The Evolution of World of Warcraft's many games

by Michael Zenke on Mar 16th 2008 6:00PM

World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Culture, Game mechanics, Patches

To say that World of Warcraft has changed over the last four years would be something of an understatement. Major content additions have come at a fast and furious rate, from minor class tweaks all the way up to the Burning Crusade expansion itself. The blog GameSetWatch hosts a feature called Play Evolution that looks at just these kinds of changes. In an article this past week author James Lantz laid out some of the ways that Blizzard has modifed WoW over the years.

What's interesting is that he doesn't just comb through patch notes. Lantz notes that within Azeroth itself there are several different games being played all alongside each other. The leveling up game is the one many people talk about, but there's also the raid game, the pvp game, the crafting game, the social game ... everyone is playing a WoW slightly different from everyone else's. Using the evolution of Player vs. Player combat since the game's launch, Lantz talks about the path Blizzard has walked to focus that particular 'metagame' for players - be it for good or ill.

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Tags: blizzard, evolution, game-design, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (2)

Again I raise my battered old banner... WoW is not the only game with several iterations of itself running side by side. In fact, most, if not all, MMOs have these elements. True it is less so in MPFPS and MPRTS but still, they also have a couple of games running within their system side by side.

WoW may be the beefiest cash cow on the block but it is not the only one.

That's absolutely true - but I don't think the article was trying to disagree or suggest WoW is the ONLY game to have this level of depth and complexity. Rather, the author is trying to reveal an often-overlooked (or, more likely, simply intuitively understood) level of complexity within MMOs to his readers by exploring the evolution of a running MMO and, for obvious reasons, chose the biggest game in town. He's using the concrete example of WoW to explore a more abstract concept that he and we, as people who play non-WoW MMOs, recognize as being universal to the genre. (I don't think, judging by his other posts to this blog and even just his other articles in the Play Evolution set, that it's a stretch to say the author has played other MMOs besides WoW.)

In light of that and what you've pointed out, that makes the article MORE interesting because I believe we can learn about the evolution of young MMOs through studying where other, similar games (WoW, in this case) have gone before. OR as a contrast to other games that, despite their similarity, have chosen to evolve and solve their problems differently. We get to see what works and what doesn't, so to speak.

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