Good timing for this; the game just dropped a new patch and new zone yesterday, and the new environments continue this same feeling of very intentional art direction. But with each expansion pack, the assets feel closer to being in-line with modern standards.
It's not the most graphically intricate game still, for the better IMO in terms of accessibility (it still runs improbably well on my 2013 MBP), but these spaces are still evocative and good to look at. For me, anyway.
The environments were compelling enough I guess, but for me the true magic came from giant numbers popping up when I would hit things. Get something with multiple critical strikes in vanilla wow was so singularly satisfying. I couldn’t tell you anything interesting about the map, but I can tell you where I was when I hit my first two handed mace triple crit as a wind fury shaman in pvp. Big numbers and dead opponents. Pure joy.
Are the environments so compelling? before WoW there was MUDs (or MOOs) and they were super compelling and addictive with no gfx, lets call it the "MUD effect". So do the environments of WoW feeling compelling because of the environment, or because of the "MUD effect", and hence everything built on that feels more compelling, including the environments?
I was supposed to say exactly the same words and mention the MUDs and MUSHes...I think anyone who is interested can read the "backstab" stories of reddit user Patches765 and get amazed.
I'd even stretch a bit and say that graphics advancement does not really bring a lot of the immersion. For sure it is immersive to wear a pair of VR Goggles and experience places that you never visited, but it is equally, and maybe even more addictive, to allow oneself to read whatever is on the screen and let imagination flies. I would definitely not mind if the graphics advancement stops around year 1998/1999 when we had good enough graphics even for FPS.
Well EverQuest was openly hostile to players. The game was full of pointless timesinks, artificially and inorganically too difficult, and progression was way too slow and frustrating. When wow came out it was a breath of fresh air. Ultima was super dated by then, enthusiasts mostly played on custom servers
I am always amazed at how little recognition Anarchy Online gets in MMO discussions. I have never seen another game like it. It's too bad the devs kind of lost direction, and the game eventually withered and died. It's actually still around, but mostly as a nostalgia thing. I remember that the community had started to accuse the developers (a company called Funcom) of trying to make the game more like WoW instead of focusing on what made AO unique and interesting.
Before WoW there was EverQuest. I personally felt EverQuest was more compelling than WoW. Sure WoW was "better" but it didn't have the same magic as EverQuest did. EverQuest motivated me to go all the way to the highest levels and beyond in a way that WoW just didn't. I may have done 2 or 3 raids in WoW before I grew out of it. But is this really anything to do with how good the game was? Or is it really just nostalgia? I mean, your age when your first played it is probably the #1 factor in how good a game is, to be honest.
It was the opposite for me. You could successfully solo in WoW while it was nearly or completely impossible in EverQuest beyond level 30 or 40 or so (IIRC). That meant you had an easier time catching up with your friends if you have to take a day or two off of playing. In EQ if you fell behind you stayed behind unless you were lucky enough to find pick-up groups (hours of LFG anyone?) or your friends were cool with slumming it.
I wonder about World of Warcraft and can't help but think its success and place in our culture can't be replicated for a variety of reasons:
-It had a very popular RTS game series that built up the lore, graphical template of the world, and did a lot of world/character building.
-It released in 2004 which was at a time when the internet was becoming more and more accessible such that kids could reasonably get online. (All MMO's are related to internet access but I would argue that the rollout of the internet has no two time periods that were the same)
-It blended the right amount grind/accessibility being more accessible than competitors like everquest but more enthralling and entrapping that successors.
-The appetite for MMO's may never be the same: revenues for mobile games and their ilk with micrcotransactions vastly outweight the market for MMO's. With how gaming has changed, many customers may not give the time to an MMO the way they used to and companies may not see the point.
Yes WoW definitely was at the right place at the right time. Blizzard was basically the biggest name in gaming at the time. When everyone could get online, it’s natural they would all pick up WoW. It’s unlikely anything with similar network effects would happen now.
There were other games at the time, that may have been better at some things, but probably not better at what it aimed to be good at. WoW certainly wasn't a better RTS than the Warcraft games before it, but those are just different games. WoW was probably the best game out there in a category defined as an immersive online multiplayer game world with actual game and roleplaying elements.
I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience I'd played since final fantasy, but with everyone else playing in the same world for no explicitly stated reason. If you think it rose to the popularity it did because previous rts/roleplayers were just continuing their love for the franchise, you're missing the rest of the picture.
I would be curious though if you have anything specific in mind that beats my claim
> I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience
In what way was it immersive for you? Not saying it's not immersive, but I didn't find it immersive. I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750. But at the time there was no end-game, liniar progression, once you level there's no need to go back to other area's, etc. So it was quite boring.
But I know people who have played since day 1 till now who swear by it.
I started with Ultima Onine, tried EQ, Lineage / Lineage II, AC, DAoC. But while alot of people during those days played SNES/N64, or games on PC like War Craft, Counter Strike, AOE/AOC. Me playing UO and such I was a 'computer geek' etc, but when WoW landed all of a sudden it was cool to play WoW, people who didn't even know MMORPGs were all of a sudden talking about upcoming WoW game. At the time I didn't understand because gameplay was much more immersive in other games, but they didn't want to play any of the games I played.
I think WoW got alot right to get people into the game even tho they are things I don't like. The hand-holding, bound items, and questing system. But WoW success was definitely not because it was a good game. It got better over time and became great, till it ended up being terrible again. But on release it wasn't good.
> I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750.
Might be the fact that you just power leveled through it.
I played UO and remember when starting on WoW it felt "dumb".
Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.
I think WoW did well by simplifying the mechanics and having more developed storyline which then helped people immerse in it more approachable or enjoyable way. I even read the lore on the internet and the books later, and I think all of that added more. I always enjoyed the questing and adventuring to new places the most, not that much about trying to min-max every aspect of the process.
> Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.
I miss this aspect of UO. Full loot PVP was fun, especially when you would get cheap gear and go ganking with people. One time on a shard (Novus Opiate) there was a ~50+ vs ~50+ blue vs red war for a few hours where we opened portals to the PVP towns and ran in ganking all the reds and they were ganking us.
Lots of fun those days. I missed the PVP because in WoW there was no loss and so no one really cared to try run or fight back, the only loss was exp so they sometimes just stood there let you kill them. It's one of the reasons I rushed 60 was to do PVP but then PVP didn't really exist.
I played the full 30 days and had 2 characters, 1 max and the other I was trying to do all the side quests and I stopped at like lvl 40 cos I just got bored of repeating the same sort of quest over and over in different zones, kill this, collect that, talk to X.
Did you never go over to Tarren Mill? IIRC, back in 2004 there was a ton of world PVP going on there, and one of the most fun aspects of it (IMO) was exactly the fact that there was no purpose other than "hey let's go fight some other players". Then BG came out and kinda ruined that aspect of things by making the PVP experience far more systematic and I guess purposeful. They may have improved it in later years but by then I had lost interest and stopped playing.
I didn't play at launch, but have heard that it could have probably used a few patches before it would have been so immersive. The pace of leveling however probably was its slowest at launch, and it seems like to do that, you would necessarily have been sucked in, because it would have probably taken a hell of a lot of playing, especially without all of the web resources we currently have. I started probably around 2005/6 I'd guess, before leveling was quickened. I'm not really sure what you mean by hand-holding exactly; at best there wasn't much in terms of assistance through any means. Though it was never a technically difficult game, I found it immersive in that it was slow, if you weren't deliberately trying to hit max level in the shortest possible time. I just played it to do something, that had some gradual reward and power system that felt intuitive and meaningful, and it probably took me a year to hit max level. Doing that with people is really what made it compelling, I couldn't imagine playing it alone at that time, it wasn't that kind of game. In contrast to your experience, none of my friends stopped playing the other games you mention, but WoW uniquely augmented our daily lives with questions about what gear you recently got, what level you hit, doing dungeons and raiding together, bumling into someone from the opposing faction and killing them or getting killed. Runescape had elements of that, but the graphics and gameplay were sluggish and more rudimentary, whereas WoW felt like I was "in" something more than ever before.
It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.
In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.
Exactly the same here. Never got into it, and the longer I held out, the more I was convinced it triggered some sort of addiction gene in people! How could they spend HOURS every day and weekend in this pretend world clicking random monster??
I personally knew parents who would stick their toddlers in pack and plays for hours just to grind out or quest or whatever.. every weekend. It seemed so absurd to me.
Then I realized as I got older, it really wasn't different than any other social activity. People gathering to watch hours of (sports) doesn't seem so strange, why should gaming get the same scepticism?
So that is my take away, the immersion wasn't so much the game itself, it was the broad social aspect: everybody you knew played. It was relatable, and you felt a sense of accomplishment.. just like most other social activities.
That was always my impression. WoW and other MMOs aren't like normal games in being something you do for fun. As a solo experience, the gameplay quickly becomes something you'd do your best to avoid.
The point of WoW is the chat window; the rest of the game is there to give you something to do while you're hanging out.
My first memory of WoW was leaving my starting city, traveling to the closest main city, and seeing the buildings were very conspicuously the same models reused. I found the environments to be the opposite of compelling. Lazy but well polished. Other MMO environments felt more hand-crafted.
I guess they like strategy game maps from third person then. The early areas all looked a lot like Warcraft 3 maps, and there were even orcs peons chopping trees just like you'd expect.
I always assumed part of the idea was to allow asset reuse.
Not all of WOW is very compelling and I wish the author had taken his admittedly unscientific ranking and examined different zones to see what would come out on top. Especially in Vanilla there were a lot of grindy areas and depending on which faction you chose you would have a radically different early game experience. The Orc, Tauren, Dwarf, and Undead starting areas I remember being pretty boring and it seemed like a lot more care was put into the Night Elves and Human areas.
The best environments were generally in the mid game where the developers seemed to have the most leeway in what they were building theme wise. Once you got to the end game it became very grindy and the environments were not so compelling. Everything became volcanic, lots of generic evil and vistas of browns.
Having said all that - I think the real reason it was so compelling was the community. It hit at just the right time where everyone was finally coming online and there weren't many other games of the same quality level pulling people away. It was a well designed game and everyone seemed to be playing it. I only spent so much time there because it was where I could reliably chat up friends. The few people I know who are still playing it today only do so because of their guild.
I remember the first time going into Ironforge, and being immersed completely like nothing else before or since.
