World of Warcraft made dying less painful and conquered online gaming
Blizzard borrowed heavily from EverQuest but softened the punishments for death and made it easy to find a group. The result, launched in November 2004, became the most popular online role-playing game ever, peaking at 12 million subscribers in 2010 and grossing more than 9.23 billion dollars by 2017.
Announced in 2001, the game arrived on November 23, 2004, timed to the tenth anniversary of the Warcraft series. It is set on the planet Azeroth, roughly four years after the strategy game Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, and mixes classic fantasy with steampunk machines and science fiction touches such as spaceships and time travel. Eleven major expansions have followed, from The Burning Crusade in 2007 to Midnight in 2026.
Death is handled gently by genre standards. A fallen character becomes a ghost at a nearby graveyard, or a wisp for night elves, and can simply walk back to its body to revive. Accepting a spirit healer's help instead costs extra wear on equipment and a spell of resurrection sickness lasting up to ten minutes. A rested bonus speeds up experience gains after time away, rewarding players who log off.
Every new character picks a side, Alliance or Horde, then a race and class. The Pandaren are the exception, staying neutral until they finish their starting zone. The old walls between factions have eroded: opposing players can now group for dungeons and raids, and since patch 10.1 can even share guilds. A War Mode switch lets anyone above level 20 choose whether to be open to player combat.
Much of the challenge lies in instances, private copies of a dungeon generated for each party, usually five players, or raids of up to forty. That design spawned an unofficial contest, the Race to World First, in which guilds compete to clear a new raid on its hardest Mythic setting; the esports organisation Team Liquid sponsors a North American guild that has won several. In 2019 Blizzard also relaunched the original version as World of Warcraft: Classic.
Source: World of Warcraft
