Watching WoW Classic.

#writinggram #MMORPG #games #wow #worldofwarcraft #WoW #WoWClassic
Since World of Warcraft Classic is coming out tomorrow, I thought I'd write some thoughts about WoW. WoW is one of the iconic games that changed many of today's games. It is almost the only game inducted into the Hall of Fame as an MMORPG, many of this game's UIs have been borrowed by other games, and even now several RPGs that model its systems keep coming out.
The first time I played WoW was 15 years ago. 15 years ago I was in 8th grade. I remember that time exactly. I played the open beta. During the open beta I played the 'Horde' faction on a server named 'Zul'jin,' the name of a troll hero. Back then, in the open beta, WoW was a game with absurd wait times. After launching the game, logging in, and pressing 'connect,' you had to wait roughly 2 hours, sometimes up to 4 or 6 hours, for the queue to shrink. That's how enormous the popularity of the 'RPG' that was WoW had become. There were various reasons it turned out that way, but it was because, riding the momentum of the popularity from StarCraft and Diablo II, Blizzard released this RPG game that continued the Warcraft story after Warcraft 3. As a result, people got to have two kinds of experiences. One was an MMORPG made by 'Blizzard,' and the other was getting to play an RPG in which I become the 'protagonist' in the story after WC3.
To explain briefly what an MMORPG is, MMORPG stands for Massive Multi Player Roll Playing Game. An RPG that many players connect to and play simultaneously is called an MMORPG. The Kingdom of the Winds was such a game, Lineage too, and Mu, which existed at the time, was also such a game; among them, this 'WoW' had nearly the most advanced form for that era. To summarize WoW's various features, here they are.
1. Auction house: WoW was a game that truly many people played together. There were auction houses by server and by faction, and you could earn gold, the in-game currency, through production activities you could each choose by picking various professions. The auction house was an unmanned trading method that used a capitalist system. You'd put an item up for the price you wanted, and when someone bought it, you paid 5 percent of the sale amount as a fee. That auction house was unmanned, and because of it, many items and in-game goods changed hands. No other game had a system like this. In MapleStory you could open a shop at the time, but that required cash items, and even that was manned.
2. Quests, experience, and the yellow exclamation mark: the yellow exclamation mark is a kind of symbol that WoW created, which earlier games did not have. Because it first appeared in WoW. WoW's NPCs had either a yellow exclamation mark or a gray exclamation mark. A yellow exclamation mark meant you could take and carry out a quest from that NPC, and a gray one meant your level wasn't high enough yet to take that quest. When you took a quest, the exclamation mark turned into a question mark; while the quest conditions were incomplete it was a gray question mark, and when complete it became a yellow question mark, and upon completion it gave a certain amount of experience and gold.
The experience you got from completing quests back then was something you couldn't find in other games. Even thinking about the Maple I was playing around then, in the early versions of Maple, completing a quest gave neither experience nor gold. I can't even remember why on earth I was supposed to clear quests. So I didn't do many quests. But WoW was different. It told you about quests with a yellow exclamation mark and gave appropriate rewards for them. And it wasn't long before this yellow exclamation mark became the 'quest' marker for every RPG.
3. Professions: professions were a kind of character-specific specialized item-crafting skill. There were various types. There were gathering professions like mining, herbalism, and skinning; item-crafting professions like blacksmithing, tailoring, leatherworking, alchemy, and so on; and there were skills like enchanting and engineering. With these you made and used useful weapons, items, potions, and the like. Not professions exactly, but there were also fishing, cooking, and first aid.
4. Minimap: WoW's minimap became the standard. A round circle was always floating in the top right, and that's why nowadays every game has a minimap floating in the form of a square or a circle. Even in checking your current location, which you could call a basic of RPGs, WoW influenced other games.
5. Bound items: the binding system was a curious system you couldn't find in other games. At the time, most games like Lineage or Mu had no concept of item binding, so you could freely sell an item you were wearing. But WoW was different. WoW introduced two binding concepts. One was 'Bind on Equip,' the other 'Bind on Pickup.' Bind on Equip meant that the moment you equipped it, the item became yours and you couldn't sell it to anyone else. Of course, a Bind-on-Equip item could be sold before being equipped. A Bind-on-Pickup item was bound from the moment the item entered your bag. Because of this binding, item trading dropped enormously. Not just in Korea but in most RPG games, this item trading was a major element of 'pay-to-win,' and this blocked it. Of course, they later introduced something called the token, which let you buy in-game gold, but that didn't mean the binding system itself changed. Maybe that's why Bind-on-Equip items from each raid tend to be very expensive early on.
6. A game with no upgrade system: Dungeon Fighter still has an enhancement system. But WoW didn't have one 15 years ago, and doesn't now. An enhancement system is a kind of gambling. WoW didn't adopt that enhancement system. Very fairly, that is.
7. A subscription game, which was uncommon at the time: now that subscription price has been lowered somewhat, but back then it was very high. The Kingdom of the Winds was also subscription-based, but WoW was more expensive and provoked people's resentment. There was even something of a WoW boycott at the time. Now, thanks to not having raised the subscription price, it has inadvertently become a game whose cost is the same as 15 years ago. The monthly account fee costs less than it did then. Of course, even so it still costs 20,000 won.
8. Almost the first popularized 'raid' game: nowadays the concept of a raid is somewhat familiar, but back then it wasn't. WoW was the game that created the 40-player raid. There was content where 40 people formed one team to take down a few monsters. Now that content has shrunk and shrunk to where a team is formed of 20 or 30 people.
9. A game that brought countless buzzwords: I wonder if you know the word '태세 변환' (switching one's stance). These days kids in elementary, middle, and high school think 'stance switching' came from League of Legends. But stance switching is actually a term that came from WoW. The 'Warrior,' one of WoW's classes, could choose among three stances. Battle Stance, Defensive Stance, and Berserker Stance. Damage and armor differed depending on the stance. How did you switch stances? It was done with just a single click.
Another buzzword is 'aggro.' Actually this 'aggro' is no longer even a buzzword but has become an everyday word. Before that there was no concept of 'aggro.' But in WoW the word 'aggro' was used routinely, and then through DC Inside's WoW gallery the word started to be used in other situations too. In-game, aggro referred to threat level, and monsters changed their target according to players' aggro values. The tank usually had the highest aggro, so having aggro on the tank was the basic of a 'raid.' Now this 'aggro' is commonly used on internet communities and in games. Like, 'That guy's drawing aggro, let's ignore him.'
10. A story game: these days I think the term '스덕' (story geek) shows up. People usually call a story-buff a 'story geek,' and WoW had the most solid story among the games of that time. This was one of Blizzard's philosophies. Of course, Chris Metzen, who built up Blizzard's story up to now, is currently only working as a voice actor.
I'd like to write more, but I should stop. There's also a character limit. Looking at it this way, it seems a lot of things really happened. If there's anything to lament, it's that the RPG genre itself no longer seems to have any vitality. Should I say that dodging stuff on the ground has become standard in every game. Not as many people play WoW or any other RPG as they used to.
Still, since it's a game holding old memories, I had all sorts of thoughts.