse and repeat for twenty years a

  • Still awaiting for the last trademark of Warcraft to expire so Freecraft can be resurrected.

Hackers are just a migratory lifeform with a tropism for computers.

Working...