The MMORPG game has been in existence for around 12 years and it does not show any sign of being shut down in the near future. Their selling point relies on their virtual world which has tons of stories leading to every release and major expansion that they’ve ever made since its inception. There have also been movies made on Warcraft albeit with little relation to the game. Therefore if you are a new player or have been recently initiated into the WoW universe it’s important to have a clue about the historical inclination of it. Here are 5 things that you need to know about the history of World of Warcraft:
- All about Azeroth
Azeroth is a human world which has two factions, the Alliance and the Hordes. The Alliance are the good guys and are composed of humans, elves, gnomes, dwarves and werewolves whereas the Hordes are generally the bad guys and are composed of the trolls, orcs and goblins. So you can decide which faction you want to be part of from the onset of the game.
- The early continents
Generally, WoW started off with two continents; the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. As the game progressed more continents were added onto the existing continents in the game which include; Northrend and Pandaria which brought the count to 4.
- Burning Crusade
In came the Burning Crusade expansion that took the world by storm. It made record sales of 2.4 million copies in the PC games industry and attracted multitudes of players to the game. Its level cap was raised to 70 and it also introduced some new races, the Blood Elves and Draenei. Far for some other pretty additions, the Burning Crusade was more of a test for coming expansions.
Its next expansion Wrath of the Lich King addressed the challenges in Burning Crusade and went on to surpass it to move 2.8 million copies. Furthermore, some of today’s features are all nested in Wrath of Lich King’s expansion e.g. the dungeon finder tool, cross-server instancing and random battlegrounds.
- Cataclysm
However if you thought, Wrath of Lich Kings was the best expansion yet, Cataclysm proved everyone wrong. With opening day sales of 3.3 million units, it broke all the records held by WoW before and introduced a whole new World of Warcraft. It brought with it new race combinations, guilds were now able to level up and the benefits passed on to members, the transmog tool, raid finder tool and reforging among others.
- Pandoria andDraenor
After Cataclysm came the Mists of Pandoria then the Warlords of Draenor. In as much as these two expansions never gained much traction in terms of sale, their stories pretty much solidified what the other expansions had to offer. WoD raised the level cap up to 100.
Legionis the latest expansion and it will be interesting as it will generally signal whether World of Warcraft will continue leading in MMORPG in the next decade or some other game will by pass it in the long run. Only time will tell.
Ever wondered how come World of Warcraft managed to attain the heights of fame in massively multiplayer online role playing games? It is solely because of the unique and indifferent gameplay offered by the developers of the game.