What made World of Warcraft's environments so compelling? | Hacker News Reader

What made World of Warcraft's environments so compelling?

erichgrunewald.com

196 pointserwald138 comments

What made WoW environments so compelling is that were very stylized and deliberately not "realistic". If you look back at the history of games that focus on photorealism they date really quickly as the tech moves on yet WoW's aesthetic is much more timeless.

Secondly, the game feels good. By this I mean the movement and responsiveness.

Third, the game in its original form was particularly immersive as the WoW developers eschewed the loading screens that were an immersion-breaking feature of the big competitor at the time (ie Everquest). Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Lastly, WoW came about at a time before social networks when online games were the first proto-social networks for many, many people. Through guilds you found likeminded people.

For the environment design aspect, I'd add that in the earlier iterations of the game something that inadvertently added a lot of appeal was the somewhat "organic" nature of zone composition, where there wasn't a 1:1 match between what the quest writers needed and what got put on the game map.

There were all sorts of things in each zone that just existed to exist, with no connection to any quest or player objective. It felt like the map artists were given a lot of latitude to design as they pleased, with the quest writers coming in after them and writing quests to match the map as it had been designed.

This was flipped on its head at some point around Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm, where instead nearly every square inch of every map existed for some quest or player objective. It made the game more convenient, but also made it feel a lot more like a game than a lived-in world.

The term for this is "conveyor belt content". And yes, this took off in WotLK, probably in big part due to the achievement system. Why? This replaced player agency in determining content with a Blizzard-supplied checklist and the effects of this flowed on to map design (IMHO).

It was also around that time that i think the Blizzard's internal policy changed.

Before to that they were creating a game, and balancing it in vacuum. Afterwards they went for designing metagame - picking how player should play. It was more egregious in their newer games though - especially in diablo3(where Blizzard literally makes builds in form of armor sets) and overwatch.

It's interesting to compare the early super-military look for tf2 to the zany cartoon version they wound up with. Their original plan would have looked old within a year or two, but tf2 still looks great today.

TF2 does not look great today still. Its artistic stylized look has been ruined by pay-to-win and cosmetic collectables.

The character animation was also significantly better than what was typical at the time even in, say, an AAA FPS, which helped immersion. The travel system by flight both helped hide loading delays and provided an opportunity to show off the environment from a different vantage point, a kind of pre-programmed vista showcase.

Edit: occurs to me these flights were basically the equivalent of HL1's rail ride intro sequence, integrated into the game and in great numbers.

Flight paths also offered some nice foreshadowing. When flying from Ironforge to Stormwind, which many alliance players would often do, you fly over Burning Steppes, a very high level zone. A menacing music starts to play, a brown fog covers everything around you, there's lava, dragons, the zone looks "scary" but also exciting. Makes you want to play so that you can go there and explore it for yourself.

They were also chock full of things to see. Flying over Ironforge there was that dwarf/trog fight that you could never get to, but always wanted to. The world felt huge and full. You knew that if you just got over the next hill there'd probably be something interesting to look at or make you go wow. EQ didn't have those same set pieces.

I was always annoyed by the loading screen when moving by boat between west and east continents.

I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.

Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.

These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.

I'm guessing also a "realistic" time to travel between the two continents would not be very appealing the thousandth time you have to do it.

This is something EVE online deliberately leans into. Time to travel between star systems adds up really quickly and promotes a feeling of living in a particular part of the galaxy. Where going to a city to use the auction house has enough friction to be an annoyance in WoW, in EVE there’s so much more friction that it becomes a whole logistics game within the game. There’s money to be made hauling cargo because of this, and hauler ships offer the trade off of bigger cargo holds with fewer defences.

EverQuest had a long boat ride you could take between regions. It's hard to imagine any game company doing that in a MMO these days.

I expect the loading screen was in large part to there being no smooth transition when sailing from one continent to another.

WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).

I think it's because you can't load assets from the entire game world in main memory, so when you go to a new zone it'll load assets from disk (slowly).

You could, even back in vanilla. I remember making a Linux ramdisk and installing the entire game into ram.

I think the tram had to be fake given the actual world geometry. If you consider where the tram should be it makes no sense. Well that, or they had to totally change the world to accommodate it or give it a very strange path.

The tram loading screen could have been an engine limitation. Streaming the game world from disk works nicely if the player moves at a pace that is slow enough that the disk can keep up. Long range teleportation breaks that assumption completely. You can deal with that case in two ways: accept a loading screen or build teleportation support into the streaming system, which means that both ends of the teleporter need to be loaded at once if you walk up to it. I assume that Blizzard decided against all that complexity deep in the engine for a single use case.

I’ve not found an MMO that feels as smooth as WoW to play the character, and honestly it’s not even close. Nobody has even approached WoW’s crispness of gameplay, almost seemingly because nobody has really even tried, and I wonder why that is.

The Warhammer MMO was very close on a number of these key fronts - especially style and good gameplay feel.

It just failed for other reasons, notably the large overlap among people playing it and WoW deciding WoW was a better way to continue their time sink since they'd already invested, and the end-game content wasn't there at launch the way people expected it to be.

Interestingly, Blizzard did copy some of the key concepts from it for later expansions of World of Warcraft (open world "join in" style events / boss fights, to name one).

I like ESO better in "smoothness". WoW combat feels a little bit clunky in comparison, especially in chaotic trash fights with multiple targets. I find it very frustrating when I can't attack just because my selected enemy moved to my side, even though there are 5 other targets standing right before me. Stacking nameplates doesn't help, making the position of a nameplate unrelated to the position of an enemy (but if you turn off stacking, you'll have trouble selecting the right enemy).

In comparison, in ESO most (melee) attacks are not targeted, meaning you can cleave your way through a trash fight without playing Enemy Selector Simulation.

That said, at the moment WoW is still my favourite timesink though. ESO does a lot of things better, but there's not much on an end game and at some point you've just seen it all. I'm not into cosmetics so there's just not much left for me to actually do in ESO.

You should probably be using more AOE. Also, you shouldn't be using your mouse to select targets, you should be using it for movement.

Some tips (most of these shouldn't have changed much, but I haven't played in many years):

You don't have to hit enter to start typing a command. /t first few letters of mob is pretty fast.

You can also hit tab to rapidly switch targets.

Bind A and D to strafing instead of turning.

You can bind slots to modified keys, like Control-6 or Alt-3.

If you're a melee class, you probably have many moves that hit multiple targets, while also not being raw AOE. Spend a bit of time getting familiar with your spellbook; there are a lot of gems.

