20 years ago World of Warcraft released and it was an instant success with over 11 million
players. But now 20 years later Wow still has a impressive player base. With millions of loyal players.
But it’s been 20 years. Many newer shinier mmorpgs have released. There are tons of great RPG games on the consoles. Now there’s even mobile games you can play on your cell phone and ipad. And of course a plethora of streaming movies. In our new modern time there is no lack of instant entertainment.
Yet here we are still playing Wow. What is Wow’s secret mystery that holds us in thrall?
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4 Strength, 4 Stam Leather Belt… Level 18…
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It’s different for different people.
Most folks I play with only play for their friends. If my friends stopped playing, I’d cancel my sub in an instant. And most of my friends are the same.
If any development studio could actually pull their head out of their butt and develop an appropriately challenging and social MMORPG to compete with WoW, we’d all jump ship. But they’ve all been making the same mistakes for 20 years, which is why they all fail.
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There’s no other MMO with the same amount of polish and endgame content.
…that also isn’t weeb. Although FFXIV for example also doesn’t have the same PvP and PvE endgame offerings.
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Show me another mmo that lets me be this cute and deadly at the same time!
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All the MMO’s that have come out all do the same thing: They focus all their attention into flashy graphics and the first 2 hours of gameplay, and then there’s nothing after that.
Which, TBH, is a problem with a LOT of game development, since a lot of games these days are “designed to the reviewer” since they know that reviewers won’t play more than 2 hours anyway before doing their video or article, so there’s no point in doing anything past that if you’re just going for quick sales.
I used to go to E3 every year, and got into the habit of asking every upcoming-MMO-publisher the same question: “What will I be doing in your game after 2 months?”
Nobody ever had an answer. And they seemed astonished that I was even asking.
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That’s a great question to ask them.
BUT it’s tough…if you had asked WoW devs the same question when WoW launched, they would have had no idea. They were making things up as they go.
I’ve heard things like Molton Core was cobbled together because players had nothing to do…and it kind of shows, have you ever looked at MC design? It looks like someone just painted some tunnels, plopped some mobs in and called it a day lol. I think the armor sets weren’t even done being designed when it launched? I might not be remembering this correctly.
It’s hard to get started in the genre when there’s such a heavy amount of investment required.
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Time, money and memories. The first 2 are a bit easier to let go of, but the memories not so much. Personally, I just enjoy it more than the rest of the MMO market. That’s the simplest answer I can give.
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The combat system. It just flows so much better than any other game ive bothered to try
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Going pre-WoW, though, the Dark Age of Camelot creators knew exactly what their players would be doing.
Which is why it had such a great end-game right out of the box. And that was way back in 2001.
Compare to City of Heroes, which came out 3 years later, and it had nothing to do at max level except fight the Hamidon when it spawned, for trivial power-ups.
It was after City of Heroes’ disappointment that I started asking everyone The Question. (I even talked to City of Heroes’ lead designer about it.)
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I really enjoyed the RTS games and this was the first game of its genre that I enjoyed. I tired a few of the D&D online games and they didn’t grab me.
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Which makes me glad games like helldivers and palworld are doing so well. Some kind of light at the end of the dev tunnel.
Also gives a nice break to wow with something good to play.
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I’ve only played MMOs for near 20 years now and from my experience every single one focuses on only one element of an MMO while everything else ends up subpar. WoW is the only MMO I’ve seen become a jack of all trades, master of none.
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Um… source?
I mean, I really hate to take off your rose-colored glasses, but I strongly doubt that WoW has more than 2 million players anymore… the number is probably much lower.
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Yeah it’s pretty clear we dipped below 2m in Shadowlands and haven’t gone up past that.
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I don’t play other MMOs seriously and would probably never play another one even close to as seriously as I play WoW at this point in my life. Way too much to learn just to feel like I’m not a burden to my friends in this genre.
I play them solo and casually, though. I play GW2 maybe once a month for 20 or so minutes. I run around and it’s beautiful. I play Diablo 4 maybe twice a month for about an hour. I run around and maybe do a dungeon alone or a few quests. I play RuneScape maybe … 3 times a year for 10 minutes and haven’t left the starting zone/city, I don’t even know how to do that. I just click the logs and am a lumberjack of some sort
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My characters are handsome 
Also, I like repetitive things, so I can do the same dungeons/raids over and over again without getting bored in a long time.
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Also the problem that it’s a lot of time to spend learning something when the life expectancy of a new MMO is not very long before the servers get shut down.
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