World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was released in 2004 by The Blizzard Entertainment. There are additional six expansions has released until today. Blizzard Entertainment is one of remarkable video game company that has produced many popular games such as Diablo series, StarCraft series, Warcraft series and more. The development team of WoW began to develop this game since early 1999. At the time, Blizzard put almost all the elite staffs into this team. As a result, when the game was released, that resulted in a revolution both for the hardware market and the opinion of the MMORPG. However, since this game already 14 years old, the Overall quality of the game is descending because it is impossible to remake everything to fit the new game engines. Also, after 6 expansions, the game has too many contents that make a new player hard to experience the old content due to various reason. The activate player was 12 million, but now only 1-2 million left. Nevertheless, WoW still the most profound content game among of the same type of games. This game is a milestone of the game development history, and there are a lot of game communities in the real world.
WoW has involved in many genres such Action game, Adventure game and Strategy game. The game has the partial character of the action game. First, it obviously has the real-time battle system. Players involve both PVP and PVE activates in the real-time and has to react immediately. The battleground is also a highly strategy based place. There are from 2V2 to 40V40 PVP battleground that requires the better plan and better fighting skill in order to win. Although WoW is an online game, it also is an adventure games. The World of Warcraft has a profound background since all this game his build on a famous novel ‘Warcraft’ and ‘World of Warcraft’. There are more 30 stories in published paperback version novel. And Three previous very popular video game “Warcraft” series. In addition, the team has created thousands of quests in the original version and each quest has its own story. As a result, player could experience a lot of epic even through the timeline and game versions, plus all the side quests. The game itself is telling the story to player. The Dungeon is most important part of this game because it is a main way to acquire the higher level equipment and to experience the epic story from the Warcraft novel. The great teams must have the great strategy and corporation to complete the dungeons.
As a 14 years old game, WoW had a lot of changes in its graphical design, music, and gameplay styles. As a result, it is hard to analyze WoW without to segment its timeline. In the early year of WoW (2004 – 2009). The graphical design is the most outstanding among the MMORPG at the same time period. The main reason is that Blizzard has established a team to focus on the graphical work. The character and monster models, the world map, and the Material Texture, everything related to artworks has been extremely elaborately created. Thus, compare with the similar game at that time, WoW is the game really expressed the players. After 2010, the graphical design is still great, all the skill and spell has great particle effects. The world becomes large and large without lost any graphical quality. Indeed, it is still perfect. However, there are two reasons why WoW isn’t outshining among others. The old game engine limited the upper bounding of the graphical quality and the world is too large makes it is impossible to remake and update everything easily. Different than Graphic, the Sound System is extremely amazing over the 14 years. There are many famous game composers to write the epic music for the WoW. No matter in the what situation, the music brings the player great immersive experience. The Music is the soul of the WoW. As a survey that shows there are players were moved by the music first, then tried to play the WoW late.
In the early time, 2004 – 2010, the main player are the people born between 80’-90’, they are mainly college student and people just graduated since college students and new graduates have more flexible money time to spending on the game. Since WoW resulted in the worldwide hardware upgrade mania, much older computers were unable to run WoW smoothly. Some people choose to buy a new computer, but the most people have to go to Internet café (Asian Area). Then similarly, the people born between 70-80 taken the second population group, 60-70’s and 90’s – 00’s were the least. The incredible game experience and the profound content strongly attracted every player. Player has a high freedom to decide what to do. There are many main storylines, especially in the early version, the player could discover the world in their own way. Many players played for a month but still stayed a low level just because they just spend the time to take a look the world. There are no certain limited to let player to do anything. A professional PVP player could to kill other players in the opposite camp over the world. Players could also lead a 40 people team to fight in the dungeon day and night. Players can also try to control the market as a successful businessman. Or player can just walk through the world and experience the stories and quests. Thus, the rule is very flexible to players, discover and world and find your own way to do what you want to do as long as it is possible, and even some impossible thing could also be done by special techniques. Player control one character, but every player under same class has similar skills, but different play has different setting of the skills and different understanding to the skills. That makes some players are powerful than others in certain case. WoW has tried to limited the random ability that breaking balance between PVP and Dungeon (related competition). Others than those, random ability is kind of high. Player never know what monster or other players many attack him in next seconds or what the next killed monster may drop. Thus, WoW obviously allowed emergent play and everything could happen in the next second.