Learn your rotation! Check Icy Veins for your spec: https://www.icy-veins.com/

I'm not exactly sure how new you are, but you should also probably be using Bartender, Recount and DBM.

I already do pretty much all of the above. I've played about 6-7 months now, arms warrior, so mainly single-target DPS. I have few AOE abilities. A lot of my abilities don't work if the target isn't directly in front of me, even abilities like Mortal Strike and Rend with can hit multiple targets. The big difference with ESO is that in ESO I rarely need to target an enemy. You pretty much only do it as a ranged DPS if you want to target a specific enemy in a mob.

WoW combat is a lot more tactical and complex. ESO is smoother and faster, but simpler (only 6 abilities per bar, 2 bars max)

Movement is important in WoW. If you're not keeping people in front of you, you need to focus on it more. It's one of the layers.

The critical thing here is that you really shouldn't be mouse targeting.

Any good tutorials or videos on that?

No clue! I haven't thought about the game in years!

What worked for me, though, was joining as many raids as possible. Dungeons are good too, if you're tanking. You'll suck for the first few, but after a while you'll stop sucking, and it'll make your life a lot easier.

Lord of the Rings Online is quite close. Wonderful environments as well, not to mention the lore.

For me it was all of the above, but equally important, the sound design was superb. Not just music but game sounds as well.

Yeah, I played for about a year during the original release and haven't played since but I still go back and listen to some of the tracks as ambient background music while programming and often times they trigger nice memories.

It was just one of those games that mixed together all of the right things at the right time, very similar to the original Diablo II in the early 2000s.

> Sadly this design principle has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Sadly this is due to new content being added as disparate “continents” that exist apart from the rest. Recently, content that had multiple zones on the same continent still has no loading screen. But since they have to adding new places to go to, and all the existing land being accounted for, they add new “continents”. But even new zones that get added mid-expansion are also separated by loading screen since they were never accounted for in the initial set of zones for the expansion. These days you might pass through several loading screens just going from one place to the other as you magically teleport around the world and cosmos.

Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.

> Funny enough, the world felt larger when it was smaller because it was rare you ever encountered a loading screen.

It's not only about loading screen. The world felt larger, because you had to walk and take the fly path a lot! Going from one end of the world to the other took literal minutes in flight. Then after they introduced the group search feature which automatically teleported you in the dungeon you had chosen, the world felt much smaller, because in practice you were only seeing a tiny part of it.

100% agreed. The cross-realm and phasing/layering they introduced further shrunk the world as well. While I think those features were ultimately good for gameplay reasons, they definitely stole from the magic of the original game.

I met a good friend through playing Counter Strike before social networks were universal, 2003-2005 or so. Early 2000s gaming felt (or I remember feeling) a lot different. Match making wasn't prevalent in PC games yet. You would play on different servers til you found you like. Then you would get to know the other players are form deeper relationships that I haven't had since then. I haven't really met any friends in Counter Strike after it implemented match making in CS:GO.

For anyone who loved WoW (especially the early days), I highly recommend checking out the WoW diary, by John Staats.

https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/

Not only was he an environment/dungeon/zone designer, but he recorded so much about the games development in the alpha stages. One of my favorite tidbits was how they worked to optimize the game for 56k back then. They got it to work extremely well with just a couple Kb/s!

Hey thanks for posting about this! I never would have discovered it on my own :)

lots of great tidbits in the book. for example the first maps were made in radiant and tested in quake3! with getting fragged by a coworker and all

Though not dial-up, my internet at the time was still very slow and the servers were a very long way away, so I routinely played with a ping of 600-1000ms with no issues at all. WoW and Guild Wars were about the only online games that worked, come to think of it. On behalf of 13-year-old me, I thank him for his efforts.

You can't just discuss WoW environments without bringing up sound design and weather effects. Graphics are merely one aspect of why WoW felt like a world.

Ever been to the Shimmering Flats in old WoW? How about at night?[1] It's an entirely different feel (and then you know why they call it shimmering). It's an amazing experience to go from day to night in WoW. Your friends might drop off for the day. You're just alone in this vast quiet world. And it rains. Or you enter a tavern and it feels warm thanks to the welcoming music. How about Duskwood during Halloween? This one game can evoke so many different feelings depending on which zone you're in, what time of day it is, and what weather effects are going on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEM4xVhDAjI

I remember returning after the soundtrack change and it did not feel the same. Thousand needles, Tanaris, barrens, zulfarrak were great in Vanilla.

The memory of leveling through heavy rain in Feralas is one of the strongest I have about the game.

When making a game world, there are many parameters you can tweak. One of them is the distance between points of interest. I think WoW struck a good balance between short distances (where the game feels like a casino or theme park, where everywhere you look there's some quest or shiny item begging for your attention) and long distances (where the player might get bored pressing the W key to move forward). It actually fell a bit of the "long distance" side, and it did this by keeping the environments grounded in reality.

But, like, a caricature of reality. Each zone feels like the WoW devs looked at a location on Earth and said "okay, how do we turn this up to eleven?". You've got Durotar, which looks like the Kalahari desert in the southern African countries, but with huge stylized rock formations and oversized trees. Then you have Tirisfal Glades, which looks like a generic pine forest in Canada (with gothic elements added, and again, larger trees). Then you have Thousand Needles which looks like Utah's Bryce Canyon or the Karst Towers in Yunnan, China (but what if there were rope bridges connecting them?). Winterspring looks like many places in winter (but there are those oversized trees and mountains again!)

Another important aspect is, not much was prefabbed. While it was possible to find buildings reused across the game world, they were all decorated differently, and had different NPCs inside and out to give them uniqueness.

Also, not everything in the world had purpose. This goes back to the "theme park" idea. There are many, many unique buildings, NPCs, and outdoor areas with absolutely no purpose. No enemies to fight, no quests to do. But someone put effort into making sure that this NPC and this carrot garden looks believable (as much as the stylized world of WoW can look believable).

Thinking back to the first days of World of Warcraft, the art direction was impeccable. There was great attention to detail that felt immersive.

Every area had a specific theme and lore to it, which connected to other areas and the overarching story.

What worked best for these environments were the memories of early multiplayer for me.

It's easy to forget how old school the graphics are yet my memories of Tarren Mill and the first beginnings of PVP are still very vivid.

Same with the first server event with Ahn'Qiraj (which in my opinion had some of the best design in the whole game).

I doubt I'll ever feel the wonder I felt from those first months of classic WOW. I started as a NElf, and those environments still feel kind of homey to me, even all these years later.

I played off and on for about 9 or 10 years, and then stopped. The game evolved past what I enjoyed, which was mostly in-world advancement with friends. I was never much of an endgame player.

Glance at the thread has me surprised (I think) nobody has brought it up, but by far one of the strongest aspects of WoW's environments is the fact that they tie in with the lore of the game.

WoW environments are not just generic, they reflect and take place in stories that people have loved for many years even before WoW came around. the very first place that came to mind reading that article was the entrance to Undercity where you can hear, if you have the audio loud enough, scenes from Arthas Betrayal in WC3.

Many places in WoW have genuine weight, they feel like real historical places in a way. This is what makes them memorable. You do not have this attachment at all in any modern MMO were most people just click through the cinematics.

I remember playing through Morrowind. It was my first Elder Scrolls game, and I got entranced by the in-game history books about a character called Jagar Tharn. They were deep and convincing in a way I'd never seen in atmosphere-setting content before, it really felt like I was reading about real events.

Turns out, Jagar Tharn was a major character in an earlier game in the series, and the histories more-or-less recounted the plot of that earlier game.

I think you're right that that referencing of earlier stories really carries a lot of weight, but I don't think the player even has to be familiar with those stories to profit from them. The very fact that they are "real" stories and places that exist outside of that game I think allows the designers to treat them more convincingly, more engagingly.

> You do not have this attachment at all in any modern MMO were most people just click through the cinematics.

I have a bit of the opposite opinion. The story in WoW for me felt very half-baked. I wanted to read the quest text, but usually it was kind of dull. The overarching story was at once overly complicated and a boring mess. Despite putting hundreds of hours into that game, I don’t think I really care about any of the characters in the story.

In comparison, the writing in FFXIV (another, more recent MMO) is a masterpiece. I cried several times through the main story quest. I don’t think I’ve ever cried before in a video game. Unfortunately the best writing is the most recent part of the story - and to get to it you need to play all the previous expansions first.

But World of Warcraft makes much better use of its world. Especially before they added flying, the world really felt like a place you explored and were present in. It has geography, that you need to learn as you play. And it takes time to move from place to place. WoW really invites a sense of wonder and curiosity as you explore the world. There’s always something interesting over the next ridge. And it might be a monster that eats you. It was a delight.

Despite its rough edges, wow is still a work of art. I’d love to work on something like that at some point in my career.

It’s funny you say that. I thought the overarching story was pretty straightforward and simple in the original game, including the RTS games. Warcraft 3 did add some extra elements to it, which were carried over into WoW, but it felt like lots of small stories. There really wasn’t a single, cohesive overarching story in the original WoW. Only now in modern WoW do we have these grandiose, trans-cosmos, overly complicated storylines that retcon everything that’s happened.

Not all of WOW is very compelling and I wish the author had taken his admittedly unscientific ranking and examined different zones to see what would come out on top. Especially in Vanilla there were a lot of grindy areas and depending on which faction you chose you would have a radically different early game experience. The Orc, Tauren, Dwarf, and Undead starting areas I remember being pretty boring and it seemed like a lot more care was put into the Night Elves and Human areas. The best environments were generally in the mid game where the developers seemed to have the most leeway in what they were building theme wise. Once you got to the end game it became very grindy and the environments were not so compelling. Everything became volcanic, lots of generic evil and vistas of browns.

Having said all that - I think the real reason it was so compelling was the community. It hit at just the right time where everyone was finally coming online and there weren't many other games of the same quality level pulling people away. It was a well designed game and everyone seemed to be playing it. I only spent so much time there because it was where I could reliably chat up friends. The few people I know who are still playing it today only do so because of their guild.

Anecdatally, loading into the Dwarf starting zone in 2005 was one of the most mind-blowingly immersive experiences of my gaming career

One second I was sitting at my computer watching a loading bar, and the next I was standing in a vast winter wonderland

That's not even saying anything about Ironforge..

I remember the first time going into Ironforge, and being immersed completely like nothing else before or since.

Even my first Oculus did not beat that.

I'm not sure what it was. The graphics were far from ground breaking. There were other games with big worlds. But I think the combination of world building, graphics, scale, and quality of execution (nailing the style) just completely shattered the level of anything else that came before - or at least for so many people that played the game.

I had to upgrade my RAM just to get to the auction house. Ironforge was truly something.

Ah memories...

I remember needing to drop down all my graphics settings just to be able to enter Ironforge.

> loading into the Dwarf starting zone in 2005

I think the background score adds to the effect.

I can never forget the surreal feeling when logging into the first time in Elwynn Forest with its iconic music in the background. Very idyllic.

There is something about WoW graphics. Its a right balance between cartoonish and photo-realism.

I made a lot of Night Elves because of this - I found the Teldrassil -> Darkshore leveling route so much more compelling.

My first character was a Night Elf. You can never capture that first experience of playing WoW. Starting out in Shadowglen and growing to the point I could reach Darnassus is simply the best gaming experience I've ever had. Then you realize that you're just on a tiny island and there is an entire world to explore beyond what you have just witnessed. I never thought you could experience actual awe in a video game before that. And I have never had that experience since then.

I'll never forget when I managed to squeeze my Night Elf between the trees that made the wall around Teldrassil, only to realize that the whole map I had been exploring for so many hours was the trunk of a humongous tree, and the sea was far below.

Awe is a very good description of those feelings.

The reasoning for the difference in complexity of the Alliance vs Horde starting areas (and lategame areas) in Vanilla was discussed somewhere (don't have a source handy). The artists and other creators started with the Human and Night Elf areas and created the elaborate areas you reference. Once they realized how long it took to do those areas and that they would never be able to meet the release deadline if they took the same amount of time and effort for other areas it became much more of a copy-paste job.

Indeed, if you ever pull up the earliest alpha screenshots where WoW is recognizable as the game that got released, the very first zones that were worked on were Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Duskwood, and Stranglethorn Vale and that was very apparent in Vanilla.

Yes! Duskwood - with that giant monster - and Stranglethorn Vale were absolutely incredible!

What was particularly enjoyable about it was that up to that point in the game - the areas seemed to get exponentially better.

It started off as the best game I had ever played - and each new area was somehow SUBSTANTIALLY better!

It's bizarre how well I remember that game... It was the design of each area, the music, ambiance, how the quest system introduced you to an area, but there was exponentially more to discover if you explored. Then the hook were instances where you couldn't realistically go solo, which led to pickup groups, which led to frustration with randos, which led to elitist groups forming which became top raiding guilds.