Even my first Oculus did not beat that.
I'm not sure what it was. The graphics were far from ground breaking. There were other games with big worlds. But I think the combination of world building, graphics, scale, and quality of execution (nailing the style) just completely shattered the level of anything else that came before - or at least for so many people that played the game.
My first character was a Night Elf. You can never capture that first experience of playing WoW. Starting out in Shadowglen and growing to the point I could reach Darnassus is simply the best gaming experience I've ever had. Then you realize that you're just on a tiny island and there is an entire world to explore beyond what you have just witnessed. I never thought you could experience actual awe in a video game before that. And I have never had that experience since then.
I'll never forget when I managed to squeeze my Night Elf between the trees that made the wall around Teldrassil, only to realize that the whole map I had been exploring for so many hours was the trunk of a humongous tree, and the sea was far below.
The reasoning for the difference in complexity of the Alliance vs Horde starting areas (and lategame areas) in Vanilla was discussed somewhere (don't have a source handy). The artists and other creators started with the Human and Night Elf areas and created the elaborate areas you reference. Once they realized how long it took to do those areas and that they would never be able to meet the release deadline if they took the same amount of time and effort for other areas it became much more of a copy-paste job.
Indeed, if you ever pull up the earliest alpha screenshots where WoW is recognizable as the game that got released, the very first zones that were worked on were Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Duskwood, and Stranglethorn Vale and that was very apparent in Vanilla.
It's bizarre how well I remember that game... It was the design of each area, the music, ambiance, how the quest system introduced you to an area, but there was exponentially more to discover if you explored. Then the hook were instances where you couldn't realistically go solo, which led to pickup groups, which led to frustration with randos, which led to elitist groups forming which became top raiding guilds.
I met some insanely talented and accomplished people who moonlighted in raiding guilds within WoW. Friends raiding, writing custom mods, while working at the top tech companies. Such a time sink, but so much fun.
Oh.. and do you remember theorycrafting? Reverse engineering the game mechanics and optimizing for each situation across all the classes to beat raid bosses that were designed to be nearly impossible to defeat at launch? That was incredibly interesting, especially in a 40 player environment with multiple classes. The depth and balance of that game was and is still unparalleled.
Some areas were also just unfinished. The stories/quest-lines just simply ended. For example Dustwallow Marsh suddenly ends, and while you do go back that for one of the first raids (Ony) it is largely disconnected from the zone itself.
WoW Classic had this stuff in spades. Areas that were masterpieces (Tanaris, WPL, EPL, Human/Dwarf starting, et al) and areas (and ideas) seriously neglected or forgotten. Most of the content added in patches was fairly high quality though, they just seemingly focused their attention on that end-game instead or revamping since "most players have levelled passed that."
Graphic design played a large role, I'd guess. Warcraft imagery had this unique mix of cartoon, fantasy, and realistic in a way that most of its successors (and even later versions of WoW itself couldn't match. Plus, the open world aspect of it was the first time many players had ever encountered something like it. There were loading screens only for dungeons and continents. You could walk, run, or ride in Azeroth for hours without anything from outside intruding on the experience.
What made WoW environments so compelling is that were very stylized and deliberately not "realistic". If you look back at the history of games that focus on photorealism they date really quickly as the tech moves on yet WoW's aesthetic is much more timeless.
Secondly, the game feels good. By this I mean the movement and responsiveness.
Third, the game in its original form was particularly immersive as the WoW developers eschewed the loading screens that were an immersion-breaking feature of the big competitor at the time (ie Everquest). Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
Lastly, WoW came about at a time before social networks when online games were the first proto-social networks for many, many people. Through guilds you found likeminded people.
For the environment design aspect, I'd add that in the earlier iterations of the game something that inadvertently added a lot of appeal was the somewhat "organic" nature of zone composition, where there wasn't a 1:1 match between what the quest writers needed and what got put on the game map.
There were all sorts of things in each zone that just existed to exist, with no connection to any quest or player objective. It felt like the map artists were given a lot of latitude to design as they pleased, with the quest writers coming in after them and writing quests to match the map as it had been designed.
This was flipped on its head at some point around Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm, where instead nearly every square inch of every map existed for some quest or player objective. It made the game more convenient, but also made it feel a lot more like a game than a lived-in world.
The term for this is "conveyor belt content". And yes, this took off in WotLK, probably in big part due to the achievement system. Why? This replaced player agency in determining content with a Blizzard-supplied checklist and the effects of this flowed on to map design (IMHO).
It was also around that time that i think the Blizzard's internal policy changed.
Before to that they were creating a game, and balancing it in vacuum. Afterwards they went for designing metagame - picking how player should play. It was more egregious in their newer games though - especially in diablo3(where Blizzard literally makes builds in form of armor sets) and overwatch.
It's interesting to compare the early super-military look for tf2 to the zany cartoon version they wound up with. Their original plan would have looked old within a year or two, but tf2 still looks great today.
The character animation was also significantly better than what was typical at the time even in, say, an AAA FPS, which helped immersion. The travel system by flight both helped hide loading delays and provided an opportunity to show off the environment from a different vantage point, a kind of pre-programmed vista showcase.
Edit: occurs to me these flights were basically the equivalent of HL1's rail ride intro sequence, integrated into the game and in great numbers.