One of the characters of WoW is that players must choose between the opposing factions of the Alliance or the Horde. Alliance and Horde have totally different backgrounds, starting points, and cities. As a result, a player can only experience a partial story at the beginning, the only way to experience other races/factions’ stories is to create a new character under the races and faction. However, missing most of the stories and quests will not influence the game playing unless some critical quests that will award important item or unlock new spell, equipment or permit to the dungeons. Also, the purpose of Blizzard made thousands quest is supposing most player will not to experience all of them. The benefit is player always feel there is something need to do and something need to discover. Each version has the different theme, also the best way to storytelling is using the linear fiction. However, the linear fiction will more or less to limit the freedom, WoW solve this problem by line up the story during player level up. Player has the ability to choose where they want to go and where to do the quest, but to go to higher level places has to have a relatively high level in order to survive. Under this restriction, the player has to complete the quests to level up and there are chances to insert the main stories into the quests to tell the story to players.
World of Warcraft has a lot of elements that suits for different demands for the players. Players have various purposes to play the game; as the WoW has the guild system to simulates the real world societies activates, social impact and risk is typical in the guild system. Guild system is a common system that can be found in almost all MMORPG game. There are two related major problems that every player will face in the game. First, how to make the fair distribution to the members with really limited resources. Second, how will the player obey the extra rule even in a game? For both questions, that can be treated as the government resources distribution problem. For example, in early game version, players can only acquire advanced equipment from the 40 players raid activates (usually much longer due to the various situations). In the total booties, there may be some duplicated parts that useless for everyone. As a result, more than half of the group member will work for nothing for the entire week. How to balance and make up the loss of any policy change is one major challenge for the guild leader. Also, understanding this fact is also a challenge to each guild member. In addition, there are many other problems related to the guild, for instance, since the items have a certain value related to the real world currency. how the leader will manage the income will be another large topic. In short, the guild system reflects the societies in real world. The guild management is really profound, realistic, educational and social-simulated.
WoW is amazing, but not all the influence is the positive. There are many negatives news related the WoW. For instance, WoW is too good that many people were seriously addicted to it. As a result, there were a lot of discuss about Internet addiction and most of them are addressing the WoW. Indeed, WoW is the game will result addition for the people with weak self-control ability, but this is the objective reason. People could addict to any game but WoW became the powerful catalyzer. Focus on the guild, the most obviously active user perspective risk is “enforced overplay”. This is a typical issue in MMORPG, especially for the play has involved in the large group. enforced overplay is case that player wants to leave off-line, but other team members are still playing. If the players leave, he will feel out of the team and will not get involved. Thus, he will keep playing even he doesn’t want. The interesting point is that enforced overplay has the chained influence. Each player wants to leave in different time points for various reason, but when he decided to stay, he will keep influence other players to stay playing. This phenomenon especially occurred in the large guild, since missing attendances and leaving early of the guild activates usually be punished to deduct DKP point. So the most guild member is enforced to treat the guild activates as the real job. The enforced play will not only waste player's time but also result in the mental and physical damages for the over player. And players even cannot feel pleasure for the playing!
In MMORPG, the player will feel another life in the game world. Millions of people left their memory in the World of Warcraft. 14 years is too long in a person’s life. The students have turned to business elites; the guild members got their family and kids. The competition between Alliance and Horde were not violent as before; StormWind and Orgrimmar were not that bustlings. Players are growing and WoW gets older; most of the old friends have quit. However, everyone must remember they have fought in this fantastic world with their reliable allies and they had a good time in the Azeroth where they spend their youth.