I met some insanely talented and accomplished people who moonlighted in raiding guilds within WoW. Friends raiding, writing custom mods, while working at the top tech companies. Such a time sink, but so much fun.

Oh.. and do you remember theorycrafting? Reverse engineering the game mechanics and optimizing for each situation across all the classes to beat raid bosses that were designed to be nearly impossible to defeat at launch? That was incredibly interesting, especially in a 40 player environment with multiple classes. The depth and balance of that game was and is still unparalleled.

Some areas were also just unfinished. The stories/quest-lines just simply ended. For example Dustwallow Marsh suddenly ends, and while you do go back that for one of the first raids (Ony) it is largely disconnected from the zone itself.

WoW Classic had this stuff in spades. Areas that were masterpieces (Tanaris, WPL, EPL, Human/Dwarf starting, et al) and areas (and ideas) seriously neglected or forgotten. Most of the content added in patches was fairly high quality though, they just seemingly focused their attention on that end-game instead or revamping since "most players have levelled passed that."

I loved the Orc, Drawf, and Undead starting areas. Tauren was always pretty boring

Graphic design played a large role, I'd guess. Warcraft imagery had this unique mix of cartoon, fantasy, and realistic in a way that most of its successors (and even later versions of WoW itself couldn't match. Plus, the open world aspect of it was the first time many players had ever encountered something like it. There were loading screens only for dungeons and continents. You could walk, run, or ride in Azeroth for hours without anything from outside intruding on the experience.

If you spend a lot of time exploring any virtual world in your formative years, that world will stick in your memory.

World of Warcraft is only unique in how universal it was.

That, and how many millions was spent on the artwork…

I was going to say essentially the same thing. In my early 20s I was working at Sony Computer Entertainment America as a QA tester and EVERYONE was playing and talking about WoW non-stop. This was probably around the time that Burning Crusade came out, or maybe WotLK. At the time it felt like I was the only person in my work/social circle NOT playing WoW.

I tried to pick it up years later, playing solo. It just doesn’t have the same appeal. I definitely feel like I missed out on something special by not having played it during the heyday.

WoW classic is a substantially different experience from WoW “retail”.

I kept a WoW account over these years but seldom played it. Still got hooked when classic came out.

Half of the fun is interaction with the community though. Meeting people in starting areas and struggling together in quests and dungeons. I’m not sure one can reproduce this experience again now that classic has progressed beyond the original expansion…

FWIW I don't consider my 40's to be my "formative" years :-)

Are the environments so compelling? before WoW there was MUDs (or MOOs) and they were super compelling and addictive with no gfx, lets call it the "MUD effect". So do the environments of WoW feeling compelling because of the environment, or because of the "MUD effect", and hence everything built on that feels more compelling, including the environments?

I was supposed to say exactly the same words and mention the MUDs and MUSHes...I think anyone who is interested can read the "backstab" stories of reddit user Patches765 and get amazed.

I'd even stretch a bit and say that graphics advancement does not really bring a lot of the immersion. For sure it is immersive to wear a pair of VR Goggles and experience places that you never visited, but it is equally, and maybe even more addictive, to allow oneself to read whatever is on the screen and let imagination flies. I would definitely not mind if the graphics advancement stops around year 1998/1999 when we had good enough graphics even for FPS.

There were other graphical MMORPGs. Ultima, EverQuest, FFXI was big prior and multi platform. Wow was pretty modest and ran on nearly everything.

Meridian 59 was the beginning of the MUD -> MMORPG transition as far as I can remember.

Any TDome players here?

Well EverQuest was openly hostile to players. The game was full of pointless timesinks, artificially and inorganically too difficult, and progression was way too slow and frustrating. When wow came out it was a breath of fresh air. Ultima was super dated by then, enthusiasts mostly played on custom servers

I am always amazed at how little recognition Anarchy Online gets in MMO discussions. I have never seen another game like it. It's too bad the devs kind of lost direction, and the game eventually withered and died. It's actually still around, but mostly as a nostalgia thing. I remember that the community had started to accuse the developers (a company called Funcom) of trying to make the game more like WoW instead of focusing on what made AO unique and interesting.

Good shout. I felt AO was too mature for me back then. The writing itself was much more advanced than wow.

Tibia. Nothing comes close it's quests or lore.

Before WoW there was EverQuest. I personally felt EverQuest was more compelling than WoW. Sure WoW was "better" but it didn't have the same magic as EverQuest did. EverQuest motivated me to go all the way to the highest levels and beyond in a way that WoW just didn't. I may have done 2 or 3 raids in WoW before I grew out of it. But is this really anything to do with how good the game was? Or is it really just nostalgia? I mean, your age when your first played it is probably the #1 factor in how good a game is, to be honest.

It was the opposite for me. You could successfully solo in WoW while it was nearly or completely impossible in EverQuest beyond level 30 or 40 or so (IIRC). That meant you had an easier time catching up with your friends if you have to take a day or two off of playing. In EQ if you fell behind you stayed behind unless you were lucky enough to find pick-up groups (hours of LFG anyone?) or your friends were cool with slumming it.

For me what made it interesting (in early vanilla at least) was the mystery. More specifically, a lot of the areas just weren’t used for anything, and some were completely empty (Silithus, Deadwind Pass)

You actually wanted to explore these places just because. It made the world feel more compelling. Later expansions, the areas compressed and every inch was covered in quest crap.

Subnautica is another example of this with its lush natural underwater environments: shallow beaches, coral reefs, kelp forests, thermal vents, underwater rivers, abyssal cave ecosystems, lava tubes, etc.

I'd give it high marks for Naturalness, Mystery, Openness, Coherence, Beauty, and Colorfulness; it lacks a bit in Legibility and Complexity sometimes. Great game.

I second this. Subnautica is the most recent game to give me that feeling of actual exploration; like there's a big deep world out there you can explore.

Agreed. Subnautica is an incredible game and once I picked it up I couldn’t put it down. I just wanted to keep exploring.

When I read the title, I had a very different idea in mind for what the content of the article would be.

I think it's interesting to apply a sort of topographical analysis to the virtual regions of WoW to try to understand why they're so important to us. Kudos to the author, I enjoyed reading his analysis. However, as other commenters have noted - I believe it's impossible to understand the allure of the game independently of the social elements.

