It’s generally agreed amongst the gamer cogniscenti that the game World of Warcraft is starting to fade into the background now. It’s no longer the dominant force in PC gaming that it once was, but it’s been more successful than any game in history before it.
So what has happened in the game’s long, long run, and how has it changed?
Vanilla WoW
World of Warcraft was released in 2005 to a rapturous reception. Taking the lessons of the first really successful graphical massively multiplayer game, Everquest, it smashed the previously accepted ceiling for the number of people who would be interested in playing a fantasy game online. In the Everquest era, it was generally accepted that no MMO would ever be larger than 100,000 players. WoW rapidly shot to 6 MILLION players, and onward then to a high of 13 million later in its life.
Initial WoW was in some ways a very primitive version of its later self. There was no flying of any kind, no auction house in every city (only one city on each side had an Auction House, meaning a long trek for whoever wished to sell their stuff), and all loot was randomly dropped. Raids and dungeons were extremely simple by later standards, but also very unforgiving – the end-game was only accessible to a small elite of very, very organised people capable of doing the 40-person raids it offered.
The Burning Crusade
The Burning Crusade, WoW’s first expansion, is now considered by many to be the game’s golden age. It introduced a spectacular, alien new world (the mushroom forests of Zangermarsh are still one of the greatest vistas any computer game has been able to offer), Heroic dungeons to offer 5-man players equivalent challenge to raids (some long-term players still never completed the hardest of them), and smaller, 10-man and 25-man raids. The player base bloomed, and the blogosphere around WoW started to thrive (to the extent that today the site MMO Melting Pot exists solely to catalogue and index WoW and other MMO blog posts).
At the end of The Burning Crusade, most of the original development team from Blizzard went away, and were replaced by the so-called “Team B”, who ushered in the new, more accessible era.
Wrath of the Lich King
The WoTLK expansion introduced more accessible raiding than ever before, with a far higher percentage of the WoW populace setting foot inside its most spectacular encounters. Heroic dungeons were much easier, and the automated Dungeon Finder was introduced, meaning that instant dungeon runs were now available to all. Sadly, the last feature also ushered in a more anonymous, unfriendly feel to the game, with older players complaining that the community started to die out.
Cataclysm
And finally, with Cataclysm Blizzard did the most audacious thing they could think of – they completely rewrote the original world of the game, setting it 10 years in the future. At the same time, they introduced a new threat, in the form of the dragon Deathwing, who flies over and sets fire to entire zones – he’s not yet in the game, but when players eventually learn how to find Deathwing, Blizzard have promised the most spectacular boss and raid encounter ever.