Flight paths also offered some nice foreshadowing. When flying from Ironforge to Stormwind, which many alliance players would often do, you fly over Burning Steppes, a very high level zone. A menacing music starts to play, a brown fog covers everything around you, there's lava, dragons, the zone looks "scary" but also exciting. Makes you want to play so that you can go there and explore it for yourself.
They were also chock full of things to see. Flying over Ironforge there was that dwarf/trog fight that you could never get to, but always wanted to. The world felt huge and full. You knew that if you just got over the next hill there'd probably be something interesting to look at or make you go wow. EQ didn't have those same set pieces.
I was always annoyed by the loading screen when moving by boat between west and east continents.
I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.
Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.
These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.
This is something EVE online deliberately leans into. Time to travel between star systems adds up really quickly and promotes a feeling of living in a particular part of the galaxy. Where going to a city to use the auction house has enough friction to be an annoyance in WoW, in EVE there’s so much more friction that it becomes a whole logistics game within the game. There’s money to be made hauling cargo because of this, and hauler ships offer the trade off of bigger cargo holds with fewer defences.
I expect the loading screen was in large part to there being no smooth transition when sailing from one continent to another.
WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).
I think it's because you can't load assets from the entire game world in main memory, so when you go to a new zone it'll load assets from disk (slowly).
I think the tram had to be fake given the actual world geometry. If you consider where the tram should be it makes no sense. Well that, or they had to totally change the world to accommodate it or give it a very strange path.
The tram loading screen could have been an engine limitation. Streaming the game world from disk works nicely if the player moves at a pace that is slow enough that the disk can keep up. Long range teleportation breaks that assumption completely. You can deal with that case in two ways: accept a loading screen or build teleportation support into the streaming system, which means that both ends of the teleporter need to be loaded at once if you walk up to it. I assume that Blizzard decided against all that complexity deep in the engine for a single use case.
I’ve not found an MMO that feels as smooth as WoW to play the character, and honestly it’s not even close. Nobody has even approached WoW’s crispness of gameplay, almost seemingly because nobody has really even tried, and I wonder why that is.
The Warhammer MMO was very close on a number of these key fronts - especially style and good gameplay feel.
It just failed for other reasons, notably the large overlap among people playing it and WoW deciding WoW was a better way to continue their time sink since they'd already invested, and the end-game content wasn't there at launch the way people expected it to be.
Interestingly, Blizzard did copy some of the key concepts from it for later expansions of World of Warcraft (open world "join in" style events / boss fights, to name one).
I like ESO better in "smoothness". WoW combat feels a little bit clunky in comparison, especially in chaotic trash fights with multiple targets. I find it very frustrating when I can't attack just because my selected enemy moved to my side, even though there are 5 other targets standing right before me. Stacking nameplates doesn't help, making the position of a nameplate unrelated to the position of an enemy (but if you turn off stacking, you'll have trouble selecting the right enemy).
In comparison, in ESO most (melee) attacks are not targeted, meaning you can cleave your way through a trash fight without playing Enemy Selector Simulation.
That said, at the moment WoW is still my favourite timesink though. ESO does a lot of things better, but there's not much on an end game and at some point you've just seen it all. I'm not into cosmetics so there's just not much left for me to actually do in ESO.
You should probably be using more AOE. Also, you shouldn't be using your mouse to select targets, you should be using it for movement.
Some tips (most of these shouldn't have changed much, but I haven't played in many years):
You don't have to hit enter to start typing a command. /t first few letters of mob is pretty fast.
You can also hit tab to rapidly switch targets.
Bind A and D to strafing instead of turning.
You can bind slots to modified keys, like Control-6 or Alt-3.
If you're a melee class, you probably have many moves that hit multiple targets, while also not being raw AOE. Spend a bit of time getting familiar with your spellbook; there are a lot of gems.
I already do pretty much all of the above. I've played about 6-7 months now, arms warrior, so mainly single-target DPS. I have few AOE abilities. A lot of my abilities don't work if the target isn't directly in front of me, even abilities like Mortal Strike and Rend with can hit multiple targets. The big difference with ESO is that in ESO I rarely need to target an enemy. You pretty much only do it as a ranged DPS if you want to target a specific enemy in a mob.
WoW combat is a lot more tactical and complex. ESO is smoother and faster, but simpler (only 6 abilities per bar, 2 bars max)
No clue! I haven't thought about the game in years!
What worked for me, though, was joining as many raids as possible. Dungeons are good too, if you're tanking. You'll suck for the first few, but after a while you'll stop sucking, and it'll make your life a lot easier.
Yeah, I played for about a year during the original release and haven't played since but I still go back and listen to some of the tracks as ambient background music while programming and often times they trigger nice memories.
It was just one of those games that mixed together all of the right things at the right time, very similar to the original Diablo II in the early 2000s.
> Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
Sadly this is due to new content being added as disparate “continents” that exist apart from the rest. Recently, content that had multiple zones on the same continent still has no loading screen. But since they have to adding new places to go to, and all the existing land being accounted for, they add new “continents”. But even new zones that get added mid-expansion are also separated by loading screen since they were never accounted for in the initial set of zones for the expansion. These days you might pass through several loading screens just going from one place to the other as you magically teleport around the world and cosmos.
Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.
> Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.
It's not only about loading screen. The world felt larger, because you had to walk and take the fly path a lot! Going from one end of the world to the other took literal minutes in flight. Then after they introduced the group search feature which automatically teleported you in the dungeon you had chosen, the world felt much smaller, because in practice you were only seeing a tiny part of it.
100% agreed. The cross-realm and phasing/layering they introduced further shrunk the world as well. While I think those features were ultimately good for gameplay reasons, they definitely stole from the magic of the original game.
I met a good friend through playing Counter Strike before social networks were universal, 2003-2005 or so. Early 2000s gaming felt (or I remember feeling) a lot different. Match making wasn't prevalent in PC games yet. You would play on different servers til you found you like. Then you would get to know the other players are form deeper relationships that I haven't had since then. I haven't really met any friends in Counter Strike after it implemented match making in CS:GO.
Subnautica is another example of this with its lush natural underwater environments: shallow beaches, coral reefs, kelp forests, thermal vents, underwater rivers, abyssal cave ecosystems, lava tubes, etc.
I'd give it high marks for Naturalness, Mystery, Openness, Coherence, Beauty, and Colorfulness; it lacks a bit in Legibility and Complexity sometimes. Great game.
I second this. Subnautica is the most recent game to give me that feeling of actual exploration; like there's a big deep world out there you can explore.
It’s easier to see when you can compare them all side-by-side. There’s only a few levers the team had available between the sky lighting, skybox, architecture, and foliage but they exaggerate the hell out of each so that you never get a same-y feel from any of the zones.
For me in 2004 it was all the content that we had played in Warcraft 2 and 3 - that was now open to explore and laugh about with friends… it was a huge leap forward in experience like nothing before it
The later zones (of Vanilla Wow) were pretty boring and ugly, assumedly because they ran out of time to develop them further. They definitely put a lot of iteration into the earlier zones and it paid off.
Looking back, there just wasn't anything that looked like WoW, but a lot of that included the perspective of running around in a comparatively polished world with a ton of comparatively polished game systems, with friends. The first long flight I took from two major cities across most of a continent (that I was familiar with from experience with the IP) was absolutely nuts to me.
I was going to say essentially the same thing. In my early 20s I was working at Sony Computer Entertainment America as a QA tester and EVERYONE was playing and talking about WoW non-stop. This was probably around the time that Burning Crusade came out, or maybe WotLK. At the time it felt like I was the only person in my work/social circle NOT playing WoW.
I tried to pick it up years later, playing solo. It just doesn’t have the same appeal. I definitely feel like I missed out on something special by not having played it during the heyday.
WoW classic is a substantially different experience from WoW “retail”.
I kept a WoW account over these years but seldom played it. Still got hooked when classic came out.
Half of the fun is interaction with the community though. Meeting people in starting areas and struggling together in quests and dungeons. I’m not sure one can reproduce this experience again now that classic has progressed beyond the original expansion…
Those felt more high-stakes than end-game raiding for me, for some reason. Probably because you only had one shot a week. I remember being the first to turn in the fishes, getting right up to the vendor, and having my hands tremble from the adrenaline... slowing me down just enough for someone else to snipe the reward out from under me.
When I read the title, I had a very different idea in mind for what the content of the article would be.
I think it's interesting to apply a sort of topographical analysis to the virtual regions of WoW to try to understand why they're so important to us. Kudos to the author, I enjoyed reading his analysis. However, as other commenters have noted - I believe it's impossible to understand the allure of the game independently of the social elements.
To me the most important part of what made these environments compelling was the ability to actually quantify my interaction with them, exactly. Almost 20 years ago - god, has it been that long? Going into this virtual world with a counter that exactly captured how 'well' or 'good' I did was some kind of revelation. To people who played: these were the first DPS meters or counters. The foundations of quantitative gaming analysis for these kinds of games.
Of course, in the real world we have tests and races and everything else. But it wasn't the same. In World of Warcraft you could bend your entire intellect against the goal of maximizing some number which summarized your interaction with a virtual agent in a public way. This wasn't the first game to do this, but it was the most successful. If you were were good at the task (of interacting with the game environment), this gained you prestige in a highly visible way. For a million faceless and lost teenagers across the world, this mechanism was an indispensable lifeline.
Not only was he an environment/dungeon/zone designer, but he recorded so much about the games development in the alpha stages. One of my favorite tidbits was how they worked to optimize the game for 56k back then. They got it to work extremely well with just a couple Kb/s!
Though not dial-up, my internet at the time was still very slow and the servers were a very long way away, so I routinely played with a ping of 600-1000ms with no issues at all. WoW and Guild Wars were about the only online games that worked, come to think of it. On behalf of 13-year-old me, I thank him for his efforts.
I doubt I'll ever feel the wonder I felt from those first months of classic WOW. I started as a NElf, and those environments still feel kind of homey to me, even all these years later.
I played off and on for about 9 or 10 years, and then stopped. The game evolved past what I enjoyed, which was mostly in-world advancement with friends. I was never much of an endgame player.
I picked a race that didn't start in Ironforge. I remember not really knowing what to expect. I may have taken a griffin or just used a boat. But the sheer feeling of awe when you enter. The music changes and truly get a scale of how large the place is. I'm not sure I'll ever get to experience that again.
