Reflections on 20 Years of World of Warcraft

Today is the day… isn’t it?  Well, if it isn’t, it is close enough for me.  World of Warcraft is now 20 years old.

The Blizzard press site has an official statement on the 20th anniversary of the game.

For two decades, millions of World of Warcraft players from around the world have considered Azeroth a second home. From their initial steps out of the starting zones in 2004, their journeys have taken them across the contested territories of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms as well as distant worlds and realms over ten expansions. Launching first in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft’s story has followed the epic tales of iconic heroes and villains such as Arthas Menethil, Lady Jaina Proudmoore, Thrall, the Windrunner Family and more importantly, the millions of adventurers that have faced Azeroth’s world-ending threats head on. With the Worldsoul Saga, a new era of the game will take players into the next 20 years and beyond.

Cool.  I think here, 20 years down the road, I can now identify all those named NPCs.  I didn’t play the Warcraft RTS, save as a LAN game, so the origins and stories of Azeroth have always been a bit foggy for me.

There are any number of games where I have launch day stories of joy, excitement, thrill, problems, crowds, and occasional disappointment.  Many recorded right here on the blog over the last 18 years.

World of Warcraft is not one of those games.  I was still off in the EverQuest II launch that hit two weeks earlier, and was kind of surprised I was doing that as I had gotten jaded with EverQuest and had decided that the MMO thing was not for me.  I had pretty much ceased to pay attention to the genre.

But, in TorilMUD, where I had been playing for about a year, some of our guild were keen on this new version of EverQuest, especially those who had missed out on the launch of the original, so the case was made to go over there and give it a shot.  So we went there, joining up with an EQ guild that had some overlap with us in TorilMUD… and I’ve written all about that elsewhere.

And it was there, on our guild TeamSpeak server, that I got an ear full about WoW launching and how it was a clownish, cartoon kiddie MMO and not for REAL gamers.  This was before I had discovered I was not a REAL gamer… and I had not been paying attention, as noted, being far more interested in things we could play together over the LAN at work, like Diablo II and Age of Empires and such.

Soon the shine because to fade from EQII when it came to our guild, and our leader began telling us how Brad McQuaid was going to save us with Vanguard and that would be our eventual destination where all the REAL gamers would go.  Yeah, we know how that turned out.

I was thus diverted from WoW for some months and did not actually obtain a copy until March 2005, which I only recall because it was on the weekend of my birthday.  I logged in, made a dwarf paladin, played through the starter area and did not really find it all that compelling.  I had chosen the Hyjal server because some friends from EQ had gone there, but they were all high level and doing other things, so it was a very plodding, solo affair, not helped by the state of paladins in vanilla.

So I went back to EQII after that weekend, confirmed that WoW did, in fact, kind of suck, and carried on with post-shattering Norrath for almost another year, weathering the problems and radical changes being applied to the game to try and “fix” it and keep up with the innovations that Blizz had done with WoW that the EQII, despite having been in the WoW beta, must have dismissed to their later regret.

After the Desert of Flames expansion we entered what I think of as the “Qeynos harbor lag era” where going to the dock in Qeynos harbor would get you down to 2 FPS, and the members of our guild from TorilMUD, those that remained, decided to jump to WoW to give it a shot.

There, in what must have been January of 2006, we rolled up on the Eldre’Thalas server and created the guild Twilight Cadre, which was as close to our TorilMUD guild name, Shades of Twilight, as we could get.

This was the era of server splits and separations, where I had multiple friends playing on different servers, and even our server was split at one point, taking a few people I knew elsewhere.  Our crew was small, dispersed, and quickly spread out in levels such that there wasn’t much to keep one engaged.  I ran another paladin up to level 40-ish, got stuck in the quest gap, played with a few alts… if you played WoW back then and didn’t have a hunter, there was something odd with you… and generally lingered and solo’d a bit and went back to play TorilMUD sometimes.  I was not invested, but also had no other plan.  The Twilight Cadre guild members mostly moved along to other servers or other titles.

All of which brings me to the founding of the blog and a post I did two weeks into its life wherein I summed up my progress thus far in Azeroth.

I have been playing WoW continuously on the Eldre’Thalas server since January and I have five characters that are level 40 and above and a couple more in the 20-39 range.

So work done on characters… there was also a Horde guild rolled up for our group with a few characters on that side of things… but kind of lingering and aimless and almost entirely solo up until that point.  I went to the Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep with some guild members, but it was always with somebody higher level dragging us through.  We didn’t have a regular group or anything.

The title of that post is Changing My Solo Ways because, after summing my story so far in Azeroth I mentioned that I had been emailing with a friend from high school (Potshot) and we ended up talking about WoW and then rolling up some fresh characters on Eldre’Thalas in order to have something like a regular instance group.

By the beginning of October we were hitting the Deadmines as a group for the first time.  I look back at that post… not even a single screen shot… and wonder at how my style and approach to blogging has changed.

But that set off a sequence of events that took us through vanilla, Burning Crusade, Wrath and then other titles as a group like LOTRO, Neverwinter, Warhammer Online, Valheim, Minecraft, and so on.

The impetus to start the blog lay in frustration with the EVE Online tutorial, but the core thread running through things has often been the instance group and the games we end up playing.  And that path, which started in Azeroth, that has been pretty well documented here.

I sometimes regret not starting the blog sooner.  I would have liked a record of the launch of EQII and all the crazy that went on there.  But my journey in Azeroth, the important bits are all pretty well covered here.

Not so much a post about WoW as about me I suppose.  But, as the About page states up top, the blog is about me.

World of Warcraft has changed a lot over the years, and we can debate whether none, some, or all of that was for the better.  As I have stated, probably too often now, retail feels like a foreign country, too infused with FOMO and conflicting agendas and the focus of “everybody must raid or we’ve failed” to make me happy.  I am not sure we would be playing were it not for WoW Classic and the return to the simpler ways of the early days.

But WoW has also been a foundational aspect of my gaming over the last 20 years and is likely to remain so for some time.  And, of course, I made sure to log in to get the achievement.

I always think that we might go back to retail at some point, so I keep things at least a little warmed up over there.