WoW part 1.

The last time I checked, World of Warcraft had a subscriber base of around 9 million accounts.
For game producers Blizzard (owned by Vivendi) this means an annual income from this game that outstrips the combined Box-Office of The Matrix Trilogy.
One might define WoW as being successful.

Before WoW was launched in 2004 the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (which I'll refer to as MMO henceforth) market was seen as lucrative but rather niche. It was a playground for the Dungeons and Dragons pen and paper set with little scope for growth.
Everquest (also known as Evercrack for its life consuming properties) had a subscriber base of around 200,000 people who marvelled at its persistant world and graphics that actually needed a 3D Graphics Card.
The model of paying around $15 a month for the pleasure of having a character in worlds full of Elves and dragons and so on became the industry standard income model and persists to this day.

I myself played the game for about 5 years and thanks to it I made a number of good friends, travelled to visit one, met a girl, got all mushy, got married and emigrated. You will understand if I have a fondness for EQ.

What Everquest did was make computer gaming feel epic. As scratchy as the graphics look now, standing alongside a garish gang of 70 players on a raid in a cavern to take down a 60 foot long ice dragon was exciting. Hours of gaining experience, questing for an epic class weapon that could take over a year to get (never got my final epic blade for my Paladin in the whole 5 years), exploring dungeons and huge raiding events were enthralling and many an evening I would realise it was morning.

The problem EQ had was that it really was as niche as the rest of the market. To travel to the other side of the game world you might need to go by boat. The boat might take 30 minutes to arrive, the journey itself might take as long.
You might be in a place that wasn't safe to exit the game at and have to plan ahead by an hour to get back to a town to end your session.
The creature you need to kill to get that item you had been dribbling over had a respawn timer which was random over 72 hours and lots of other people wanted it. First to hit it got to kill it and loot. I know of people who "camped" that creature for 72 hours straight, sitting in that spot on a snow covered iceberg waiting for it to appear, then coming back after taking a bathroom break to find it had spawned and a passer-by had killed it.

To gain experience in the higher levels you were pretty much forced to group with other players to be able to do anything, which meant if there were a lot of people playing the same class they could sit for hours on end looking for group (LFG) and wind up doing nothing. Also the penalty for dying meant that at higher levels one death could mean 4 hours of gameplay to recover the loss. Unskilled players didn't last long in those groups.

Then the raiding progression mentality arose and the top guilds would race through content to be the first to kill Amazing Creature of Awesomeness No. 345, to slow their progression the developers made new raids which required you to defeat them in order before you could begin the next tier of raiding.
This then meant that you absolutely had to be in a high end raiding guild to do any of the big monster kills and thereby get the best equipment to go to the next raid.

Those people who could not treat the game as a second job (though they probably needed to put more hours in than the first job) were left behind.
EQ, like most MMOs had accessibility problems.
Like I said, niche.

Then came WoW.
All the staple MMO ideas are there. A fantasy setting (descended from Tolkien) with elves, dwarves, trolls et al. A choice of classes based on the healer, damage dealer and tank (big brawny git who can take a beating) gameplay staple. And of course the amazingly well-proportioned female characters who run around protected by chainmail that barely covers their Brazilian wax.


What WoW did was bring the revolutionary idea of making everything as fun as possible. You do not need a quad-carded PC beast to play the game. Everything is set out before you and explained to make picking up the gameplay as easy as possible without getting in the way of the hacking/clubbing/clawing/iceblasting.

Quests are found everywhere and you are given all the information you need to complete them within the description from the NPC, which is stored in a Quest Log for an easy reminder (I still can't believe I used to have to write down pages of notes of cryptic words that I would have to try and guess how to move on).
The game design is stylised to keep the framerates high and smooth and it looks pretty beautiful.

Levelling does not take forever, you can log on, do something for an hour and log off and feel like you have achieved something, the group dynamic in dungeon runs works with graceful simplicity and raiding can be hugely enjoyable and exciting.
My wife plays the game now after watching me for a lifetime and I still remember her nervous excitement on her first raid. Fun stuff.

But astonishingly for the long-time MMO player like myself, you can actually go from level 1 to level 70 (currently the highest point) without ever having to form a group (5 people working together) or a raid (6 to 40 people working together).

There are plenty of Pop Culture references to amuse scattered across the world (Ogres dance like Chris Farley, certain large gorillas will drop empty barrels when killed, I've weilded a Hanzo sword and hundreds of other fun Easter Eggs referencing everything from Ace Ventura to Siouxsie and The Banshees) and the whole game when levelling up is based on being entertaining all the time.

So that's my introduction to World of Warcraft. I know of a few friends who have pondered trying it out and haven't been sure and thought I'd offer some information.

The next time I post about WoW I'll give a rundown on why I'm taking a break from the game and how it makes me "want to drown things".