Let's review video games - World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO since 2001. Part I

Platform: PC - Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Title: World of Warcraft
Developer/Development team: Blizzard studios
Release date: November 23, 2004
Genre: MMORPG
No. of Players: Single Player/Multiplayer
Where to buy it: Battle.net or your closest games retailer
R.R.P.: $60 USD for the battle box

Where do I even begin? How about with this; this review will be of the base product before any expansions were released. World of Warcraft was announced to be released shortly after the success of Warcraft 3, one of the better RTS games of the time. WoW went into Alpha stage in 2001 and only an exclusive few were allowed to participate in it. Then in 2003 it went into a beta stage, which was also a closed beta. Looking back at it now it seems so long ago since it released, but it finally made the market in 2004 and by god are there some interesting stories about that.

When it finally hit store shelves physical copies kept selling out and the servers crashed from the traffic. Ghostcrawler, one of the most prominent GM’s in WoW history, came out and said that they hadn’t expected the millions of players they got, and instead they only anticipated 500,000 or so players. In between server time and mass amount of players in zones, it was hard to play let alone log in. This would just be the start of WoW’s journey though, as it was set to be one of the most successful MMO’s of all time.

So what was good with the game? Well, almost everything. First let’s start with the aesthetics. At the time, Blizzard used one of the best engine’s for MMO’s they could and the game looked amazing. The starting zone’s really set the tone and atmosphere for each race, with the Forsaken having a dark and gritty zone and the Night Elves being one with nature in their zone. The environments were fantastic and the dungeon’s looked pretty good as well. Blizzard’s art team went all-out when it came to making Azeroth look big and vast and they did a wonderful job with it. The raids though, they were massive dungeons and again, the art team went all-out. They did a more than brilliant job with the designs, giving that feel of an epic dungeon.

Figure 1: A part of the Forsaken starting zone. The Forsaken are the undead unbound from the Lich King.

The soundtrack is something that WoW to this day is renowned for. Blizzard have always done an amazing job with their soundtrack’s, as is evident in their Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises. They held nothing back here, as they had to make a soundtrack specific to each zone and a soundtrack for every dungeon and raid. This is a total of 39 zones, not including the massive dungeons and epic raids. One of the soundtrack’s from Vanilla that stands out, for me, is the one for Stormwind. I remember going there for the first time, albeit in Wrath, and the soundtrack was very impressive. It really gave a good representation about what the human race was like and how structured the Alliance is.

Figure 2: Stormwind, the human capital city and the city of the Alliance Leader, King Varian Wrynn.

Now the gameplay. If you chose a class that was actually playable (I’ll talk about this in a little while) then the gameplay was great for an MMO. The Global Cooldown and burst cooldown’s idea was something that was fleshed out and perfected by Blizzard. DPS roles in vanilla was something like this; use all of your abilities and facesmash as much as possible. Healing roles were this; USE EVERYTHING TO HEAL. Tanking was this; Just hit something really really fast. Yeah nobody knew what they were doing back in Vanilla. It was a game of learn as you go, and you better learn fast.

The end-game content… epic. The raids were massive and there were so many of them. Some of the 5-man dungeons of today were massive 40 man raids, including the Sunken Temple and Blackrock Spire. Molten Core is the most memorable, housing the first Tier of epic raiding gear. The instance was made of massive caverns and giant mobs which took 4 tanks, 8 healers and 28 dps. That would be the theme for all WoW raids until Burning Crusade (I think, don’t quite me on that). The soundtrack, aesthetic appeal and just how massive these raids were gave them an epic feeling, but they took way too long to finish. Just like PvP in WoW - which was a tacked on feature and never meant to be in the game in the first place - it could take 6+ hours or even days to finish a raid. This was far too long for most players, but teenagers could play and raid to their heart’s content. It’s really interesting to see the dynamic shift between what raiding used to be and what it is now.

Figure 3: Casuality taking on Vaelastrasz the Corrupt from Black Wing Lair, the Tier 2 raid of Vanilla after Ahn’Qiraj got released.

Now, the negatives of WoW that got fixed in Burning Crusade. Like I mentioned before, not every class was playable. Hell, most classes weren’t playable. Most Mages, Fury Warriors, Enhancement Shaman, Shadow Priests and even more were never seen in raids since they were barely playable. They weren’t pulling the numbers needed and were thusly pushed out of raiding spots for better classes. Stats were all over the place. You would get plate gear with Strength and Intellect on the same item, namely for Paladin’s since they used Intellect in Vanilla. You’d also see Agility on the gear as well, but this is back when Agility boosted Dodge rating and Critical Strike rating for plate users. The same travesty also happened to other classes, including Hunters who at the time used mana (which would be changed to Energy/Focus in Wrath of the Lich King).

Levelling was a nightmare. For an MMO Blizzard did an excellent job at deterring people from their game. For the entirety of Vanilla, the exp system was hated upon because of one reason; exhaustion. If you were levelling too much or playing for too long, a debuff called exhaustion was applied to you, reducing all of your exp gained by 50%. People were leaving and not playing for something like 4 hours because of this debuff. When I said people hated it, they really hated it. The forums were overrun with how much hate it was getting.

Lastly, the server issues. As I explained, the servers crashed on the first day. This seems to be a running trend with Blizzard (see: Mists of Pandaria and Diablo 3). In their defence, they didn’t expect so many fans of the game. Just like what Nintendo said last year when their servers crashed, and Sony and Microsoft said this year on Christmas. As you can tell, this isn’t a valid excuse for fans.

All in all, Vanilla WoW is remembered as being the first epic entry into WoW’s dynamic journey is oft thought of in a nostalgic bliss, even if the issues would have pissed off most gamer’s today. It got a few things wrong, but it got a hell of a lot more right and is still one of the most successful franchises to this day. If you want to check out Vanilla WoW and the issues or hit’s that it had, look for a private server as Vanilla WoW is no longer playable on the official servers.

If I had to rate Vanilla WoW, I’d give it an 8/10. Great, but not perfect.