I have a long and involved history with World of Warcraft (WoW for short) that has spanned twelve years. I’ve not been a subscriber all that time, having taken several breaks from the game and – as I thought at the time – freeing myself from its addictive tentacles for good.
But then something a bit different happened. I saw what the team at Blizzard (the developers of the game) had planned for the new expansion and I decided it would be fun to get back into it. This is the videogame equivalent of taking up smoking. If you enjoy the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) experience then WoW has been the gold standard of what such a game can be for the longest time.
But here’s the odd thing: World of Warcraft needed a hit expansion. It had swung very wide of the mark with its previous offering, Warlords of Draenor, and the less said about Mists of Pandaria the better. As there had been since The Burning Crusade launched, there were (pardon the pun) Legions of detractors lining up to declare the game was dead and the whole MMO genre was done.
It certainly looked that way for a while. Subscriber numbers were way down, Blizzard had succumbed to their habitual problem of an insane content drought at the end of an expansion and the limited number of players who remained were definitely only there to mark time until the next expansion. What’s more Blizzard had two incredible successes since the release of Warlords of Draenor: Hearthstone and Overwatch. Suddenly WoW was the uncool older child; the tired old nag ready to be put out to pasture.
Yet rather than call time on a game that had been a phenomenal success story over the years, the WoW team did something they had not had a great track record with in the past: they learnt from their mistakes. The most common complaint about Warlords of Draenor was that you did not need your character to go out into the world to achieve things. In fact, you had a little instanced fiefdom all of your own – your garrison – where you could happily hang out, make insane amounts of gold and be done with the game in a mere five minutes a day.
That is not at all how MMOs are supposed to work. They should be involved social games whereby you interact with monsters, players and non-player characters as part of a broader whole. Instead Blizzard had taken a wrong turn and stuck players in a boring cul-de-sac that was the death of social interaction.
Indeed, this erosion of social bonds is what makes me one of the many who have rose-tinted goggles for vanilla WoW (the original game before any expansion). In a time before you could pay to transfer your character or your server, you were locked more tightly into the choices you had made. Either you started again somewhere else or you made the best of it on your home server. It was this lack of flexibility that led to real bonds among vanilla guilds and to you as a player getting to know the other players on your realm.
After countless expansions chipped away at these bonds with more flexibility and therefore less reason to invest in where you were, the game dipped. In my guild, there was some absurd drama and a great many people left. So did I, in disgust, for three years. It turns out that missing two thirds of Pandaland and all of Draenor was a very good decision. In essence, I missed nothing of note.
Had WoW continued down this path I am unsure it could call itself the Greatest of all Time, but the quite incredible revival of the series with Legion puts it firmly in that top spot for me. In almost any metric of success you care to name – revenue generated, concurrent numbers, staying power in the marketplace – WoW is the unassailable number one. Technically it was an absolute marvel when it launched in 2004 (I challenge any vanilla player to tell me they weren’t blown away when they took their first in-game taxi ride) and it’s a testament to its art style that it still holds up so very well today.
I can’t think of a more involving and engaging game than WoW and I have spoken before of my love for the cohesion and satisfaction that comes from overcoming challenges with your team, be in raids or battlegrounds. Like every game, WoW is a creature of its genre and so it’s perhaps redundant to say it’s ‘better’ than, say, a sports title. But hell, it is. See you all in the Emerald Nightmare!
