I stopped playing with Cataclysm, so I guess this is for the vanilla. I care less about the fact of WoW's place in gaming history than about the qualities that made it so appealing to so many gamers and non-gamers alike in the first place. It's a rare case of more involved and accessible playstyles coexisting, and where a huge scale is carefully filled with details orienting players to an acute sense of place. Every location has its own distinct look and feel, but they're also organised such that you can see how one unfolds into the other. The skies change, or the design of rocks and trees, or a subtle transformation occurs in the colour palette, or the texture of the paths. Changes in the continent's climates and geologic features cause the design styles to mutate and hybridise, leading naturally to the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of port cities. It feels lived-in, believable, because the settlements seem to have emerged to suit the landscape and not vice versa.
Blizzard's clumsily physical character and building designs encompass WoW's topography, which exploits a dynamic vertical axis with quick descents into craters and forests, and dizzying mountaintops overlooking desert stretches and floodplains. The thrill of discovery is just endless, and this is helped by the rather reserved achievement system and unobtrusive maps. Other games of this scale load these things with achievements and filled-in mini-maps such that watching the HUD takes precedence over the experience of physical traversal. WoW is all traversal, all cliffs and boulders and things to scale and jump off for no reason other than to do it. It doesn't really tell you much, but it makes not knowing intrinsically enjoyable, and a perfectly viable way of existing in the game. Happening across the zeppelin in Tirisfal Glades, totally by accident, and realising with a rush just how big this thing is on arriving at Orgrimmar is a feeling I won't forget. I had spent weeks just wandering around those undead forests, taking in every hill and lake and cabin, and now here the horizons rolled out to the infinite, with people spilling everywhere across the glowing yet formidable desert landscape.
Blizzard's clumsily physical character and building designs encompass WoW's topography, which exploits a dynamic vertical axis with quick descents into craters and forests, and dizzying mountaintops overlooking desert stretches and floodplains. The thrill of discovery is just endless, and this is helped by the rather reserved achievement system and unobtrusive maps. Other games of this scale load these things with achievements and filled-in mini-maps such that watching the HUD takes precedence over the experience of physical traversal. WoW is all traversal, all cliffs and boulders and things to scale and jump off for no reason other than to do it. It doesn't really tell you much, but it makes not knowing intrinsically enjoyable, and a perfectly viable way of existing in the game. Happening across the zeppelin in Tirisfal Glades, totally by accident, and realising with a rush just how big this thing is on arriving at Orgrimmar is a feeling I won't forget. I had spent weeks just wandering around those undead forests, taking in every hill and lake and cabin, and now here the horizons rolled out to the infinite, with people spilling everywhere across the glowing yet formidable desert landscape.