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)

You'll turn that MOM tattoo to a WOW tattoo...

The Good
I loved absolutely everything. The environments were wonderfully rendered and the combat system,purely and simply fun. You will literally say good-bye to everyone you love and go play this game. The massive amounts of campaigns and side quests are just mind blowing. Blizzard has succeeded with all of the Warcraft series. This is a must have for any lover of MMOs and any hater if them, because after you've tried it, you just can't stop. And also I love the fact that after you die you can run around the spirit world and find you're body. But I messed around for a while and found some really cool things. Don't pass that up. And the skills and abilities you can learn just make the game all the more sweeter. I've always dreamed of an MMO where you could craft armor and World Of Warcraft has pleased me most. The monsters are one of the best things about this game. Blizzard will often put you up against an unstoppable foe and see what you can do.

The Bad
The only thing I didn't like is....wait. I loved it all. There is nothing bad about this game.

The Bottom Line
A masterpiece composed by the geniuses at Blizzard. WARNING:If you play this game even once, you will be addicted.

Windows · by Lord Dayin (9) · 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

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

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

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World of Warcraft Classic Cantillon (76711) 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 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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Related Games

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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.