World of Warcraft Phenomenon

World of Warcraft Background

Just over 15 years ago, Blizzard Inc rocked the gaming world with Warcraft: Orcs Vs Humans, a Real Time Strategy game that combined ground breaking graphics, a in depth story line, the requirement to think about strategy more than ever before and multiplayer gaming all in one - a first for the gaming industry. cheap wow classic gold  You will be surprised to learn that the first version of Warcraft arrived before the hugely popular Command & Conquer franchise.

With the success of the first release of Warcraft, Blizzard went away and a couple of years later came out with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness which expanded the universe, introduced new characters and species and made the game more involved than ever before. Central to the game was Blizzard's belief that multiplayer gaming was the wave of the future. Never before had a game had so much attention placed on the multiplayer aspect. You need to remember that this was back in the late 90's and even the concept of the Internet was new to most people, so you can definitely say Blizzard were ahead of the curve on the idea of multiplayer games.

Warcraft is one of the few games where the developers have spent time building a universe in which the action takes place. By creating this universe they have added depth rarely seen in other games. At first glance the story might seem quite basic, just think Lord of the Rings with a mixture of medieval technology and a healthy dose of fantasy. The result? Castles and wizards, swords and dwarves.

Unlike the previous versions of Warcraft the game play has changed slightly from a God like role to you controlling a single character. To begin you have to select whether you are going to play as a member of the Alliance (humans and their allies) or the Horde (Orcs and their kind). Each species has its own strengths and weaknesses so it's down to you which one you go with. The character that you control is known as your Avatar, which is your representation in the virtual world. The aim is to build up the attributes (known as leveling) of your Avatar to become bigger, stronger and have more skills to take on ever harder quests.

You should note that World of Warcraft is completely different to other games you may have bought in the past because instead of playing against the computer you are entering a world online (you can't play it offline) where there are other real people to play with and against. The game also differs slightly in that it operates a kind of 'pay as you play' scheme so you have to either pay a monthly subscription to keep logging in or buy pre-paid playing time - from a business point of view Blizzard really hit a home run on this one!

Innovations in World of Warcraft

As I mentioned earlier, Blizzard have been committed to building quality multiplayer games since 1994 with the original release of Warcraft: Orcs Vs Humans. They made the multiplayer aspect such an integral part of the games that this experience didn't go to waste when they created World of Warcraft because now it's officially recognized by the Guinness book of records as the most popular MMORPG ever made and one estimate by mmogchart. com puts their market share at 62% of the entire MMORPG industry.

When you play WoW for the first time you can see why it took Blizzard nearly 5 years to develop. There are a huge range of innovations and features that couldn't be found in other MMORPG's at the time it was launched. Even some thing as simple as Avatar reincarnation was revolutionized by Blizzard. In other games when an Avatar died it took a while for them to come back and be back at the same level they were before they died. Blizzard did away with this and made reincarnation swifter and easier for players to get back in the thick of the action. The same concept applies to damage an Avatar suffers in battle, recovery is quicker to help casual gamers compete on nearly the same footing as hardcore gamers.

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