From the archive: Key events from WOW’s first five years.
World of Warcraft celebrated its fifth anniversary last week.
On 23rd November 2004, Blizzard launched its MMO in North America.
So it’s possible for you to hardly call Blizzard’s first steps in massively multiplayer gaming tentative.
But some of that story can only be understood, and properly put into context, in hindsight.
In September 2005, patch 1.7: Rise of the Blood God introduced the raid dungeon Zul’Gurub.
It was a feature of the boss fight, nothing more.
It was never intended to leave the safe confines of the instance.
It spread like wildfire, killing lower-level characters in seconds.
Eventually, Blizzard was forced into a hard reset of affected servers to kill it off.
Stories like this are more closely associated with less regulated “sandbox” MMOs likeEVE Online.
The fix was in.
From now on, World of Warcraft would only run as its makers intended.
Leeroy became a sort of folk hero of WOW.
Looking back, the video’s wild popularity isn’t that easy to explain.
If there’s one area where Blizzard really hit the ground running though, it was dungeons.
It simultaneously proved how great MMO raiding could be, and how exclusive, intimidating and inaccessible.
For its developers it was both climax and anti-climax, and they would never make another 40-man raid.
Once you started there, it was impossible not to do all of it.
But the name of the new entity left little doubt.
And the prime motivator for the deal was one game: World of Warcraft.
Analysts estimate that WOW alone contributeshalf the super-publisher’s earnings, eclipsing even Guitar Hero and Call of Duty.
But at the end of the day, it meant more to him than it did to Blizzard.
“There’s a lot that we can learn from [Bobby].
And, candidly, there’s a lot that he can learn from us.”
It later added a version of Peggle, too.
PopCap proved him right.
It was later awarded$6m in damages.
Just another battle in the war on gold trading and power-levelling.
Any mention of the imminent Faction Change service was met with loud boos.
It deepened immersion immeasurably.
Despite the players' complaints, it won’t destroy communities.
It will probably only be used by a tiny minority.
At $30, it’s too expensive to be abused.
It’s an appropriate service to offer in a five-year-old game where your friends might have moved on.
But, symbolically… it’s a betrayal of the game’s founding principles.
But Leeroy Jenkins needed to be mentioned (and, well, I wasn’t there).
As an entity, Blizzard can be aloof and over-protective.
It would be easy to characterise the developer as a money-grabbing corporate bogeyman.
But at BlizzCon, that mask doesn’t so much slip as vanish completely.
Here’s to the next five years.
