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

  • ι­”ε…½δΈ–η•Œ - 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)

Welcome to World of Grindcraft!

The Good
I've been an adventure and role-playing game player for nearly three decades. I witnessed the pioneering of graphical gaming and every leap and bound of technology ever since. And almost every great adventure game or RPG in the history of PC gaming has a place of reverence on my shelf. But until June of 2006, I had never played an MMORPG.

When I logged onto World of Warcraft for the first time, I was awed and enthralled. The universe that unfurled before me was overwhelming - a real virtual reality, with 24 hour days, sunrises and sunsets, a calendar with celebrations and events that occur only on certain days of the year... I was convinced I had seen the undeniable future of role-playing gaming as we knew it.

However, mine was a novelty that was soon to fade, and when it did, it faded hard and fast...

The Bad
As I played on over the months, small bothersome things began to come to my attention. Individually, or even in small numbers, these could be seen as the small quirks every game has - no game is ever 100% perfect in every player's eyes, of course. But these flaws began to multiply, and rapidly. And they were issues not just with the game itself, but with the very concept of the game. Too numerous to mention all of them, these little problems ranged from droll terrains, to poor character class balance, to ridiculously unrealistic area transitions. But worse, was the side of humanity that World of Warcraft not only attracted, but amplified and gloried in. Truly, my years in chat rooms, IRC channels, and weblogs never prepared me for the level of pure human stupidity that gravitates to WoW like iron filings to a magnet. Soon enough, 'phrases' like "cn i hav sum gold plz???", "rofl omg u sux0r!!!!1", and the inevitable "cn sum1 plz run me thru rfc PLZZZZ???" soon took their toll on my sanity, to the point where some days, I truly wanted to go on a postal rampage, killing all members of the same species who could manifest that mentality.

But, alas, perhaps that's simply the nature of online gaming. With World of Warcraft being the only MMORPG I had ever played (and because of it, now likely ever will!), I can't say with certainty that this is a failure of this game, or just this genre. But by contrast, the flaw which I found to be the worst failing of World of Warcraft, can most certainly not be blamed on the pathetic mental acuity of its players.

World of Warcraft is - and I state this with great vehemence - the dullest, most boring, most unimaginative, repetitive excuse for a "role playing game" I have experienced in nearly three decades of gaming.

When you play an RPG, one expects there to be puzzles, or quests, and solutions to these. In RPGs like Eye of the Beholder, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights, and so on, one is prompted to use one's creative and logical mind to solve each quest. Some are simple, some are challenging, some are downright complex, some are even funny or clever or ironic.

But in World of Warcraft, though there are literally thousands upon thousands of quests to be completed in the world of Azeroth, there is ultimately only one solution to them all: Kill X monsters, and/or collect Y loot from their corpses.

I need to emphasize this again for clarity - the ENTIRE GAME is comprised of people telling you go somewhere, kill a predetermined number of things, and often bring back a number of things, usually dismembered body parts or items they may be carrying, to the questgiver.

For example: Kill 12 gray bears, and collect 12 bear hearts. Or, collect 15 tail feathers from slain swoop birds. Or, collect 8 tiger's claws, 6 bird's eggs, and 15 spider's legs.

And this is how THE ENTIRE GAME goes on...

To make things even worse, often, the percentage chance that you will find one of the required items on the corpse of your enemy (aka. the "drop rate") is unrealistically and infinitesimally low. And, the further you get into the game, the lower these drop rates get. In the very beginning, you may only have to slay six tigers to get six tiger's claws. But by level 30 or 40, you'll find yourself having to spend three straight hours killing dozens upon dozens of raptors just to make your quota of the 8 lousy raptor eyes you need for the quest. Not only does this repetitive and mind-mushing grinding eventually wear one's soul down to a longing for blessed death, but the lack of realism is vile to witness. I mean, let's face it - granted, in the fury and carnage of battle, it's fair to assume that not every creature that meets your sword, axe, or gun, is going to come away with it's carcass intact. Things like paws or eyes, perhaps even hearts, may just be unsalvageable. But when the quest calls for you to return with the creature's entire head, or even, in several cases, a sample of its blood, and yet still only one in every fifteen kills yields you the rewards, well, that just starts to make me angry.

And that's only the half of it. As you progress to the highest echelons of the character levels, the need for mindless grinding becomes positively unimaginable. For some quests, you have to collect around three thousand pieces of unrefined metal ore to improve your reputation with a particular faction just so that they'll allow to shop in their stores. In others, you have to collect several hundred of a crystal that is only dropped by the end boss of a dungeon, or "instance" - and even then, only dropped sometimes!! - in a dungeon which can only be completed by a 40 man "raid group", which is essentially 40 players working as a team to complete the dungeon. So, IF you and 39 of your friends clear the instance, and IF you kill the boss, and IF he drops the item, and IF, by group consensus or a fair dice roll, you are the one allowed to have it as opposed to the other 39 people who might want it, then you have ONE. Then you only need several dozen more before you can complete the first part of that quest!!

Personally, I would rather be forced at gunpoint to remove my own genitals with a rusty spoon without anesthesia than to even attempt a grind of that magnitude.

The more I played World of Warcraft, the more I felt my will to live slipping away. When I heard on the news about the teenager who committed suicide as a result of the game, I couldn't even muster a glimmer of surprise. Every day, faced with the constant spamming of utterly illiterate children shouting "WTF LOL NO U R TEH NOOB STFU!!!!!" at eachother, while I trudged out the city gates to spend another hour hacking at animals for another few lousy pieces of silver and a small dose of experience, I wondered to myself, "Why am I paying $15 a month to torture myself with what is the equivalent of working in a sweat shop while being forced to watch 40 straight hours of reality television?".

When I discovered no answer to that question, after weeks of soul searching, I canceled my World of Warcraft account.

The Bottom Line
When I came to MobyGames today to post this bleak review of the worst game I've played in over a quarter of a century, I read first a glowing review posted by Corey Cole, a man whom I once positively idolized as the co-creative legend, with wife Lori-Ann Cole, behind the Quest for Glory series, which was the pinnacle of role playing adventure games of its time. When I read that this man, whose inspirational work on computer game development shaped a large part of my life, was now a self-confessed WoW addict, I honestly nearly wept. The notion that he and Lori, the hearts and minds behind Erasmus's Mage's Maze, the shimmering sands of the lands of Shapeir, the mentally and emotionally charging land of Tarna, and so much more, are now grinding day and night in this tiresome game hurts me to my soul. The blurb on the back of the box for Quest for Glory III: Wages of War says, "And if you succeed, it will be because you cut to the core of the mystery with your mind, not because you managed to sort through a series of stats or slashed through a thousand mindless monsters.". But that is precisely how you succeed in World of Warcraft. You slash through some monsters. And then you slash through a thousand more. And then, when you've done that, you move to another region, and slash through a few thousand more. Rinse, repeat.

Oh, and don't forget to pick up their heads, on the off-chance that they drop them. Remember, you'll need to take a few dozen of those back to your questgiver to "solve" the "quest".

I'd rather just withdraw $15 from my bank account each month, and set fire to it.

Windows · by Vaelor (400) · 2007

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

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

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
World of Warcraft Classic Cantillon (75880) 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 Γ–yster 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.