When making a game world, there are many parameters you can tweak. One of them is the distance between points of interest. I think WoW struck a good balance between short distances (where the game feels like a casino or theme park, where everywhere you look there's some quest or shiny item begging for your attention) and long distances (where the player might get bored pressing the W key to move forward). It actually fell a bit of the "long distance" side, and it did this by keeping the environments grounded in reality.
But, like, a caricature of reality. Each zone feels like the WoW devs looked at a location on Earth and said "okay, how do we turn this up to eleven?". You've got Durotar, which looks like the Kalahari desert in the southern African countries, but with huge stylized rock formations and oversized trees. Then you have Tirisfal Glades, which looks like a generic pine forest in Canada (with gothic elements added, and again, larger trees). Then you have Thousand Needles which looks like Utah's Bryce Canyon or the Karst Towers in Yunnan, China (but what if there were rope bridges connecting them?). Winterspring looks like many places in winter (but there are those oversized trees and mountains again!)
Another important aspect is, not much was prefabbed. While it was possible to find buildings reused across the game world, they were all decorated differently, and had different NPCs inside and out to give them uniqueness.
Also, not everything in the world had purpose. This goes back to the "theme park" idea. There are many, many unique buildings, NPCs, and outdoor areas with absolutely no purpose. No enemies to fight, no quests to do. But someone put effort into making sure that this NPC and this carrot garden looks believable (as much as the stylized world of WoW can look believable).
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadIt's not the most graphically intricate game still, for the better IMO in terms of accessibility (it still runs improbably well on my 2013 MBP), but these spaces are still evocative and good to look at. For me, anyway.
https://www.wowhead.com/gallery=2049/zereth-mortis-sceenshot...
The theorycraft was a real love affair, constantly searching on Thottbot.
I'd even stretch a bit and say that graphics advancement does not really bring a lot of the immersion. For sure it is immersive to wear a pair of VR Goggles and experience places that you never visited, but it is equally, and maybe even more addictive, to allow oneself to read whatever is on the screen and let imagination flies. I would definitely not mind if the graphics advancement stops around year 1998/1999 when we had good enough graphics even for FPS.
Any TDome players here?
-It had a very popular RTS game series that built up the lore, graphical template of the world, and did a lot of world/character building.
-It released in 2004 which was at a time when the internet was becoming more and more accessible such that kids could reasonably get online. (All MMO's are related to internet access but I would argue that the rollout of the internet has no two time periods that were the same)
-It blended the right amount grind/accessibility being more accessible than competitors like everquest but more enthralling and entrapping that successors.
-The appetite for MMO's may never be the same: revenues for mobile games and their ilk with micrcotransactions vastly outweight the market for MMO's. With how gaming has changed, many customers may not give the time to an MMO the way they used to and companies may not see the point.
WoW was a truly unique game in its time IMO
People who were not into MMORPGs at the time were all of a sudden excited because it was Warcraft.
I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience I'd played since final fantasy, but with everyone else playing in the same world for no explicitly stated reason. If you think it rose to the popularity it did because previous rts/roleplayers were just continuing their love for the franchise, you're missing the rest of the picture.
I would be curious though if you have anything specific in mind that beats my claim
In what way was it immersive for you? Not saying it's not immersive, but I didn't find it immersive. I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750. But at the time there was no end-game, liniar progression, once you level there's no need to go back to other area's, etc. So it was quite boring.
But I know people who have played since day 1 till now who swear by it.
I started with Ultima Onine, tried EQ, Lineage / Lineage II, AC, DAoC. But while alot of people during those days played SNES/N64, or games on PC like War Craft, Counter Strike, AOE/AOC. Me playing UO and such I was a 'computer geek' etc, but when WoW landed all of a sudden it was cool to play WoW, people who didn't even know MMORPGs were all of a sudden talking about upcoming WoW game. At the time I didn't understand because gameplay was much more immersive in other games, but they didn't want to play any of the games I played.
I think WoW got alot right to get people into the game even tho they are things I don't like. The hand-holding, bound items, and questing system. But WoW success was definitely not because it was a good game. It got better over time and became great, till it ended up being terrible again. But on release it wasn't good.
Might be the fact that you just power leveled through it.
I played UO and remember when starting on WoW it felt "dumb".
Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.
I think WoW did well by simplifying the mechanics and having more developed storyline which then helped people immerse in it more approachable or enjoyable way. I even read the lore on the internet and the books later, and I think all of that added more. I always enjoyed the questing and adventuring to new places the most, not that much about trying to min-max every aspect of the process.
I miss this aspect of UO. Full loot PVP was fun, especially when you would get cheap gear and go ganking with people. One time on a shard (Novus Opiate) there was a ~50+ vs ~50+ blue vs red war for a few hours where we opened portals to the PVP towns and ran in ganking all the reds and they were ganking us.
Lots of fun those days. I missed the PVP because in WoW there was no loss and so no one really cared to try run or fight back, the only loss was exp so they sometimes just stood there let you kill them. It's one of the reasons I rushed 60 was to do PVP but then PVP didn't really exist.
I played the full 30 days and had 2 characters, 1 max and the other I was trying to do all the side quests and I stopped at like lvl 40 cos I just got bored of repeating the same sort of quest over and over in different zones, kill this, collect that, talk to X.
