A look at World of Warcraft's unique characteristics

With Wrath of the Lich King imminent, we thought it would be a good idea to take a short look at just what has made and continues to make World of Warcraft so different than many other MMOs and whether or not it still retains that oh-so-different sheen. After four years of being pretty much the biggest dog in the yard, does World of Warcraft still bring new ideas to the table? Click below to find out what we think.

The biggest difference between World of Warcraft and other MMOs at the time of its launch was the focus on quests. Not only did quest NPCs have exclamation marks over their heads (a design that's become rather ubiquitous with the "WoW experience" nowadays) but they were littered throughout the entire game world. This was a huge departure from the genre norm, where quests were generally a less frequent affair. With Wrath of the Lich King, the focus on questing has gotten even more intense for Blizzard. The entire Death Knight starting quest line is an effort in storytelling unseen in MMOs to date. Players take quests directly from Arthas, who even speaks telepathically via PMs in-game. The quests are both incredibly interactive and inspired, but we won't ruin them here. Suffice it to say, this is an area that remains the domain of Blizzard expertise -- at least for the time being.

Secondary to the questing innovations, but no less important, was the graphic design in World of Warcraft. When screenshots first began to emerge from the desktops within Blizzard, a lot of people turned their noses up to them. Jaggies and low-resolution textures were pointed out by many nay-sayers and it was hard to blame them, the game just didn't come off very well in still imagery. However, once people started to see the world come to life through motion and animation, ears perked and heads turned.

Of course, the devout Blizzard fan will tell you they knew this was coming all along. For a long time now the Blizz mantra of tech and graphic design has been "Big bang, little buck." or in other words: It's all in the hips. You know, the motion of the ocean and not how many sails a ship has to show off, or something like that. Both expansions have kept the system requirements fairly low and what Blizzard has opted to do instead is slowly improve the graphics featured in their freshman MMO effort. It's worked well, because incremental upgrades avoid alienating original players while keeping those with higher-end machines distracted by some new shiny effects.

Finally we come to the simplistic, brick-by-brick game design. If you sat a non-MMO players in front of a level 70 -- or even level 30 -- character in World of Warcraft, their eyes would probably implode from all the icons. However, start them at level one and watch the "WoW addiction" slowly take its course. No other MMO before World of Warcraft had hit the sweet spot of making the game simple enough at the beginning, but slowly more complex over time. Playing through the first 60 levels of the game is almost like an extremely pro-longed tutorial, but in a way that isn't a terrible tutorial level. Ideally, all game designers should be able to come up with a system that slowly and carefully introduces more and more things for players to be aware of during gameplay.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't come down to just features. What makes World of Warcraft different from a lot of other games is more than a buzzword like polish or innovation. This game is special by the combination of being designed by passionate people with a powerful sense of design and then being released at just the right moment. When all these things don't come together to near perfection when making any game -- let alone an MMO -- players will take notice. For as long as this game took Blizzard to put together, we can expect it to remain for a long, long time. And to that end, its successor will likely take a while to crest the hill of our harddrives as well.

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