Here we are, finally arriving at the defining moment for all of MMORPG industry, or maybe a redefining moment – World of Warcraft(WoW).
If you have been following along in this series, you will know that MMORPG games did exist before WoW arrived on the scene. My first entry into the genre was a game by the name of Lineage 2 you can read all about that in the previous articles (Part 1 and Part 2).
When WoW came out it was a very strange time for us gamers. A new drug was released into the wild and we were falling victim to the addiction. I don’t know how else to describe it. One day there were other MMOs and the next they were ghost towns. People jumped ship so quick, it was incredible. The day the game came out I wasn’t there, I am a rebel in that sense, I don’t follow the crowd. But many and I mean many of my friends, clan mates, did. The servers could barely contain all the players that were showing up. There were large ques that you were placed in to get into a server. When you did get into the servers they crashed and you had to restart the whole process.
It was madness, and Blizzard at the time was a smaller development studio, at least nowhere near the size they are now, were doing their best to keep up. Blizzard opened up new servers for people to start on, there was no character transfer mechanism at the time, so you had to restart from the very beginning, not a whole lot of people wanted to do that. So the new servers didn’t help those that started at launch, but new players could be sort of funneled to the new servers and avoid all that craziness. I avoided the game for that period, too many unknowns.
By the time I jumped it my friend was at level 40 of 60 and he was kind of starting to get burned out. I initially wanted to be a hunter, something about having a pet with you, a partner of sorts really appealed to me, but my friend was a warrior so I decided I wanted to be helpful in fights and went with paladin. One of the worst classes in the game at the time as far as the fun of game play went. I didn’t know that at that moment I thought all classes were this dull, and to a degree they were, but just so the picture is a little clearer, my main damage skills were auto attack skills with a chance to double damage or proc. That was it… I had a couple buffs but they were very short timed and had to be constantly recast. So yeah not a whole lot of fun. I mean the game is very different now and I love the paladin class now, but that’s years and years as well as several expansions later.
So when I jumped into the game I wanted to be hunter, but went with a paladin. I also knew for sure that I wanted to be a dwarf, not sure why, but that was a thing and I started a dwarf paladin. This part is important because in WoW some race pairings got unique starting places, I guess that’s wasn’t that uncommon in MMOs at the time, but dwarfs got a winter type landscape which I am extremely partial to. As you can probably tell from the title of this website, I love, love snow. I love watching it fall, I love playing in it, I love the quiet that it provides, I love the sound of it crunching under your feet. Everything about snow is amazing and the starting place for dwarfs had snow. It was amazing.
I think I started maybe 4 months late, but let me tell the starting zones were still extremely crowded. Zones being crowded doesn’t mean anything in today’s WoW, but back then you could only get experience and a quest update for a mob that you tagged(attacked) first. So the range classes would win most of those tag games, as a paladin I had no range attacks so it was an experience… trying to complete the first couple of quests. There weren’t any quest guides either, like there are now with the quest trackers, you had to find out where everything was by reading the quest by figuring out the map and if all else failed by asking people in chat. People sometimes would make things up in chat too, you would go to a place and it wasn’t it, you would be mad for a second then turn around and do it to someone else.
But with all of those things that sound terrible nowadays, were an incredible step forward for MMOs of that time. You had NPCs with exclamation marks, which meant they had a quest for you, nobody did that in the other games, it is now a standard. When you completed a quest you had a yellow question mark saying it was ready to be turned in. Things were faster and much more fluid and self explanatory than the other MMOs. Many systems were simplified to appeal to the general public, and IT WORKED. The single most successful MMO in the history of MMOs is WoW.
Today Blizzard continues to simplify and streamline the process of leveling, of getting gear, of catching up when you were away from the game for too long. All of these are steps forward once again, but you will hear a lot of players complaining about how dumbed down the game became and how its effort to appeal to the public is ruining it. What they don’t realize is that they were the mass public that the game was simplified for in 2004. They were the reason the game was dumbed down more than any other MMO. It isn’t fair for the new generation of gamers to not receive the same treatment as they did then. Just my two cents on that part there. Oh and good news for people that want to go back to that time will get their chance come August 27.
So that’s how it all started, I will go into more detail about the progression and the friends I met along the way in the next part!
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