World of Warcraft Turns 20

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.

Back in my day

[Alanon]

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!

Re:

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Back in my day [we didn't have OCD]

[shanen]

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

Baffled

[skam240]

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

[AsylumWraith]

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.

Re:

[DarkOx]

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 i

Re:

[war4peace]

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

Sunk cost fallacy.

World of Warcraft Turns 20

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

And the players just turned 50.

Re:

[alvinrod]

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

There where precedent MMO

[La Gris]

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.

Transgender Dragons in, Spitting Out

[aoism]

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