It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.
In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.
But I never played it, because of the subscription. I was very poor back then.
In the end I was happy that I didn't. I saw many people fail their relationships and careers because of it.
I personally knew parents who would stick their toddlers in pack and plays for hours just to grind out or quest or whatever.. every weekend. It seemed so absurd to me.
Then I realized as I got older, it really wasn't different than any other social activity. People gathering to watch hours of (sports) doesn't seem so strange, why should gaming get the same scepticism?
So that is my take away, the immersion wasn't so much the game itself, it was the broad social aspect: everybody you knew played. It was relatable, and you felt a sense of accomplishment.. just like most other social activities.
The point of WoW is the chat window; the rest of the game is there to give you something to do while you're hanging out.
I always assumed part of the idea was to allow asset reuse.
Having said all that - I think the real reason it was so compelling was the community. It hit at just the right time where everyone was finally coming online and there weren't many other games of the same quality level pulling people away. It was a well designed game and everyone seemed to be playing it. I only spent so much time there because it was where I could reliably chat up friends. The few people I know who are still playing it today only do so because of their guild.
One second I was sitting at my computer watching a loading bar, and the next I was standing in a vast winter wonderland
That's not even saying anything about Ironforge..
Even my first Oculus did not beat that.
I'm not sure what it was. The graphics were far from ground breaking. There were other games with big worlds. But I think the combination of world building, graphics, scale, and quality of execution (nailing the style) just completely shattered the level of anything else that came before - or at least for so many people that played the game.
I remember needing to drop down all my graphics settings just to be able to enter Ironforge.
I think the background score adds to the effect.
I can never forget the surreal feeling when logging into the first time in Elwynn Forest with its iconic music in the background. Very idyllic.
There is something about WoW graphics. Its a right balance between cartoonish and photo-realism.
Awe is a very good description of those feelings.
What was particularly enjoyable about it was that up to that point in the game - the areas seemed to get exponentially better.
It started off as the best game I had ever played - and each new area was somehow SUBSTANTIALLY better!
I met some insanely talented and accomplished people who moonlighted in raiding guilds within WoW. Friends raiding, writing custom mods, while working at the top tech companies. Such a time sink, but so much fun.
Oh.. and do you remember theorycrafting? Reverse engineering the game mechanics and optimizing for each situation across all the classes to beat raid bosses that were designed to be nearly impossible to defeat at launch? That was incredibly interesting, especially in a 40 player environment with multiple classes. The depth and balance of that game was and is still unparalleled.
WoW Classic had this stuff in spades. Areas that were masterpieces (Tanaris, WPL, EPL, Human/Dwarf starting, et al) and areas (and ideas) seriously neglected or forgotten. Most of the content added in patches was fairly high quality though, they just seemingly focused their attention on that end-game instead or revamping since "most players have levelled passed that."
Secondly, the game feels good. By this I mean the movement and responsiveness.
Third, the game in its original form was particularly immersive as the WoW developers eschewed the loading screens that were an immersion-breaking feature of the big competitor at the time (ie Everquest). Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
Lastly, WoW came about at a time before social networks when online games were the first proto-social networks for many, many people. Through guilds you found likeminded people.
There were all sorts of things in each zone that just existed to exist, with no connection to any quest or player objective. It felt like the map artists were given a lot of latitude to design as they pleased, with the quest writers coming in after them and writing quests to match the map as it had been designed.
This was flipped on its head at some point around Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm, where instead nearly every square inch of every map existed for some quest or player objective. It made the game more convenient, but also made it feel a lot more like a game than a lived-in world.
Before to that they were creating a game, and balancing it in vacuum. Afterwards they went for designing metagame - picking how player should play. It was more egregious in their newer games though - especially in diablo3(where Blizzard literally makes builds in form of armor sets) and overwatch.
Edit: occurs to me these flights were basically the equivalent of HL1's rail ride intro sequence, integrated into the game and in great numbers.
I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.
Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.
These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.
WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).
It just failed for other reasons, notably the large overlap among people playing it and WoW deciding WoW was a better way to continue their time sink since they'd already invested, and the end-game content wasn't there at launch the way people expected it to be.
Interestingly, Blizzard did copy some of the key concepts from it for later expansions of World of Warcraft (open world "join in" style events / boss fights, to name one).
In comparison, in ESO most (melee) attacks are not targeted, meaning you can cleave your way through a trash fight without playing Enemy Selector Simulation.
That said, at the moment WoW is still my favourite timesink though. ESO does a lot of things better, but there's not much on an end game and at some point you've just seen it all. I'm not into cosmetics so there's just not much left for me to actually do in ESO.
Some tips (most of these shouldn't have changed much, but I haven't played in many years):
You don't have to hit enter to start typing a command. /t first few letters of mob is pretty fast.
You can also hit tab to rapidly switch targets.
Bind A and D to strafing instead of turning.
You can bind slots to modified keys, like Control-6 or Alt-3.
If you're a melee class, you probably have many moves that hit multiple targets, while also not being raw AOE. Spend a bit of time getting familiar with your spellbook; there are a lot of gems.
Learn your rotation! Check Icy Veins for your spec: https://www.icy-veins.com/
I'm not exactly sure how new you are, but you should also probably be using Bartender, Recount and DBM.