To me the most important part of what made these environments compelling was the ability to actually quantify my interaction with them, exactly. Almost 20 years ago - god, has it been that long? Going into this virtual world with a counter that exactly captured how 'well' or 'good' I did was some kind of revelation. To people who played: these were the first DPS meters or counters. The foundations of quantitative gaming analysis for these kinds of games.

Of course, in the real world we have tests and races and everything else. But it wasn't the same. In World of Warcraft you could bend your entire intellect against the goal of maximizing some number which summarized your interaction with a virtual agent in a public way. This wasn't the first game to do this, but it was the most successful. If you were were good at the task (of interacting with the game environment), this gained you prestige in a highly visible way. For a million faceless and lost teenagers across the world, this mechanism was an indispensable lifeline.

I wonder about World of Warcraft and can't help but think its success and place in our culture can't be replicated for a variety of reasons:

-It had a very popular RTS game series that built up the lore, graphical template of the world, and did a lot of world/character building.

-It released in 2004 which was at a time when the internet was becoming more and more accessible such that kids could reasonably get online. (All MMO's are related to internet access but I would argue that the rollout of the internet has no two time periods that were the same)

-It blended the right amount grind/accessibility being more accessible than competitors like everquest but more enthralling and entrapping that successors.

-The appetite for MMO's may never be the same: revenues for mobile games and their ilk with micrcotransactions vastly outweight the market for MMO's. With how gaming has changed, many customers may not give the time to an MMO the way they used to and companies may not see the point.

WoW was a truly unique game in its time IMO

Yes WoW definitely was at the right place at the right time. Blizzard was basically the biggest name in gaming at the time. When everyone could get online, it’s natural they would all pick up WoW. It’s unlikely anything with similar network effects would happen now.

There were better games at the time, it was riding on the success and lore of the Warcraft series.

People who were not into MMORPGs at the time were all of a sudden excited because it was Warcraft.

There were other games at the time, that may have been better at some things, but probably not better at what it aimed to be good at. WoW certainly wasn't a better RTS than the Warcraft games before it, but those are just different games. WoW was probably the best game out there in a category defined as an immersive online multiplayer game world with actual game and roleplaying elements.

I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience I'd played since final fantasy, but with everyone else playing in the same world for no explicitly stated reason. If you think it rose to the popularity it did because previous rts/roleplayers were just continuing their love for the franchise, you're missing the rest of the picture.

I would be curious though if you have anything specific in mind that beats my claim

> I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience

In what way was it immersive for you? Not saying it's not immersive, but I didn't find it immersive. I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750. But at the time there was no end-game, liniar progression, once you level there's no need to go back to other area's, etc. So it was quite boring.

But I know people who have played since day 1 till now who swear by it.

I started with Ultima Onine, tried EQ, Lineage / Lineage II, AC, DAoC. But while alot of people during those days played SNES/N64, or games on PC like War Craft, Counter Strike, AOE/AOC. Me playing UO and such I was a 'computer geek' etc, but when WoW landed all of a sudden it was cool to play WoW, people who didn't even know MMORPGs were all of a sudden talking about upcoming WoW game. At the time I didn't understand because gameplay was much more immersive in other games, but they didn't want to play any of the games I played.

I think WoW got alot right to get people into the game even tho they are things I don't like. The hand-holding, bound items, and questing system. But WoW success was definitely not because it was a good game. It got better over time and became great, till it ended up being terrible again. But on release it wasn't good.

> I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750.

Might be the fact that you just power leveled through it.

I played UO and remember when starting on WoW it felt "dumb".

Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.

I think WoW did well by simplifying the mechanics and having more developed storyline which then helped people immerse in it more approachable or enjoyable way. I even read the lore on the internet and the books later, and I think all of that added more. I always enjoyed the questing and adventuring to new places the most, not that much about trying to min-max every aspect of the process.

> Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.

I miss this aspect of UO. Full loot PVP was fun, especially when you would get cheap gear and go ganking with people. One time on a shard (Novus Opiate) there was a ~50+ vs ~50+ blue vs red war for a few hours where we opened portals to the PVP towns and ran in ganking all the reds and they were ganking us.

Lots of fun those days. I missed the PVP because in WoW there was no loss and so no one really cared to try run or fight back, the only loss was exp so they sometimes just stood there let you kill them. It's one of the reasons I rushed 60 was to do PVP but then PVP didn't really exist.

I played the full 30 days and had 2 characters, 1 max and the other I was trying to do all the side quests and I stopped at like lvl 40 cos I just got bored of repeating the same sort of quest over and over in different zones, kill this, collect that, talk to X.

Did you never go over to Tarren Mill? IIRC, back in 2004 there was a ton of world PVP going on there, and one of the most fun aspects of it (IMO) was exactly the fact that there was no purpose other than "hey let's go fight some other players". Then BG came out and kinda ruined that aspect of things by making the PVP experience far more systematic and I guess purposeful. They may have improved it in later years but by then I had lost interest and stopped playing.

I didn't play at launch, but have heard that it could have probably used a few patches before it would have been so immersive. The pace of leveling however probably was its slowest at launch, and it seems like to do that, you would necessarily have been sucked in, because it would have probably taken a hell of a lot of playing, especially without all of the web resources we currently have. I started probably around 2005/6 I'd guess, before leveling was quickened. I'm not really sure what you mean by hand-holding exactly; at best there wasn't much in terms of assistance through any means. Though it was never a technically difficult game, I found it immersive in that it was slow, if you weren't deliberately trying to hit max level in the shortest possible time. I just played it to do something, that had some gradual reward and power system that felt intuitive and meaningful, and it probably took me a year to hit max level. Doing that with people is really what made it compelling, I couldn't imagine playing it alone at that time, it wasn't that kind of game. In contrast to your experience, none of my friends stopped playing the other games you mention, but WoW uniquely augmented our daily lives with questions about what gear you recently got, what level you hit, doing dungeons and raiding together, bumling into someone from the opposing faction and killing them or getting killed. Runescape had elements of that, but the graphics and gameplay were sluggish and more rudimentary, whereas WoW felt like I was "in" something more than ever before.

It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.

In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.

The environments were compelling enough I guess, but for me the true magic came from giant numbers popping up when I would hit things. Get something with multiple critical strikes in vanilla wow was so singularly satisfying. I couldn’t tell you anything interesting about the map, but I can tell you where I was when I hit my first two handed mace triple crit as a wind fury shaman in pvp. Big numbers and dead opponents. Pure joy.

I rerolled Hunter to Fury Warrior and my god there was nothing like seeing critical numbers continue to skyrocket each week as raid gear progressed.

