World of Warcraft: How it's All Started

What is the secret to this kind of success? Other MMOs usually succeed in one or two gameplay aspects, but not World of Warcraft, which is excellent in every way. Incredible raids, varied quests and a huge game universe to explore, and add-ons that bring new game mechanics that twists the whole gaming world.

Let us remember game origins and how they changed over time.

A Big Surprise

Blizzard made an announcement in September 2001, at the London ECTS exhibition. A new big project that nobody expected from them. Blizzard entertainment was already a well-known studio with huge titles in the RTS and RPG genres. Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo made them leaders in the industry of their own genres. But a new project in a highly specific genre such as MMO? Blizzard got into this adventure. Got inspired by MMO genre leaders. The Blizzard entertainment development team were huge Everquest fans, but they were also game developers. It helped them to improve the gameplay in a genre they liked so much.

The Great Release

Gamers in the US saw the game in November 2004. In a few months, the game got to European users, the first European servers were opened in February 2005.

Blizzard wasn't ready for such demand for World of Warcraft. Blizzard planned to set a goal of 280,000 accounts, but they reached the point of 290,000 accounts in a few days. It was one of the largest stars in the game industry (for an MMO).

Immediately after the game's release, the server turned into the company's main headache - the overcrowding caused the server to stop working, and the waiting room for the servers could be several hundred people, but it doesn't stop the players from buying the game.

For today's wow player it is hard to imagine how small and uncomfortable the game was:

Only two continents, the level limit at 60 lvl. The two raiding instances are Onyxia's Lair and Fire Void. That's it.

The Instant Changes

In 2005, the company had more than five million subscribers on its servers.

A record number for MMO, the next most known MMO - Everquest had its maximum 500 000 active players (according to the statistics from Eurogamer).

World of Warcraft was the most challenging thing ever faced by Blizzard. But as we can see - World of Warcraft continued its existence as it constantly changed. A lot of new content has been introduced into the game through expansion packs. patches and updates.

The First WoW expansion pack was announced at Blizzcon 2005. With every step to it, Blizzard tried to make the game more flexible and user-friendly. With every patch and update, developers added new features and new raids.

In today's version of a game with a variety of raids, and PVP arenas you can take advantage of the best wow boosting services. This kind of service could be a lifesaver for players that do not have much time for raids and lifting their PVP arena rating. After the release of so many add-ons and having such a rich plot and rich game universe, the current WoW may seem difficult for someone who played WoW back then.

Back in 2004-2005 players were not that big fans of changes: the majority of players didn't like the fact that with each patch the developers changed class characteristics in one way or another. In the early days of WoW, the players were not so tolerant of any changes. When Blizzard announced that in the next patch warrior will be "slightly weaker", the reaction of people on one of the servers was extremely violent - disgruntled users created several hundred first-level warrior gnomes for the first in-game protest march jumping around the game world. Such pranks on the part of the players made the developers extremely cruel regarding the policy of user behavior, now Blizzard is considered to be a company with one of the most brutal user policies.

Huge Game Universe

The Warcraft universe has continued to expand for more than 15 years, and the game constantly changes. The universe of the game is revealed not only in the permanent story additions but also in other formats. In addition to the games, the film and several books have already been released. The success of the game universe has no plan to decrease and knowing Blizzard's love of all sorts of surprises and unexpected twists, we can confidently say that it won't be boring to play World of Warcraft in the near future.