World of WarCraft
Description official descriptions
World of Warcraft is a MMORPG based in the Warcraft universe. The player creates a character choosing from 8 races and 9 classes. Most races start in their own part of the vast world. As the races move out from their starting locations, they can meet the other races if they choose to move out through the world. Both races and classes have unique abilities, skills, and spells to help them survive in the world.
The game offers professions for players to learn, if they want. You have the choice of 2 major professions, such as Alchemy, Herbalism, Skinning, and Tailoring, as well as the ability to have unlimited minor professions, such as Fishing and Cooking. Progressing in these skills allows you to make more things or have better results from the skills.
The gameplay is similar to most other MMORPG games, where you must go out into the world, complete quests, kill monsters, and level up your character. And, as often is the case, you also will want to find, make, or buy better equipment as you go along. There are multiple levels of equipment from normal to artifact based on rarity. The player can also join various guilds and parties.
You also can move quickly between areas by learning to ride a mount when your level is high enough, or taking another form of transport that you can't control movement for, such as train, griffon, and more.
Spellings
- ιε ½δΈη - Simplified Chinese spelling
Groups +
- Boss Fight Books games
- Fantasy creatures: Dragons
- Fantasy creatures: Dwarves
- Fantasy creatures: Elves
- Fantasy creatures: Gnomes
- Fantasy creatures: Minotaurs
- Fantasy creatures: Orcs
- Fantasy creatures: Succubi or incubi
- Fantasy creatures: Trolls
- Fantasy creatures: Unicorns
- Game feature: In-game screenshot capture
- Gameplay feature: Alchemy
- Gameplay feature: Armor / weapon sets
- Gameplay feature: Blacksmithing
- Gameplay feature: Color-blind mode
- Gameplay feature: Controllable pet companions
- Gameplay feature: Fishing
- Gameplay feature: Goldsmithing
- Gameplay feature: Horse riding
- Gameplay feature: Hunting
- Gameplay feature: Mining
- Gameplay feature: Pettable animals
- Gameplay feature: Survival cooking
- Games made into books
- Games made into comics
- Games referenced in movies
- Protagonist: Female (option)
- Retail releases with faction/character-specific cover variants
- Scripting language: Lua
- Sound engine: FMOD
- Technology: amBX
- Video games turned into board / card games
- WarCraft universe
- World of WarCraft series
Screenshots
Promos
Videos
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Credits (Windows version)
790 People (566 developers, 224 thanks) · View all
Game Design |
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Programming | |
[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 92% (based on 61 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 163 ratings with 10 reviews)
My most played game ever! (And I've played games for decades)
The Good
I have more positive things to say about World of Warcraft than any other game made. Here are some reasons why:
It empowers players to successfully solo or group to complete quests.
Roleplay lives in RP guilds and has designated RP servers.
Finding quests is not difficult, completing them are reasonable.
PvP rewards are worthwhile. Battlegrounds can be fun and challenging.
Character creation is flexible.
Mods are encouraged.
Graphics are good, lag is minimal.
Tradeskills can be helpful.
There seems to always be something to do.
The Bad
It'd be nice to have a graphics update in the game and perhaps more variation on types of quest. Most of the time it is either killing, gathering or courier but is the case with most MMORPG's.
The Bottom Line
This is the best video game ever made. If you don't like it, then maybe video games is not the past-time for you.
Windows · by nullitilium (4) · 2008
The Good
This is, by far, the best MMORPG currently out there and you hear many in the game saying the same when comparing to all other MMORPGs they have played. Although the graphics may not compare with ones like FFIX, they fit the game universe perfectly. The somewhat cartoony look to various creatures and characters is what you would expect in a Warcraft game.
The game is set up in such a way that quests will build your character up to a good level, then move you on to the next area, and so on. You have the choice of not doing all of the quests, but doing so reveals the story and plot in the game as well as helping to keep your level where it should be for the area you are in.