The theorycraft was a real love affair, constantly searching on Thottbot.

Good timing for this; the game just dropped a new patch and new zone yesterday, and the new environments continue this same feeling of very intentional art direction. But with each expansion pack, the assets feel closer to being in-line with modern standards.

It's not the most graphically intricate game still, for the better IMO in terms of accessibility (it still runs improbably well on my 2013 MBP), but these spaces are still evocative and good to look at. For me, anyway.

https://www.wowhead.com/gallery=2049/zereth-mortis-sceenshot...

I picked a race that didn't start in Ironforge. I remember not really knowing what to expect. I may have taken a griffin or just used a boat. But the sheer feeling of awe when you enter. The music changes and truly get a scale of how large the place is. I'm not sure I'll ever get to experience that again.

The later zones (of Vanilla Wow) were pretty boring and ugly, assumedly because they ran out of time to develop them further. They definitely put a lot of iteration into the earlier zones and it paid off.

Looking back, there just wasn't anything that looked like WoW, but a lot of that included the perspective of running around in a comparatively polished world with a ton of comparatively polished game systems, with friends. The first long flight I took from two major cities across most of a continent (that I was familiar with from experience with the IP) was absolutely nuts to me.

For me in 2004 it was all the content that we had played in Warcraft 2 and 3 - that was now open to explore and laugh about with friends… it was a huge leap forward in experience like nothing before it

I did some research on the aesthetic properties of WOW. one conclisoon I came to…

An aesthetic image such as a painting tends to be either low saturation/high lightness contrast or high saturation/low lightness contrast. One reason this is true is that nature tends to follow the same rules.

WoW was one of the first games to feature regularly high saturation plus high lightness contrast. This combination is difficult to maintain but has a particular appeal.

WoW was a genius game. I played Classic recently and it was astonishing. I’m saying that as one who played all the expansions. It’s weird but I enjoy 2004 year game more than 2022. They lost it in Cataclsym and later.

WoW was some of the best years of my life. Not in a depressing way. Truly a ton of fun and good memories. For a while I actually missed certain zones as if they were places I missed visiting in life. I haven’t played WoW since Wrath of the Lich King. It’s been 12-13 years and I still occasionally miss my characters.

WoW really hit certain things that appealed to many different people.

It took me quite a while grappling with the idea that it was okay that some of the best times I ever had were in that game.

It was the fishing tournaments for me.

How cool was it to wake up at 6 am before class started and fish by the giants fearing for your life!

All for +5 gloves…

Those felt more high-stakes than end-game raiding for me, for some reason. Probably because you only had one shot a week. I remember being the first to turn in the fishes, getting right up to the vendor, and having my hands tremble from the adrenaline... slowing me down just enough for someone else to snipe the reward out from under me.

I remember waiting years for the RPG they planned and then for WoW.

But I never played it, because of the subscription. I was very poor back then.

In the end I was happy that I didn't. I saw many people fail their relationships and careers because of it.

Exactly the same here. Never got into it, and the longer I held out, the more I was convinced it triggered some sort of addiction gene in people! How could they spend HOURS every day and weekend in this pretend world clicking random monster??

I personally knew parents who would stick their toddlers in pack and plays for hours just to grind out or quest or whatever.. every weekend. It seemed so absurd to me.

Then I realized as I got older, it really wasn't different than any other social activity. People gathering to watch hours of (sports) doesn't seem so strange, why should gaming get the same scepticism?

So that is my take away, the immersion wasn't so much the game itself, it was the broad social aspect: everybody you knew played. It was relatable, and you felt a sense of accomplishment.. just like most other social activities.

That was always my impression. WoW and other MMOs aren't like normal games in being something you do for fun. As a solo experience, the gameplay quickly becomes something you'd do your best to avoid.

The point of WoW is the chat window; the rest of the game is there to give you something to do while you're hanging out.

https://www.warcrafttavern.com/community/art-resources/ultra...

It’s easier to see when you can compare them all side-by-side. There’s only a few levers the team had available between the sky lighting, skybox, architecture, and foliage but they exaggerate the hell out of each so that you never get a same-y feel from any of the zones.

For me it's the amazing soundtrack and the fact the world is telling you a story. This feeling is particularly strong in the early and midgame areas - some of the endgame areas were literally unfinished. Generally if you have had fun and success in some area, associative memory does wonders when you visit it.

No mention of the music. I always think the WoW soundtrack is beautiful - for me it made the story.

I do remember an anecdote from the time that when they were world-building, the sunsets looked so good, they made them last like an hour or two just for that extended twilight feeling. I remember it especially in that southern goblin port city.

WoW was the first (relatively) open world game that I played, and the first computer-based game that I got into heavily. I had been a console fan for years, but this running on my first Mac or two (‘04-‘06) made me want to upgrade RAM, tweak rendering settings, and all of that sort of stuff in order to get the fullest experience. It was just so immersive and fun and social. I’d also just play to wander the countryside, in a way I haven’t since other than Zelda BotW. Just a masterful achievement.

Unrelated to the world design, but another factor in the success of WoW that I didn't see mentioned is the rich add-on ecosystem that would allow you to deeply customize the UI.

I believe this programability was an important factor in the popularity in the tech circles. High level play almost required you to use various addons (boss mod, threat meter, dps meter, raid frames etc). Spending hours tweaking and coding to make sure my UI was setup to give me and my guild an edge was a big part of what made WoW fun for me.

Also, the fact that you could record and export detailed combat log data was another unique feature of the game that made it appealing to number crunching geeks.

Great graphics, sound, animations, and maps.

First time I played it, I couldn't stopped playing it. It was the first game I couldn't put down because it was just so exciting to explore the world and upgrade your character.

The best part of early WoW for me was working through the PvE quests with a few friends and especially taking on the 5 person dungeon instances while leveling up to 60. The combination of needing to form a group of mixed tanking, healing, DPS and crowd control to take on the dungeons was amazing.

Are there any games out there since that capture this as well? Most I've seen since don't seem to capture the need to work with others nearly as well, usually as all classes can do too much.

"I remember back in my days kids were not always at the phone, we were in the fields playing in tazavesh"

I'm not sure I agree with the author anyway, I actually love MMORPG but the feeling of the map of WoW never got me, I think the best one is Ultima Online, in terms of happiness of exploration feeling, but among the modern ones, I think I also prefer the ESO scenarios

I think it was the stylization. Everything looks hand drawn, like the old AD&D books of the 80s. Had they used modern graphics at the time, it would look dated; instead they used art that has more staying power.

