In November 2004, Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft, a game that would forever change the landscape around MMORPGs. World of Warcraft became part of the cultural zeitgeist — commercials featuring a wide range of celebrities played on television at all hours of the day, episodes of popular TV shows featured offhanded mentions of the MMO, or were even centered around it entirely.
Everyone I knew was playing World of Warcraft. My cousin, some close friends, the High School quarterback. Everyone but me. I had, at one point, attempted to jump into the first model of World of Warcraft’s free trial, which only allowed me ten days of game time, but I bounded off hard. I made a Blood Elf on a server that had been randomly assigned to me, saw the user interface and immediately uninstalled the game after a friend told me that I’d need to download addons to make it manageable. Uninterested, I returned to Final Fantasy XIV and would not revisit World of Warcraft until November 2023, some 19 years later.
And in a strange twist of fate, I’m absolutely loving it.
To preface this, I have spent most of my life playing MMORPGs. I started raiding in Lineage II with my dad at age 12. I jumped into AION, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Blade & Soul, and Guild Wars 2 on launch. I played Final Fantasy XIV in its 1.0 iteration and stuck with the game once it was re-released as A Realm Reborn. I have played that MMORPG for nearly 10 years on and off, done the high-end Extreme and Savage content on release with dedicated groups, and spent more time than I’d like to admit just running laps in Limsa Lominsa.
I love MMORPGs. They’ve always been a healthy part of my gaming diet, but despite my foray into the Warcraft series through Warcraft III (and The Frozen Throne) as a child, I never felt the desire to jump into World of Warcraft. This was largely due to the culture cultivated around the game that sometimes felt outright hostile towards outsiders or even toward itself due to its baked-in faction-focused gameplay. But feeling the MMORPG malaise in Final Fantasy XIV and having attended BlizzCon in 2023, I decided to give World of Warcraft another shot.
As soon as I got home, I reinstalled the game, hopped into the free trial, and was surprised to see that everything had changed. I no longer started on the Sunstrider Isles as a Blood Elf; the game immediately stuck me in a cinematic and accompanying tutorial zone that set me right on my way to the start of the Battle for Azeroth expansion. It introduced me to every mechanic I would need to know as a new player. I learned how to interact with objects, queue for dungeons, fulfill quest objectives, and illustrated how much World of Warcraft’s onboarding process had changed when that first free trial was implemented all those years ago. It feels like something almost comparable to Final Fantasy XIV’s onboarding process. You start in a specific zone that teaches you the basics to get you off on the right foot.
However, World of Warcraft didn’t do away with their traditional, race-specific starting zones, instead, these areas become available to new characters after you finish the tutorial on your first character. And as you progress through the game and reach level 10 you unlock different classes — the Death Knight and Demon Hunter. I ended up expanding my experience with World of Warcraft and Blizzard provided me with access to the most current expansion, as well as some game time so I could get the breadth of what the MMO had to offer. And as I started my second character, a Void Elf Death Knight, everything seemed to fall into place. All at once, I understood what made World of Warcraft the phenomenon it was and why it felt so familiar to play.
Outside of the rare exceptions, World of Warcraft has been the foundation for almost every MMORPG that has appeared after it. Final Fantasy XIV Producer Naoki Yoshida even stated in an interview with PCGamesN that without World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV as we know it would not exist in the state that it currently does. Part of this is why jumping into World of Warcraft as a long-time Final Fantasy XIV player made it so easy. The combat was roughly the same, as was the leveling structure and quest progression systems.
But World of Warcraft more keenly reminds me of Final Fantasy XIV during its Heavensward era, where experimentation was possible and Job Classes weren’t so rigidly defined outside of their roles. I remember the age of needing to level up your stats manually and having to purchase an item from your local Grand Company if you messed up that stat allocation or if Dark Knights needed to balance their TP and MP to near perfection to clear the Extreme raids at the time. Final Fantasy XIV has more or less done away with these elements and slid into a more homogenized experience, which is why World of Warcraft is so fascinating to me.
Upon hitting level 10, I opened up Specializations for my Death Knight and saw that there were three different paths for me to take. After making that selection, it opened up two skill trees — one for my class and another for the Specialization itself. I could pick what skills I wanted to use according to my own build. I reveled in this freedom as I made a Frost Death Knight to run through the Wrath of the Lich King expansion through World of Warcraft’s “timewalking” feature which lets players run back through old content as though it were current.
Alongside this, you can sync quests with friends and progress together. Certain zones also scale to your level which makes playing the game solo possible as well. Right now, I’m currently running through Wrath on my Death Knight, Battle for Azeroth on my Holy Priest, and dipping my toes into Dragonflight on my Evoker. And getting a little sampling of everything has been great. I never feel bored playing World of Warcraft, and since changing skill allocation in your talent tree is free, I felt myself mixing and matching skills that fit my playstyle best. But I never ran out of people to play with, as some friends had either picked up the game shortly after myself or found themselves returning to Azeroth for one reason or another.
This prompted a handful of us to try our hand at World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore, which we are still working our way through. Experience World of Warcraft as it was has been interesting to say the least. Retail featured a lot of adjustments to the user interface and obviously has more quality-of-life experiences, but running through the game as it was in its “vanilla” era has opened my eyes to just how impactful it was to the market.
Everything I played by comparison wasn’t as in-depth or as feature-rich. No other MMORPG I played at the time had cooking, fishing, or crafting to the degree World of Warcraft had or such an expansive amount of skills for each class.
Classic lacks a lot of the modern conveniences of Retail, but due to the populous nature of the Hardcore server, it’s managed to emulate the sense of community that used to exist in MMORPGs. Everyone talks to each other and asks for help completing quests or tackling world bosses, and it’s what I’ve missed the most about MMORPGs. With Final Fantasy XIV’s structure now allowing for solo play, you don’t really get these things to a similar effect. Not saying that this is a bad thing, but it leaves the world feeling silent and sometimes empty outside of major cities.
Overall, my experience with World of Warcraft is a positive one. It was interesting seeing all of the pieces come together and understand why the current MMORPG climate is the way it is, and why World of Warcraft was king of the genre for so long. Will it continue to exist as it does now, and will its Hardcore server remain as popular as it is now? Only time will tell as Activision Blizzard King has entered its acquisition with Microsoft. Maybe World of Warcraft will change drastically in these coming years with Chris Metzen returning to the helm, or maybe it will stay mostly unchanged. Regardless, it’s a more approachable experience than it’s been in the past, and I’m happy to be here, catching up and experiencing the foundation of so many games I’ve grown to love.