Professions in the game are great, though not perfect. Depending on your character's class, you pick from the various professions to select 2 that are going to be useful either to you or to your guild members... or just so you can make money off them. The professions can help you to have better equipment than you usually can find for your character, though not always. If you keep your professions' skills increasing, you can make some powerful items. And the minor professions -- fishing, cooking, and first aid -- help to give you some more to do. Fishing, in particular, can be very useful. Besides getting fish that can be used for health, feeding pets, or cooking to make even better, you can also catch equipment. Sometimes this can gain you some excellent equipment.
The enemies and varied considerably in the game. No matter how long you play the game, as long as you aren't staying in the same area, you will find many new enemies to fight that look vastly different from previous ones. Granted, spiders look similar, wolves look similar, etc... but you also find many enemies that look completely different.
Each race and class have special abilities and skills that define them. These help you to create your own unique character that is different from everyone else's characters. And the vast amount of equipment available also help to change how your character looks compared to everyone else. Once you're out of the beginner areas, you don't usually see two characters who look the same.
The emotes included with the game are fun to mess around with when you want a break from killing. The best of which is dancing. Each race and gender have their own unique dancing style... from the human female doing the macarena, to the undead male appearing to be a hard rock star. Getting many races and genders together to dance can make for a very interesting display.
The world is absolutely huge. It would take a very long time to see the entire world, if you wanted to try and do so. It can be deceiving when you look at the default map, because it seems small. However, when you zoom it out all the way, you notice how huge it really is. I have no idea really how big the world is, but I would estimate it to be over 500 miles x 500 miles (or 250,000 square miles)... and it may be even larger than that. For a game world, that is ridiculously huge! And that size helps keep areas from being too filled up with people.
Because of the number of classes and races available and because people want to try them all out and also be on multiple servers, the game allows you to have 10 characters on any one server, with a maximum of 50 characters. For most people, this basically allows you to have as many as you want, since most don't want more than 50 characters.
The Bad
If you have a problem, GMs take a very long time to respond. This is perhaps the worst issue with the game as it is still new and problems can happen more frequently now than they will in months to come.
Some quests require you to loot, or kill, a specific enemy, and when you have 20 people trying to complete the quest, this can take forever before you manage to get the kill so you can loot it. You can group with others and that can help, but it still can become troublesome.
Lag is an issue in the game, but usually not a huge problem most of the time. When it DOES hit, however, it can be severe. Blizzard is working to correct that and may have it taken care of soon.
The Bottom Line
If you like MMORPGs and don't mind paying some money for monthly access, this game is the best one you'll find. I don't usually play games with monthly fees because it's not worth the cost to keep playing the game. However, this game is so great that, for under $0.50 per day, it's worth the cost. I can actually sit and play the game for 6-8 hours a night, every night... and many play much more than that!
Windows · by Riamus (8480) · 2004
The Definitive MMO experience.
The Good
This game doesn't really need to be reviewed, its faults and success are visible for most people interested in playing an MMO to see. Yet, I still feel like I have something to say about the game.
I've played quite a few MMO's and this one was the best. Not the most fun, but it was the best. The game is the quickest to get into and has a very stable feel.
Another good thing about the game is how they are pretty delicate with character deaths. A lot of games totally punish you when a character dies in the game which I think is one of the reasons why this game is so easy to pick up.
The graphics and control are also very solid as well as the characters graphics and control. In some MMO's for some reason controlling the character is really awkward. In this game it's not the case. Everything just feels so standard and put together, which makes it easy to play the game.
World of Warcraft reminds me a lot of multiplayer Starcraft. Just like Starcraft the game has a very high learning curve that you may never achieve. And just like Starcraft the game is done to death that it doesn't feel like you're doing anything new, yet the game is so balanced that it still is the definitive experience for its Genre.
The Bad
Overview: The game falls into the problems that any other MMO falls into. It simply engrosses such a large amount of time and for what? A few bits of gear, etc. But, the thing is, that's just how MMO's are right now. And most people are fine with that.
The Bottom Line
The game deserves to be so popular, It really is a good game. However, its an MMO. And because the game is an MMO, it is a really time consuming game that has a huge learning curve at later levels.
What makes the game addicting is that you cannot just stop and pause the game. Many people are very competitive gamers and this game has no pause button. What this does is cause the game to demand giant scores of time. If you don't put in enough time as your peers you will literally fall behind. If you leave the game you're not pissing off some game characters you're pissing off real people. And secondly, the MMO has become so competitive that at the highest levels you must spend gargantuan amounts of time playing. All of this comes together to make a person, susceptible already to playing a game too much, spend an enormous amount of time on the game.
Windows · by Evan Agresti (6) · 2009
Discussion
Subject | By | Date |
---|---|---|
World of Warcraft Classic | Cantillon (76187) | May 5, 2021 |
Trivia
1001 Video Games
World of Warcraft appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Board game
This game has been adapted into a (less massively-multiplayer -- 2-6 players instead) 2005 boardgame.
Christmas events
- For the 2004 Christmas season, Blizzard added easter eggs throughout the game in a patch, which enabled players to find egg nog recipes, snowballs and various other references to Christmas.
- In the 2005 Christmas event, several new NPCs and quests were added for a short period of time. One of the quests requested that you rescued Metzen the Reindeer - try searching for Chris Metzen on Mobygames and you'll see that he is from the Blizzard staff.
Development (post-release)
Blizzard developed a program called The Warden to fight off cheaters. It's a highly-intrusive watchdog program, some even call it spyware, that scans for active processes while playing World of Warcraft. By accident, a DRM protection from the Sony record company helped crackers to avoid detection by The Warden.
Sony's DRM, shipped with tens of thousands of audio CD's, installs a virus-like rootkit that causes processes starting with $sys$ to stay undetected at all times. Malicious users with the DRM installed then simply wrote software with a $sys$ process to cheat in-game. With a booming economy and a gold price on eBay that easily matches the currency of some foreign countries, certain players will be rich soon.
In November 2005, Blizzard opened six new realms for the game in North America to give first time players the opportunity to adventure on equal footing with other players.
Gnomeregan
In every punch card you get in Gnomeregan, there is a hidden binary message:
White Punch Card:
Thrall and Jaina sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Yellow Punch Card:
If you can read this, you're standing too close
Blue Punch Card:
The gnome king wears night elf underwear
Red Punch Card:
Help! I'm trapped in a binary punch card factory!
Prismatic Punch Card:
Message to Castpipe: your laundry's ready for pickup.
Great Azeroth Plague, The
In September 2005, Blizzard added a seemingly innocent instance with unexpected consequences of epic proportions. To a certain extent, it even became one of the most realistic events in a MMORPG to mimic the world and history itself.
The new instance, Zul'Gurub, features the god of blood: Hakkar. When you fight him, he has a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that deals 250-350 damage every two seconds and affects nearby players. Unexpectedly, some players managed to carry the disease, soon dubbed wow aids, hakkar sars and The Great Azeroth Plague, outside the instance and brought it to the towns. It soon became a real plague, affecting thousands of players, of which many did not have the class to constantly protect themselves. Even npcs and pets became affected and low-level players were killed over and over again, as, after respawning, they were immediately struck once more.
The plague became so powerful that major cities became places to avoid. The GMs first tried to quarantine the players, but some kept escaping until it could no longer be controlled. From a small annoyance, it soon became a survival of the fittest where certain players found themselves unable to continue playing under normal circumstances. Ultimately, the plague lasted two days until a rolling restart of all servers.
This was not the first time something unexpected was taken outside an instance, though.
What is not commonly known is that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta contacted Blizzard about the plague in the game. The CDC had read that Blizzard had simulated a plague spreading through the world, and was interested in how they simulated it. They were disappointed when they found out it was a bug.
Leeroy Jenkins
A World of Warcraft gameplay video by the clan PALS FOR LIFE has spawned the internet phenomenon Leeroy Jenkins. You can read all about it in the Wikipedia article in the related links section.
Money
214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper seems to be the maximum amount of money you can collect per character in WOW. As they informed in wowinsider, at least two different players, Dorgabas and meth would have reached this limit on January 16th, 2008, a limit theorized before. After reaching this limit, your character can no longer receive money from any source in the game.
Novel
A World of Warcraft novel was published by Pocket Books in 2006: Cycle of Hatred by Keith R. A. DeCandido. It takes place in the period between between Warcraft III - the Frozen Throne and World of Warcraft, filling in blanks and establishing greater continuity.
As of 2012, there are eight novels based on World of Warcraft (plus four based on the expansion World of Warcraft: Cataclysm).
References
- If you look carefully while playing the game, you may find developers or their families among the NPCs, such as
Robert Bridenbecker's family in Goldshire, just outside of Stormwind. - In Uldaman there are 3 lost dwarves: Olaf, Eric and Baelog.
Those 3 dwarves are all from the game
The Lost Vikings . And on top of that, The "Staff of Tsol" and the "Medallion of Gni'kiv" (which are both used on another quest in the same dungeon) spelled backwards "Tsol" and "Gni'kiv" are "Lost" and "Viking". - When playing a Horde character at level 40+ with 225/225 in your First Aid skill, travel to Hammerfall. Go to the Trauma Surgeon in the building to the left of the entrance. He will give you a quest in which you can gain Artisan First Aid. In this quest, you must run around and bandage dying patients. When dying, one of the patients says: "Goodbye cruel world.. I'm leaving you today. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye". Those are the exact lyrics of the song "Goodbye Cruel World" of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" album.
- One of the named opponents for Alliance characters in Westfall is a bandit belonging to the Defias Brotherhood, named Benny Blaanco. His name refers to a gang leader in the well known movie Carlito's Way.
- In Elwynn Forest there is an NPC named Terry Palin. He is a lumberjack and he's OK. His name is a reference to Monty Python comedians Terry Jones and Michael Palin who were responsible for the famous Lumberjack Song.
- One of the quests in Netherstorm, Outland, is called Needs More Cowbell where the player needs to find the cow Bessy using a bell. The quest's title is a reference to the pop culture catchphrase More cowbell, which was launched in a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch on 8th April 2000, about the recording of the song (Don't Fear) The Reaper by Blue Γyster Cult, where a cowbell is featured.
References to the game
- Coca Cola launched a commercial in China inspired by World of Warcraft. Three models stand up to their boss when he asks them "to show more". He transforms into an orc and after drinking a coke the girls fight him. The link to the video can be found in the related links section.
- The porn film series Whorelore was originally to be called Whores of Whorecraft.
- An entire episode of the animated TV series South Park was dedicated to World of Warcraft. The episode, titled Make Love, Not Warcraft, was aired on 4th October 2006 and it was the second half premiere of the tenth season.
- The game makes an appearance in the 2008 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Early on, Jacob Benson (
Jaden Smith ), son of Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly ), is shown playing the game on his laptop. - The game is referenced multiple times in Douglas Coupland's 2009 novel Generation A, where the character Julien is addicted to it.
- World of Warcraft was parodied in an episode of "Die Redaktion" (The Editorial Team), a monthly comedy video produced by the German gaming magazine GameStar. It was published on the DVD of issue 06/2005.
Sales
World of Warcraft quickly became the fastest selling game ever, selling 240,000 copies in 24 hours.
VISA cards
In May 2007 Blizzard announced the availability of World of Warcraft VISA credit cards from the First National Bank of Omaha. There are 13 different types of cards like Alliance Draenei or Horde Blood Elf. Aside from the art work, there are other bonuses such as a free month of subscription time with first use and game time at the rate of 1% of every dollar in qualifying purchases.
Awards
- 4Players
- 2005 β Best Online Role-Playing Game of the Year
- Apple Design Awards
- 2005 - Best Mac OS X Entertainment Product
- Computer Games Magazine
- March 2005 - Game of the Year 2004
- Computer Gaming World
- March 2005 (Issue #249) β Game of the Year
- March 2005 (Issue #249) β Special Achievement in Art Direction
- Games for Windows Magazine
- March 2007 - #10 Game of the Year 2006
- GameSpy
- 2004 β #5 Game of the Year
- 2004 β #2 PC Game of the Year
- 2004 β PC MMORPG of the Year
- 2004 β PC RPG / MMORPG of the Year (Readers' Vote)
- 2004 - Special Achievement in Art Direction (together with
Myst IV: Revelation ) - 2004 - Best Game Utility of the Year (PC) (for Cosmos)
- 2006 β The Game That Wouldn't Die Award (PC)
- 2011 β #1 Top PC Game of the 2000s
- GameStar (Germany)
- February 23, 2006 - Best PC Game in 2005 (Readers' Vote)
- February 23, 2006 - Best PC RPG in 2005 (Readers' Vote)
- Golden Joystick Awards
- 2005 - Online Game of the Year
- PC Powerplay (Germany)
- Issue 02/2006 - #1 RPG/Adventure in 2005
- Issue 04/2006 - #1 RPG/Adventure in 2005 (Readers' Vote)
- Issue 02/2006 - #4 Best Game in 2005
- Issue 02/2006 - Most Played Game in 2005
- The Strong National Museum of Play
- 2015 β Introduced into the World Video Game Hall of Fame
Information also contributed by Agent 5, Captain Canuck, h'mik, Itay Shahar, MichaelPalin, PCGamer77, piltdown_man, Pseudo_Intellectual, Sciere, Silverblade, WildKard and Zack Green
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Related Sites +
-
10 Moments That Made World of Warcraft
article about 10 defining moments in the MMORPG after five years, on Eurogamer (30th November 2009) -
Beginner's Guide to the World of Warcraft
Inside Mac Games' introductory guide to WoW. -
Blizzard President Comments on WoW Issues (PC)
Mike Morhaime issues a public statement regarding the server problems plaguing the game. (Jan. 21, 2005) -
Blizzard reaches 100M lifetime World of Warcraft accounts
(A Polygon article, January 28, 2014) -
Coca Cola commercial
Video of the Chinese Coca Cola commercial inspired by World of Warcraft. -
Make Love, Not Warcraft
The Wikipedia article on the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft, dedicated to World of Warcraft. -
The Next Chapter in the Battle for Azeroth
An Apple Games article about the Macintosh version of World of Warcraft, written from the eyes of Regwyn, a Human Paladin for the Alliance (November, 2004). -
The internet phenomenon Leeroy Jenkins
A Wikipedia article -
Toyota Tacoma commercial
A commercial for the Toyota Tacoma, created using the World of Warcraft world (hosted on YouTube). -
WOW China
Official Chinese game website -
Why World of Warcraft Made It Big
Article on Gamasutra (20th March 2008) -
World of Warcraft
Official Site -
World of Warcraft - Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau
Official game website for these regions. -
World of Warcraft Europe
The official European website. -
World of Warcraft Stratics
Large information and news site. -
World of Warcraft interview with Bill Amend author of Foxtrot.
In the newspaper comic called Foxtrot, one of the main characters named Jason Fox plays a game named "World of Warquest" which is supposed to be Foxtrot perspective of World of Warcraft. So Allakhazam did an interview with Bill Amend about what he likes about World of Warcraft
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Riamus.
Macintosh added by Terok Nor.
Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Apogee IV, Sciere, Andrew Shepard, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, Frozenwaterfall, SoMuchChaotix.
Game added November 27, 2004. Last modified March 29, 2024.