Also, I think the fun of the game helped endear the zones. If the game was terrible, the game (and therefore the zones) would be much less memorable.

You could jump. :) I'm only half-serious.

I always thought WoW looked so overly cartoonish, I always prefered Everquest, which seemed more classically fantastical. I also played Dark Age of Camelot and Anarchy Online, which I also felt had much more 'soul', and way better music

Man I loved the cartoonish style of WoW. Cell shading in general is a timeless look. I mean, 15 years later and people still think it looks decent.

I guess they like strategy game maps from third person then. The early areas all looked a lot like Warcraft 3 maps, and there were even orcs peons chopping trees just like you'd expect.

I always assumed part of the idea was to allow asset reuse.

As much as WoW's environment and general art style were (and still mostly are) good, I dislike how that style has been copied in many other fantasy universes, leading to very homogeneous looks

I wanted to share my memories.

My earliest memories of the internet were back in 2005. I still remember the long bus ride and walk to the nearest shopping centre to purchase a phone line cable from Dick Smith Electronics in Northland as my modem didn't have the right connector for our units old phone lines.

My mum saved every dollar from my early birthdays and when she explained this to 14 year old, I hounded her to purchase a computer for me.

Thankfully she did, and I remember going through the arduous process of getting the internet credentials, loading the modems driver, the ISP connector and needing to manually connect to the net, then pulling up my first website playboy.com haha

From here, I returned back from the library with a bundle of HTML and web development books (mostly the dummies series) and drafted my first tests into notepad, then opened the saved files into the early Mozilla versions to see it in all its glory.

From here, the first mention of World of Warcraft was amongst my high school friends, who were big Warcraft 3 players. We all made a pact to purchase the game and begin playing it together.

I played on the Gilneas realm with my school friends, and whilst they rolled Alliance, I somehow decided to go with horde and rolled a Hunter called Rover.

Over the months, I leveled up super slowly and fell in with a guild of RL friends who graciously allowed an Aussie teen to come on board. They were my first community I ever fell into and took me into instances, enchanted my armor and weapons, helped me tame rare and exotic pets.

My real end game raiding happened on the WoW forums where I was an infamous troll on there and interacted with a lot of server personalities. A lot of people knew me, and it was a love hate relationship most players had with me. I was targeted a ton in PVP and god knows I probably deserved a lot of the griefing thrown my way. Never trust young testosterone fueled teenagers with anonymity.

I famously skipped two weeks of school just to play it. Such was my love and addiction for it.

All in all, WoW was my first taste of interacting with adults in a serious and meaningful way. I learned to:

- Code in XML

- Use Windows in a much more advanced manner by trying to hack

- Understanding how to make strategic choices with gear

- Learning teamwork in instances and raids

- Got my first dollar online by farming gold and selling it

- Got my first job online freelancing as a video game reviewer just to pay for my WoW subscription (which led me to a lucrative career in Digital Marketing. 14 years later, I'm Head of Marketing at startup).

I owe so much to this video game. It had given a young child from a poor, single parent household a lot of hours of escapism, plus developed crucial tools and skills that I translated into a professional career which aided in my ability to rise out of my social predicament.

I'll never forget the magic of opening up the discs, the smell of the packaging and waiting hours for it to download & patch to play.

You can never talk about World of Warcraft to me without bringing up the bittersweet pangings of nostalgia for a time that will never be re-created.

I have forgotten the names and usernames of so many online friends who I spent an incredible amount of time with, but I will never forget how they made me feel and the overall memories of the game.

Interesting I liked WoW but environments never really entranced me like Everquest did. Mostly because of scale. Nothing in WoW compared to running from Freeport to Queynos or the boat journey

EQ doesn’t have the boat anymore! It’s still around and free to play on steam (both 1 and 2).

Playing those games in first person perspective makes them seem gargantuan. It’s pretty cool.

The boats are back, they’re just not obligatory

I wish there was a game that would dare compete with WoW, but without lore, to make it cheaper. I guess it would be tricky, but the multiplayer aspect made this game so great.

Final Fantasy XI and XIV has some incredible environments as well

For me, The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption had the most compelling environments. I spent probably half of my play time just walking-riding around.

The most compelling thing for me was visiting a Silvermoon that was filled to the brim with people, all of them unique individual people.

Let me share as well I guess.

I was ten years old when I got WoW, I had had a laptop for a year already because my dad (who I spent every other weekend with) was the type to scream at people an then give them gifts when he felt guilty... anyway, I hadn't really known what to do with it until I learned about WoW. My friend had gotten it on the day it was released. However he didn't have a laptop so he played on his moms work computer. Similarily some of my other friends had trouble connecting.

I did not have this issue since my mom worked two jobs and my dad talked on the phone all day. For two years I played world of warcraft 18 hours a day. I didn't go to school or to sleep. I learned English, how to read a map and how to work in a team. I earned peoples respect for the first time in my life it seemed. They would listen to my advice because I wrote with correct grammar and punctuation about the actual patterns the enemies would repeat.. quickly people started to do as I said (something no one ever did in real life; listen to the tiny late-in-puberty kids ideas).

I think it's safe to say that WoW was my whole life. At the end of vanilla (shortly before burning crusade) I had finally reached level 60 but it was also then that I woke up one day with my neck stuck in a bad position. My mom took my to the countryside and I cried in withdrawal for two weeks like a heroin addict. When I came back the game wasn't interesting anymore, it had drifted a part.

During the glory days many things were different. First of all, the people didn't really know how to play the game. For some it was too intimidating / hard to actually grapple with the content and the storylines. Some of them were super immersive while others were difficult to figure out. Many people however were content to sit in the cities and ask for charity from the higher levelled players. This created high status for those players, however, if they were 12 levels higher than you then you could not see their exact level. This meant that you could be a level 25 dude in some shitty gear and still be considered a god by some level 10 dweeb. Being able to tell how strong someone was came down to recognizing the gear and gossiping with others OR being strong yourself.

Some of the coolest things about WoW were totally emergent, for example, IF was so laggy (because it had the only auction house) that walking through there was just a slideshow and I had memorized for how long to hold different keys to go where. Somehow it /felt/ like a really crowded place. When the PVP battlegrounds came you had to go to some obscure place and wait a really long time to get to play. It was kind of absurd to see the culture adopt to various things like this. If I had been older at the time I am sure I would have seen a different side to it, however, thanks to me being so young and making friends in the game who had kids my age they often had to go pick up from school around the time when I was supposed to finish school. So instead of them playing with their kids or me learning something useless at school I was playing with them and learning about what they were interested in, as if I was one of their mates at the pub.

One time I got invited to a wedding (of real people, held in-game) and a high level character gave me money for alcohol (I had never even seen a gold coin at the time) and my character got drunk in game, I had not been prepared for the "simulation" and it felt extremely realistic, I'd go so far as to say it was the first time I drank and partied because it honestly gave a similar feeling as later in life when I experienced these things for real. They had a level 60 priest (I think the only on the server) do the ceremony and then we had fireworks when we walked down the street.. Also the onyxia quest was freaking amazing when it first happened and all the NPCs in stormwind started panicking and the queen lady turns into some monster. Idk, all this stuff was freaking amazing. It's also why I learned about BF Skinner and FOSS. Basically, I owe WoW my whole outlook on life.

I hope we are not the last generation that can explore unspoiled nature within a short car drive from dense urban environments.

Im very sure Blizzard used witchcraft to make this game so attractive and addictive.

That explains a lot about current events at Activision/Blizzard :P

WoW was basically a Diablo MMO for me, and it had dwarves (and lots of content).

My first memory of WoW was leaving my starting city, traveling to the closest main city, and seeing the buildings were very conspicuously the same models reused. I found the environments to be the opposite of compelling. Lazy but well polished. Other MMO environments felt more hand-crafted.

WoW was amazing. But I am mostly referring to vanilla WoW. I have no experience with later content and environments.

I think there are several factors that made WoW feel extremely cozy and fun to play.

First one is the game is very open. From the beginning, outside of monsters, if you stick to the roads you can go to high level zones if you want to. There's nothing for you to do, but the game is not blocking you. Also, there are no loading screens between zones, so you can cross between zones wherever you want (if there aren't mountains blocking you). In other games you have to go back to the road and go through a portal to load the next zone.

I like how in WoW the game didn't tell you where to do your quest. It often told you "go south", but that's it. Sure, these days you have wikis that tell you exactly where to go, but I prefer that anyway over the big arrow telling you "GO HERE NOW". I tried other MMOs, and I lose attention on the tutorial. I feel like the game is on rails and it's just telling me which buttons to press and there's little feel of exploration.

Another factor is that WoW created a world first and then filled it with content. There are many places in WoW that aren't connected to a quest at all, they don't have a gameplay purpose but they are there. A drawback of this is that some zones didn't get finished in time. Famously Azshara, Silithus and Deadwind Pass were mostly devoid of content upon release. These days MMOs design progression and quests first and then create a world around it, which ends up a series of linear paths and quests that feel more forced than the ones in WoW (which do feel often forced).

WoW's stylized look aged very well. I actually prefer it to modern MMORPGs. Modern MMOs have the same issue Warcraft 3 Reforged has against the original - the new models look pretty, but with higher detail comes more visual noise and they stand out less in a crowd. A group of players in a modern MMORPG looks like a grayish blob, in WoW it's much easier to tell the players apart and what equipment they have. Also, simple stylized look allowed WoW to have great view distances and many entities on the screen. Places like Mulgore look amazing in 1440p@144Hz on a modern PC. You can see most of the zone, some is obscured by the fog, but you can see Thunder Bluff in the distance and it all looks amazing. WoW has some good fog and rain effects which are built to create ambiance.

The music in WoW is also good. It's low key enough to not be distracting, but builds the atmosphere of the zone well. I am getting increasingly tired of epic orchestral music in RPGs these days, so music like in WoW is a relief for me.

I disagree with the opinion that WoW's attractiveness was unique for being in the right place at the right time. It's success perhaps was, but I don't think any game managed to copy the look and feel of the zones, that felt just right for the most part.

I share the author's feeling that World of Warcraft (WoW) developed a strong sense of "place" in my psyche. I also think his methods quite unscientific :-) but share the curiosity of the question.

One of the things that gave WoW its appeal was that there was a lot going on in the environment. Animals scurry, there are houses with belongings in them, ruins, and various natural formations. Basically a lot of "cool" stuff to look at while you were looking for your target monster or next quest giver.

Of course WoW had different servers with the same environment but different play styles. The big separator was "Play vs. Environment" and "Player vs. Player."

In the former, none of the other players could attack you unless you "enabled" player vs player, or "flagged" (entered a zone that automatically enabled it like a capitol city, or manually set it and then hit someone who had also set it.) The effect of that choice was that the environment was fairly consistent with the story line that was being enacted. (yes sometimes opposing factions killed of quest givers and that was annoying but the mount of "grief" they could cause had limits).

Contrast that to player vs. player servers where entire zones were "owned" by one faction or another and characters were always vulnerable to attack (although not from players in your own faction outside the nominal 'dueling' capability). These servers could be much more difficult to play on, especially when the populations of the two factions were unbalanced in favor of one faction or the other.

Out of necessity, the quest giving non-player characters (NPCs) were typically either stationary or covered a very fixed path. As a result when repeating zones on different characters it could feel both 'boring' and somehow 'reassuring' when you went from one quest to the next.

The ease of setting up groups to quest together (co-operative play) and the social aspects of that gave the time spent a lot of "memorable" qualities. The relative challenge (especially in the first or 'vanilla' version) of the quests gave a sense of accomplishment when multiplayer quests were completed.

There was a fixed "script" in terms of how the mobs would behave, but players could be quite creative when it came to how to overcome those scripts. That also made play more memorable.

Finally, and the author touches on this, the large number of choices and NPC factions give individual players many choices on how they gained experience to get to the maximum level. For people like me, the "mini" games, like crafting, the auction house market dynamics, cooking and fishing made the world seem so much more "real" than in other games.

Having things to do in game that were not "required" for advancing, but could change how the game felt (like eating something you cooked which would change your player stats in some beneficial way) contributed to this as well.

Finally, the openness, and sheer size of the environment really encouraged exploration. The difference between running/walking, riding a mount (slow or fast), and flying (faster, and faster still) was really well done. While it could feel bleak at times Blizzard did an excellent job of providing story and nuance around the bleakness.

I've said in the past but Microsoft could probably pretty easily "dominate" the whole metaverse thing by pushing out the WoW vanilla engine as a community environment. One of my old guilds would have meetings in a building in Ironforge (a capital city), we could all come together and sit on benches and talk about the news of the day and make plans for things. Normalize the in game economy, create things that wear out to insure turnover etc and you could easily have an endless world of friends hanging out doing interesting things.

what made them compelling is most of them were copied from everquest

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