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)

Incredible game balance and FUN

The Good
Two high points of WoW are the quest system and the overall game balance. I've been told that there is "nothing original" in WoW -- All the major play elements were first seen in other online games, and many are done "better" elsewhere -- but in WoW the sum is much greater than the parts. You can play in your own style -- slowly exploring the lands and quests, racing through levels to experience the level 60 "endgame", farming for game money and items, buying and selling at the auction house, adventuring solo, doing massive 40-player quests with a guild, or just sitting in a tavern role-playing. Hunters travel the world trying to tame exotic rare pets.

You can also spend your time fighting other players either in the regular adventuring areas or in specially-designated battlegrounds. You can choose whether to play on a "PvP" server where you can be attacked at any time or on a "PvE" or "RP" server where player-vs.-player combat only occurs in the battlegrounds.

I have been playing WoW for over a year now and have had to restrict my play so I can do other things (such as my work). Beyond that, your enjoyment will depend heavily on finding other players with whom you enjoy gaming. So far, I've found that pretty easy.

There are many other ways in which WoW is a truly great game -- the lush graphics, wonderful game music tailored to where you are and what you're doing, the variety of races, skills, and areas to explore, etc. Blizzard has once again succeeded in creating a game that makes it unnecessary to get any other game for a very long time.

The Bad
Sometimes play gets too repetitive, killing the same monsters over and over. This is especially true late in the game when you work on building up your "reputation" with various factions.

WoW is (probably inevitably) a serious resource hog. You will want a fast processor, at least 1GB of RAM, and a high-end graphics card to best enjoy the game. Even with all this, WoW is sometimes very laggy. In particular, there seem to be problems with the database systems that handle your inventory and in-game mail. Again, this might be inevitable in a game that now has over 5 million subscribers, but it detracts from an otherwise incredible game.

The Bottom Line
"The game I wish I'd written" works. :-) I think of WoW as playing Dungeons & Dragons with a group of terrific gamemasters and with a game available at any time of day or night.

Windows · by Corey Cole (36) · 2006

Taking MMORPGs to a new level

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

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

[ 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.