WoW combat is a lot more tactical and complex. ESO is smoother and faster, but simpler (only 6 abilities per bar, 2 bars max)
The critical thing here is that you really shouldn't be mouse targeting.
What worked for me, though, was joining as many raids as possible. Dungeons are good too, if you're tanking. You'll suck for the first few, but after a while you'll stop sucking, and it'll make your life a lot easier.
It was just one of those games that mixed together all of the right things at the right time, very similar to the original Diablo II in the early 2000s.
Sadly this is due to new content being added as disparate “continents” that exist apart from the rest. Recently, content that had multiple zones on the same continent still has no loading screen. But since they have to adding new places to go to, and all the existing land being accounted for, they add new “continents”. But even new zones that get added mid-expansion are also separated by loading screen since they were never accounted for in the initial set of zones for the expansion. These days you might pass through several loading screens just going from one place to the other as you magically teleport around the world and cosmos.
Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.
It's not only about loading screen. The world felt larger, because you had to walk and take the fly path a lot! Going from one end of the world to the other took literal minutes in flight. Then after they introduced the group search feature which automatically teleported you in the dungeon you had chosen, the world felt much smaller, because in practice you were only seeing a tiny part of it.
I'd give it high marks for Naturalness, Mystery, Openness, Coherence, Beauty, and Colorfulness; it lacks a bit in Legibility and Complexity sometimes. Great game.
It’s easier to see when you can compare them all side-by-side. There’s only a few levers the team had available between the sky lighting, skybox, architecture, and foliage but they exaggerate the hell out of each so that you never get a same-y feel from any of the zones.
Looking back, there just wasn't anything that looked like WoW, but a lot of that included the perspective of running around in a comparatively polished world with a ton of comparatively polished game systems, with friends. The first long flight I took from two major cities across most of a continent (that I was familiar with from experience with the IP) was absolutely nuts to me.
World of Warcraft is only unique in how universal it was.
I tried to pick it up years later, playing solo. It just doesn’t have the same appeal. I definitely feel like I missed out on something special by not having played it during the heyday.
I kept a WoW account over these years but seldom played it. Still got hooked when classic came out.
Half of the fun is interaction with the community though. Meeting people in starting areas and struggling together in quests and dungeons. I’m not sure one can reproduce this experience again now that classic has progressed beyond the original expansion…
How cool was it to wake up at 6 am before class started and fish by the giants fearing for your life!
All for +5 gloves…
I think it's interesting to apply a sort of topographical analysis to the virtual regions of WoW to try to understand why they're so important to us. Kudos to the author, I enjoyed reading his analysis. However, as other commenters have noted - I believe it's impossible to understand the allure of the game independently of the social elements.
To me the most important part of what made these environments compelling was the ability to actually quantify my interaction with them, exactly. Almost 20 years ago - god, has it been that long? Going into this virtual world with a counter that exactly captured how 'well' or 'good' I did was some kind of revelation. To people who played: these were the first DPS meters or counters. The foundations of quantitative gaming analysis for these kinds of games.
Of course, in the real world we have tests and races and everything else. But it wasn't the same. In World of Warcraft you could bend your entire intellect against the goal of maximizing some number which summarized your interaction with a virtual agent in a public way. This wasn't the first game to do this, but it was the most successful. If you were were good at the task (of interacting with the game environment), this gained you prestige in a highly visible way. For a million faceless and lost teenagers across the world, this mechanism was an indispensable lifeline.
https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/
Not only was he an environment/dungeon/zone designer, but he recorded so much about the games development in the alpha stages. One of my favorite tidbits was how they worked to optimize the game for 56k back then. They got it to work extremely well with just a couple Kb/s!
Every area had a specific theme and lore to it, which connected to other areas and the overarching story.
What worked best for these environments were the memories of early multiplayer for me.
It's easy to forget how old school the graphics are yet my memories of Tarren Mill and the first beginnings of PVP are still very vivid.
Same with the first server event with Ahn'Qiraj (which in my opinion had some of the best design in the whole game).
I played off and on for about 9 or 10 years, and then stopped. The game evolved past what I enjoyed, which was mostly in-world advancement with friends. I was never much of an endgame player.
But, like, a caricature of reality. Each zone feels like the WoW devs looked at a location on Earth and said "okay, how do we turn this up to eleven?". You've got Durotar, which looks like the Kalahari desert in the southern African countries, but with huge stylized rock formations and oversized trees. Then you have Tirisfal Glades, which looks like a generic pine forest in Canada (with gothic elements added, and again, larger trees). Then you have Thousand Needles which looks like Utah's Bryce Canyon or the Karst Towers in Yunnan, China (but what if there were rope bridges connecting them?). Winterspring looks like many places in winter (but there are those oversized trees and mountains again!)
Another important aspect is, not much was prefabbed. While it was possible to find buildings reused across the game world, they were all decorated differently, and had different NPCs inside and out to give them uniqueness.
Also, not everything in the world had purpose. This goes back to the "theme park" idea. There are many, many unique buildings, NPCs, and outdoor areas with absolutely no purpose. No enemies to fight, no quests to do. But someone put effort into making sure that this NPC and this carrot garden looks believable (as much as the stylized world of WoW can look believable).