After five years, it's hard to imagine a world without World of Warcraft. Released Nov. 23, 2004, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game has set the standard for the genre.
More than 11.5 million players from around the world, from all walks of life, spend hours a day in the world of Azeroth. They embark on epic adventures, battle other players or just hang out. And each of them pays developer Blizzard Entertainment $15 per month for the privilege.
Q&A:
How Cataclysm Will Change WoW Forever
Players create characters and develop them over time, forging relationships with other gamers and going on quests to gain experience or loot. Whether they play with strangers, friends or alone, Warcraft's polished virtual world proves easy to get into and hard to get out of.
Though the game's success has spawned dozens of imitators, not one has posed a serious threat to Blizzard's dominance. But perhaps the best praise for WoW is that other game designers love to play it. Among its devotees are Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and BioShock creative director Ken Levine.
"It's the game I've played more than any other," Levine told Wired.com. "It's an aesthetic masterpiece.... So much of the world tells a story when you look at it."
Most videogames wear out their welcome after a few months. But Blizzard's stewardship of its persistent world — filled with orcs and trolls, humans and dwarves — has been so successful that the game shows no signs of slowing, even a half-decade on.
Amazingly, World of Warcraft almost didn't happen. The world's most popular MMORPG has its roots in real-time strategy games Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. In 1998, while half of a Blizzard development team was assigned to work on Warcraft III, the other half ended up working on a game that was canceled.
With nothing to do, the team members looked at the games they were playing the most at the time — massively multiplayer online games like Sony's EverQuest and Electronic Arts' Ultima Online. At the time, both games topped out at around 200,000 subscribers each, and Blizzard thought it could do better by making a virtual world that was more accessible to newbies.
"We felt there was such an opportunity in that genre, and that Warcraft was such a great universe for a game like that," said Blizzard's Rob Pardo, the first lead designer on WoW. "We started talking about it, getting excited about it, and we decided to make it."
Pardo aimed for the sky: 1 million subscribers, which would have made his game far and away the most popular MMO of all time.
WoW passed that milestone in a matter of months. "We were off by about an order of magnitude," he said.
Pardo, now an executive VP at Blizzard, said he never thought that Warcraft's world could go on for five years. "When you look historically at what other MMOs have done, by the time you hit the five-year mark, you've already hit your peak," he said. "With World of Warcraft, people are like, 'I've been playing this game for five years, and I still love it.'"
BioShock's Levine, who played WoW's beta version more than five years ago, says he still devotes several hours to the game every week.
"I just love being in that world," he said. "When you go into [the city] Stormwind, you go across the bridge and see all those giant statues of the heroes, that sells the space. It's over the top, it's huge and you know what you're getting into."
The fastidiously detailed underwater dystopia of BioShock was influenced by WoW's grandeur, Levine said: "Any project where you need to sell people on a space in a videogame, you can learn something from World of Warcraft."
WoW has been a double-edged sword for the MMO genre, said Pardo. On the one hand, its massive popularity across demographic lines has brought the MMO out of the basement and into the mainstream: "You start hearing moms at a grocery store talk about it," he said.
On the other hand, even though WoW is attracting competition, its huge popularity and loyal fan base isn't leaving many consumers for other games in the genre. First-person shooter fans will buy Halo, Modern Warfare and Borderlands for $60 a pop, but MMO players won't pony up $15 per month to delve into three different virtual worlds.
Of the three major fantasy MMOs released last year that stood the best chance of combating WoW — Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea and Warhammer Online — all have had to merge their gameplay servers because there weren’t enough adventurers to go around.
And the list of MMOs that have shut down completely is long. Many of these shuttered games had big licenses or pedigrees behind them: Tabula Rasa, The Matrix Online, The Sims Online and Myst Online.
Where WoW goes from here depends on what its army of 11.5 million players want, Pardo says. Blizzard's goal is to continue to appease its players with new upgrades and remain a few steps ahead of the competition. It will release an expansion next year called Cataclysm, which Pardo says will revamp the entire game world.
Pardo is bullish on the game's future. "WoW is going to be a bigger world five years from now," he said.
Whether it's still around in 2014, making it through the first half-decade is an incredible achievement, says Levine. "You (rarely) have something that lasts that long, is that well loved and that frequently played — I mean, what other game does anyone have a five-year relationship with and constantly play?" he says. "Outside of Bejeweled."
See Also:
