World of WarCraft

aka: WoW
Moby ID: 15620
Windows Specs
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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

  • 魔兽世界 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

790 People (566 developers, 224 thanks) · View all

Game Design
  • Blizzard Entertainment
Executive Producer
Team Lead
Art Director
Creative Director
Lead Animator
Lead Artist
Lead Character Artist
Lead Designers
Lead Programmer
Lead Technical Artist
Producers
Additional Production
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)

One of the best games of the past 10 years, just not great....

The Good
It was a very well put together rail game. It was smooth and beautiful. Very few bugs and issues. Blizzard really did a good job with quality.

The Bad
It's not an MMO. WOW is a rail game, plain and simple. To put it another way its "The Legend of Zelda", in 3d, with Warcraft characters. With few exceptions you can play this game completely by yourself, without any other players. The online element was completely wasted. Then after dozens (or hundreds) of hours in game you suddenly are required to join up with other players for "optional" quests. Why even bother?

For many gamers there was nothing to this game but hours upon hours of attack keys and grabbing pointless loot. Some people love that, many of us hate it!

The Bottom Line
If you haven't played an action game where you gain levels before, this game will be a very good start. But if you have spent anytime in level gaining games, monster stomping + loot grabbing, or anytime online in a MMO over the past 20 years, then this game will a complete repeat of previous games. Except for very few instances, you do not even need to speak or deal with other players. WOW could and should be a single player game. The online element is a huge waste of resources for both the development and the player.

Macintosh · by Sean Johanson (13) · 2009

Amazingly simple yet amazingly addictive

The Good
In my opinion, World or Warcraft (more simply abbreviated WoW for the rest of this review) does not do anything so amazingly revolutionary or new from the rest of its counterparts in the MMORPG genre. It doesn’t do anything totally or completely unexpected from many other MMO’s out there. Most elements can be seen borrowed from other RPG franchises, and as a whole one could possibly label it “generic”. But what WoW so brilliantly does is that it takes what its other brethren have created and made it easier and more fun to play. It has taken its content and made it a perfect form as to create a perfect gaming environment that is both easy and fun to play in, is not vague or confusing, and is addictive as Hell. And that, my friends, makes all the difference.

WoW has a lot of elements borrowed from every other genre. It has a talent system, and two professions from which you can choose. You’ve got a wide variety of classes from rogues to warriors to mages to warlocks. All around, WoW is just plain fun. You can do instances (dungeons and such) with your friends, or enjoy some relaxing fishing alone. You can explore the land or do quests. You can join a group for some amazing PvP, or go to a role-playing server to immerse yourself within the World of Warcraft (I have tried an RP server and the role-players for the game are very enthusiastic). WoW even has one of the biggest maps I have ever seen. To explore the entire map easily takes weeks just walking from place to place. I am still debating which game’s map is bigger, WoW or Guild Wars, and I have yet to come to a conclusion. To tell you what WoW holds in store would take pages upon pages more of a review. However, this is not how WoW differentiates itself among other RPG’s. You can get all of this stuff on other MMO’s, so what’s so special about this one?

What WoW does is it takes the simplicity of console RPG’s and mixes it with expansive environment, controls, character customization, and social abilities of the MMO world. In simpler terms: WoW is easy, it eliminates the frustrations of other MMO’s, and simply makes the game just plain fun. I was once a player of another MMORPG. That was the game Dark Age of Camelot. While I was playing it, I thought it was an okay experience. However, I now realize what a terrible experience it truly was. While games like those are far too hard and required hours of work, WoW is simple, clean, and so easy to use that casual gamers can easily be on the same level as hardcore addicts.

WoW appeals to casual and hardcore gamers alike. New players can begin enjoying the full experience as soon as they start, and it’s a huge and welcoming change for the RPG franchise. It makes it feel like you aren’t too low of a level to get the games full potential. Quests and monsters are just the right level of difficulty, making it easy for a person to just jump right into combat. Epic quests do not require hours of time devoted to playing the game. Even as early players, noobs can enjoy the same features as many players who are 50 levels above them. The fun begins as soon as you log in.

Casual players are rewarded heavily in this game, because soloing is possible, easy, and rewarding. Players who don’t play as often, will become “well-rested” while they are logged out, allowing them to gain double the experience as players who play all the time. It is this welcoming incentive that continues to draw me into WoW, and finally I am no longer penalized for enjoying doing the quests alone and sporadically.

Even early in the game players can enjoy a slew of highly entertaining skills and abilities, and each level you gain significantly adds a number of new abilities at your disposal. This makes combat throughput the game fun and different, as you have tons of skills at your disposal to toy around with. Both items that new players can use and higher experienced ones are distributed pretty much perfectly throughout the game, making finding a weapon perfectly suited for you as easy as walking down to a shop or slaying a beast. Early players have the ability to choose the same professions as later players, which makes getting to the higher levels easier for new players. The game makes noobs feel welcome. As I said before, new and casual players can begin enjoying the full experience as soon as they start, and it’s a huge and welcoming change for me.

I think one of the reasons WoW is so welcoming to casual and new players its how it practically eliminates all of the frustrations of other MMO’s. One of these things that comes to mind for me is grinding. WoW utilizes the simple system that has been a requisite for console RPG’s for years: it allows the player to gain levels while they are adventuring. Simply put: no grinding. Read that again. Eventually it hits you in this game that you never have to stop what you’re doing to bolster your stats. It is easy to gain a level once or even twice per day, even between on and off adventuring and exploring. You may even be able to achieve more levels that, if you really play it that much every day, only trying to level. Most of the time, the leveling is done while your adventuring and on quests, making repetitive monster-slaying trials and experience quests almost non-existent in WoW. Doing simple tasks such as gathering ingredients for a recipe do not require hours of work. Developing skills can be easily done by the most casual or newest of players. These reasons and many more are good reasons to get WoW. It has so many elements that are nice and user-friendly that makes it fun to play without making it a complete chore.

Another one of these features that comes to mind is that death brings no toll to those unfortunate to have to go through it. Your only punishment is that you must bring your dead spirit from a nearby graveyard (there is usually one or two in every region) to your corpse, which is a trivial walk. It does not require you to lose points or skills, or require you to pray at some alter to get your stats to full potential. I cannot being to explain how great this makes the game, being able to actually “play” without having to worry about taking risk. I could sit here for hours iterating stories of how I’ve lost days of experience (from grinding no less) simply by accidentally aggroing some monster that is a couple levels higher than me. This feature is a god-send, and you will praise Blizzard for making such an amazing decision in the game design.

One of the fundamental reasons of the underlying simplified gameplay I mentioned before is the clean character and item management. WoW is not as ambiguous as many other MMO’s. The system of professions, talents, pets, classes and other sorts are semi-self contained. Its easy to use interface contains just a few menus and an action bar, and each menu serves major purposes. All your professions, stats, pets, and other things are all tabbed in one menu for your character, while everything pertaining to social (guilds, friends) are all tabbed under another. It keeps the screen clean of anything that gets in the way and makes it easy to find what you are looking for. Looting is simple, even in massive groups. You can easily discern which professions go with which, and character class limitations are well-defined. Items aren’t vague as to what they are used for or what they add to your stats. Many games I have played include strange numbers and stats that I have no idea what they do. In WoW, almost every item is useful, so if you find something on an item, its usually used for something pertaining to a quest and will tell you so. If its armor, a quest item, and weapon, or just food, it will tell you, which makes item handling much easier, as you feel like your not throwing away something very important when you clean out your inventory. In WoW, what things do are so clearly defined it will make you wonder how the Hell other MMO’s didn’t think of doing this sooner.

And as mentioned before, WoW is incredibly user friendly. All around, WoW makes it easy for new users to gain ranks and earn experience, and still keeps everyone challenged. Socially, the people you meet in game are some of the kindest people on the internet. The role-playing servers can be lots of fun for those looking for a Dungeons and Dragons type of game, while the regular servers have people who are always willing to help out new players or go on raids or quests. The Blizzard Support must also be duly noted. If you seem to have an annoyance within the game, it’s as if Blizzard reads your mind and fixes it the next day. It almost seems as if the Blizzard staff plays the game themselves, and sees what annoys them that must be fixed. Blizzard constantly releases automatic updates that fix small bugs and glitches to make for a better gaming experience. Server crashes are fixed within minutes, and problems with servers are usually fixed within hours to get the servers back up and running. It’s simply amazing how well they treat their players. Blizzard definitely goes to great lengths to make sure you are completely satisfied with your gaming, and you can surely tell.

Aside, the game’s great atmosphere also perks you up. The graphics of the game are astounding and pleasing to the eye. The graphics almost remind me of a fairy-tale: colorful and beautiful landscapes with exaggerated features and rounded textures. The trees in the game can be a host of colors like blue or purple, and the cities are magnificent. The gates of cities are stories tall, and the streets are curvy, twisted, and almost cartoon-like. The cheery yet atmospheric music adds greatly to this. Above all, the atmosphere does something for your brain. When you look out upon a bouncy forest of bright trees that are the size of skyscrapers, it makes you feel warm inside. Even some of the more “evil” environments have vivid palettes and continue to have bouncy textures and exaggerated landscapes that make them feel more alive. Other MMO’s, for some reason, like to include some desolate wasteland with destroyed cities, hopeless people, and an atmosphere that makes everyone seem dead. WoW, however, does just the opposite. The bright, cheery characters and environments do more to bring up your spirits. Instead of drawing on dark, desolate feelings, they inspire feelings of warmth, happiness, and liveliness, almost as if the very air itself is alive. Because of this, WoW is a game that will drawn you in and keep your there for hours on end.

They call this game the “World” of Warcraft for a reason. All around, this game feels like a living, breathing thing. If you let it, WoW can become your second home. The colorful characters and world, the uncountable number of things to do, and the infinite character and profession combos will ensure that WoW has near endless replay value. Hell, all I do is questing and instances, and that still manages to take up all of my day. I’ve barely touched PvP, raids, and end-game quests, and yet I still fill my day with fun-filled questing in the world of Azeroth. Let WoW charm you to death as you discover all of the games little quirks, interesting characters, fun story arcs. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, there are always other people on, doing other things, and there is always something going on. And as you play, you will become part of that rich tapestry which has practically evolved into its own society. Invite yourself into the World of Warcraft, and you may never want to leave.


The Bad
A-D-D-I-C-T
A-D-D-I-C-T
A-D-D-I-C-T
And ADDICT was his name-O!

More and more these days video game addiction is a major problem. People have reported to leave work, school, relationships, and even families over video games. Some have even reportedly committed suicide. The idea of a video game worse than drugs is scary, but it today’s world I find that it is honestly a very real entity. This game does not seem to erode this idea. World or Warcraft is addicting, with a capital ‘A’. For some, it’s because you feel that you have to keep playing hours to get “just one more level”, or you feel that you may miss something. But also, it’s because World of Warcraft is utterly and uncontrollably fun to play. Between quests, raids, dungeon runs and profession training, time slips away at a mind-boggling pace. The first two days after I got this seem nothing but a blur. Yes, the sad truth is that I spent a two full days, over 10 hours each day, playing the game from the time I got up until about midnight. What’s weirder is that I did not actually realize that this time was slipping away. When I emerged from my basement, I wondered where the time had all gotten to. At that point I realized that time consumption was a factor I needed to seriously consider while playing WoW. That’s something very new for me, a person who generally plays video games and socializes in moderation. WoW, however, affects ALL gamers. It has been called names like “World or Warcrack.” It’s something to deeply consider when buying or playing this game. Don’t put a video game in front of family. Consider how much time you have before buying this. Hell, make sure you consider how much time you have when you’re in the middle of playing it! As my friend Pete (a dedicated WoW player and someone I actually played the game with) says, “WoW destroys lives”. And it’s true. Consider what you are going to give up for this game. Many gamers may find it easy to play in moderation, but even those who don’t normally have addictive personalities can exhibit WoW addictions and late-night sessions. People with addictive personalities should avoid the game altogether.

As the game drifts on you may notice that the quests are very much uninspired. Unlike traditional one-player console RPG’s, the quests are pretty mindless. Quests are almost always a “kill-quest”, where you either have to kill a certain number of monsters or a specific one. Occasionally you will get an item collecting quest, which invariably leads to having to kill a number of monsters just to get those items. Traveling quests are a nice and easy change but hardly offer anything fun or interesting. If the game did not make up for itself with good combat, quests would be a nightmare. Perhaps that’s why the game gets so much better when playing with a friend. Related to this is the fact that the game can be very repetitive when played alone or “solo”. Quests are almost always alike, and seem to be big repetitions of each other. As a result, restarting characters is a nightmare since you will invariable be replaying dull missions that you had to do with other characters. Quests are easily the least entertaining part of the game, and while they offer plenty of experience, are only bearable up to about level 30, where they become a terrible pain. An unfortunate factor that must also be taken into account is that all of the game’s story is driven by quests, and that the game really lacks direction without them. Bummer.

The patches are also one of the most major problems. Blizzard frequently releases patches for this game. All around it does much more good than it does bad, however the downloads are incredibly annoying. Of course, for your convenience you do not have to keep track of versions or go to download sites. It’s all done automatically by the in-game updater. However, patches can be released almost once every two weeks. And while the small ones are pretty much an annoyance rather than a pain (15 minutes isn’t all too bad), the larger ones are a nightmare, with up to an hour (or more!) or download times. This only makes it worse for players installing and playing the game for the first time. All of the patches created before that point must be downloaded, meaning 4 or 5 patch downloads (sometimes to avoid lengthy downloads they take older patches and incorporate them into the new ones so they don’t have to be downloaded). Usually one or two of these is the nightmare patch mentioned above. And while load times are swift and painless, prepare for a monstrous install time, and even more waiting just to get the game patched up running…

The Bottom Line
World of Warcraft is a landmark in MMO design. In my honest opinion, MMO’s have too long been bogged down by boring grinding, terrible adventuring, and annoying features and controls. WoW eliminates all of these things, keeping what makes the game fun, and this is what appeals to me and 7 million other gamers so much. It’s the fun a video game should give you, without all the tiresome work that come along with other MMO’s. It’s incredibly friendly, incredibly fun, incredibly imaginative, and incredibly addicting.

And even to mention all of the great content that WoW offers would take a lifetime. Things like professions, talents, all of the classes, a HUGE world to explore and tons of social interactivity make WoW my choice MMORPG. But I could never tell you about everything, so let’s just leave it at that. It’s up to you to discover all the amazing possibilities and the rich gameplay that the World of Warcraft is just waiting to offer.

Windows · by Matt Neuteboom (976) · 2007

Vaelor made some good points, but there are redeeming factors

The Good
World of Warcraft's world is simply gigantic with many different areas. I personally think the game was at it's best before the expansion packs because all the areas feel so great, when I used to walk around in Elwynn Forest it felt so peaceful while the "Undercity" feels very chaotic and aggressive. This gives the world a nice balance, if you ever get sick of the destruction and death of the Badlands you can always go back to Loch Modan to rest for a while.

When you take the title of RPG, I think it's important to live up to the title "Role-playing game" and World of Warcraft does that very well. There are servers where you can make a character and you have to act like him or her. This means talking to people like you're having a real conversation and joining a guild that offers the kind of job you want your character to have. I decided to have my character join the Stormwind city-guard and I had a great time patrolling the city and following orders.

Fighting the monsters in instances and raids was really awesome and succeeding felt like a real achievement. I always loved it when we had a group of forty people and managed to take down a monster, it just made us look so organized and skilled. I did dislike it when the expansions decreased the number of player in a raid to twenty-five, but in the end I did agree that the raids were way too hard sometimes and keeping a total of forty people alive was nearly impossible.

World of Warcraft is full of wonderful experiences that I count among some of the best I have ever had in a video game. My days as a role-player are still very dear to me and stand-out between the rest, but there was also a guild called "The Brotherhood of Wisdom" which I created myself and which grew to become the biggest guild on the server. We had a lot of fun and some of the most stupid events ever (like a snowball-war or races). I still have contact with a few people that were in our guild and we love nothing better than to talk about "the days of the Brotherhood".

The music is very good and often even awesome. While most songs are not that great, there are a few that still manage to make me feel like the hero the game wants me to be. One of my favorite examples is the Stormwind theme which I swear has to be one of the best songs in video game history. The title screen music is also pretty nice and the music in the Night-Elf lands are pretty sweet as well (they mix nicely with the forest). It's too bad that they couldn't have every song be as awesome, but there is still not enough to complain about.

The story is amazing and that is mostly due to the army of RTS-games that preceded this game. The "Warcraft" series form the background for this game and some characters even make appearances (The Night Elf priest and Thrall for example). I have to give Blizzard credit for taking a very popular franchise and taking such a massive risk with it, in the end they created every Warcraft-fan's dream and I am sure a lot of people love Blizzard for this.

The game is very easy to control and gradually builds-up the difficulty. It's unlikely that you will die at the start of the game and there are barely any enemies that attack you on sight, but soon there will be more enemies that do and you will have to pay attention to your surroundings. The game also starts with a very limited library of spells and attacks, but nearing level thirty you already got a few pages full of them and you have to decide which ones you want to bind to to the keys.

The Bad
Like Vaelor pointed-out already: World of Warcraft has one of the worst communities ever. Take the Halo 3 community, multiply that by the youtube trolls and then multiply that by the people who make jokes about disasters and you're almost close. The worst thing is probably that Blizzard doesn't take any action whatsoever, there is literally an entire city where everybody acts like assholes on roleplay servers, but nobody ever even tried to ban people there. It would take five minutes! The worst memory is when my cat died and I told my guild about it and someone actually started making fun of me and laughing. Blizzard's advice?, just ignore him...

There isn't a lot of roleplay to be found on the servers that are made specifically for that kind of playing. Unless you join a guild or always check the forums for events, there is a good chance you won't ever find any roleplay. This makes it very hard for new people to join these servers and since the first city they run into is the earlier mentioned place where all the assholes hang-out... If the new people don't fall prey to that city, they mostly end up joining the huge army guilds which have as much soul as bricks, this always causes smaller guilds with more daring themes to die due to the lack of members.

The quests used to be a big grindfest, but now that has been partially fixed. There is still a gigantic barrel of grinding, but there are also other quests which require you to perform tasks that actually change the world around you. The quests that didn't get this treatment are as boring as ever and make you feel like a factory machine. The worst thing is that it's incredibly addictive and that is NOT a good thing, in fact it's terrible because the game charges you fifteen dollars a month for this. This is a problem I have with a lot of services, I bought the game, so why does it still charge me to play it. Xbox Live comes to mind, but at least you can offline for free, here you can only play offline and there is no 1-man option for dungeons.

The Bottom Line
World of Warcraft is a great game, but it has some terrible problems that are mostly the fault of Blizzard. The story is great, the game has a nice difficulty curve, you can have a lot of amazing experiences and the roleplaying in this game in unmatched, but Blizzard is just way too passive when it comes to helping the players.

The roleplay servers are overrun with douchebags who ruin it for everybody, a large part of the community is acting like the absolute lowest a human being can sink and they take massive advantage of people's addictions. After so many years and with so many active players, the least they could do is give the people more. If you buy the game you only get one free month which is barely enough to get you going. I would suggest asking five dollars a month or giving two months for the same fifteen dollars.

Windows · by Asinine (957) · 2011

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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 Öyster 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 – 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) – Game of the Year
    • March 2005 (Issue #249) – Special Achievement in Art Direction
  • Games for Windows Magazine
    • March 2007 - #10 Game of the Year 2006
  • GameSpy
    • 2004 – #5 Game of the Year
    • 2004 – #2 PC Game of the Year
    • 2004 – PC MMORPG of the Year
    • 2004 – 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 – The Game That Wouldn't Die Award (PC)
    • 2011 – #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 – 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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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 7, 2024.