![]() I played a couple more days then cancelled before my initial 30 days expired. Bland snowy terrain, ugly cartoon character models, none of the depth of EQII, not even any housing, I wasn’t having it. The patcher was so bad back in the day that, when I did start playing, I had a paid account at File Planet because they would host the updater and you could download it quickly and apply the patch long before the default patcher would even realize it needed to update.Īnnoyed by that… you buy a game, you want to play that night… I was in no mood for anything when I rolled up a dwarf paladin. Part of the problem was that I bought it on a Friday evening on the way home from work and it required so much patching, which moved so slowly on our rinky dink, but not bad for the time ADSL internet connection, that I did not get to character creation until Sunday morning. The weekend of my birthday, at the prodding of a friend from the EQ days, I bought a copy of World of Warcraft, created an account, and attempted to play. Even Wooflin, our guild leader, and the most anti- WoW voice in the guild. Instead, they all migrated to WoW eventually. It was derided as a colorful kiddie game, not a real MMORPG like EQ was.īut those doing the grumbling had also pinned their hopes on Brad McQuaid’s Vanguard as the real successor to EQ, though, so far as I know, not one of those people grumbling ended up in Vanguard. There were lots of updates as SOE scrambled to adjust the formula of the game to try and stem the flow of players from the game, either headed back to EQ or off to WoW. ![]() It was becoming clear that all was not well with EverQuest II. I think I first heard WoW mentioned on our guild voice coms at some point in December 2004. It is not the same lore, and it is a bit brighter in places (though you spend a whole act in Diablo II in a brightly lit desert) but WoW, at its mechanics core, is very close to what a Diablo MMO might have been.Īll of which lays at least a groundwork of familiarity with Blizzard and its games. It did not take me much time to realize that much of the underpinnings of WoW were lifted straight from Diablo, right down to gear drops and such. There was a point when I was bemoaning the fact that I didn’t want WoW but a Diablo based MMO. Oh look, a quest, potions, and a proto-hot bar! Not pictured: Skill tree and points Those do not share the same lore universe as Warcraft, but a lot of the ideas and mechanics that went into WoW came from those two. I did, however, play Diablo and Diablo II very thoroughly. Played a ton of head to head, never really did the campaign.) Thus, I recognize all the peon phrases, recall some of the units, but am completely lore bereft. I bought them to play against friends and co-workers on the company network. I was playing more Marathon and Bolo then, but I bought copies of Warcraft II and Warcraft III in turn. I worked at a company that did Macintosh products and it was popular in the lab because it was a network game. I don’t think I ever owned a copy of it, but I was aware of it. I didn’t play Warcraft when it launched either. That launched 25 years ago this past Saturday, sharing a launch date with WoW separated by ten years. World of Warcraft did not manifest in a vacuum, but was part of a stream of development that started in the 90s with the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Still, I managed to scrape something together. (I really want multiple tag/category search.) The search function in WordPress is a bit too loosey goosey for my taste. And since launch the blog had passed the five thousand post mark, almost 1,300 of which are included in the World of Warcraft category, which gives me a bit of a problem finding some of the exact details I might be looking for. On the negative, this blog started in late 2006, some time after I started playing WoW and long after what I would consider the pre-history of WoW. On the plus side, I have this blog to help. So I decided that I should try to piece together a timeline of my own relationship with World of Warcraft. Suddenly invested in EQII after a hiatus for EQ, I was pretty much oblivious to the launch of World of Warcraft when it came.Įventually it came to my notice and clearly I ended up playing it. And I wasn’t even planning to play that, a tale that was pretty much covered in that other post. Honestly it didn’t register with me at the time and I was only really aware of the game after the fact.Īs I wrote earlier in the month in recognition of another anniversary, I was busy playing EverQuest II. I wasn’t there for the launch fifteen years ago. Saturday was the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of World of Warcraft.
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