World of Warcraft, remains a popular game despite the onslaught of newcomers.

“Return to the battlefield as you defend Azeroth from the shadows below. Explore a never-before-seen subterranean world filled with hidden wonders and lurking dangers, all the way to the dark depths of the nerubian empire, where the evil Harbinger of the Void gathers arachnid forces to conquer Azeroth.”

    Set in the fictional world of Azeroth, WoW allows players to create avatar-style characters and explore a vast universe while interacting with non-player characters (NPCs) and other real-world players (PCs).

    Various missions, battles, and quests are completed alone or in guilds, and rewards for success include gold, weapons, and valuables, which are used to improve one’s character. Characters advance by killing other creatures to gain experience.

    Once enough experience is gained, characters level up, which increases the character’s power. WoW offers a rich character class system, allowing gamers to play as druids, clerics, rogues, paladins, and other fantasy-related classes. Guilds often achieve fame for their ability to complete certain quests or defeat certain monsters quickly, and, in this way, a hierarchy system is created in the game.

    World of Warcraft (commonly referred to as WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth game in the Warcraft universe, with the first game in the Warcraft series being Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994.

    World of Warcraft takes place in the world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the conclusion of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Blizzard Entertainment announced World of Warcraft on September 2, 2001. The game was released on November 23, 2004, celebrating Warcraft's 10th anniversary. It is the largest MMORPG in the world.

    Since its initial release, World of Warcraft has been followed by seven major expansion packs. The game's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was released on January 16, 2007. At BlizzCon 2007, Blizzard announced a second expansion titled Wrath of the Lich King on August 3, 2007, and it was released on November 18, 2008. A third expansion titled Cataclysm was released on December 7, 2010. A fourth expansion, Mists of Pandaria, was announced on October 21, 2011 at BlizzCon 2011, and was released on September 25, 2012.

    The fifth expansion, Warlords of Draenor, was announced on January 8, 2013 at Blizzcon 2013 and released on November 13, 2014. The sixth expansion, Legion, was announced on August 6, 2015, and released on August 30, 2016. The seventh and most recent expansion, Battle for Azeroth, was announced on November 3, 2017 at Blizzcon 2017, and released on August 14, 2018. 

    World of Warcraft is the world's most popular MMORPG, with over 10 million players in 2009. The game had over one hundred million registered accounts in 2014. As of 2017, the game has grossed over $9.23 billion, making it the best-selling game of all time. At Blizzcon 2017, a vanilla version of the game was announced under the title World of Warcraft Classic, which provided the original experience as it was released in 2004, without the extra features of the expansions. The vanilla version was released on August 26, 2019, and the Twitch stream for WoW that day attracted over 1 million viewers.

Gameplay

    World of Warcraft features a variety of playable races and factions. Players can choose between two factions — Alliance or Horde. In the Alliance faction, players can choose to play as dwarves, gnomes, humans, night elves, draenei, worgen, lightforged draenei, void elves and pandaren. In the Horde faction, players can choose to play as orcs, tauren, trolls, undead, blood elves, goblins, highmountain tauren, nightborne and pandaren. Each race has its own unique story, appearance, abilities and other features.

    World of Warcraft also features many non-playable races. These races have supporting characters. These races include dryads, satyrs, centaurs, dragonkin, elementals, naga, vrykul, vulpera and others.

Development

    Game development is not easy. Games fail all the time, sometimes because they’re broken and sometimes because they don’t find the right audience. Launching a successful game is hard, and sustaining a successful game for more than a decade is a combination of skill, passion, and luck. That’s clear, given the many competitors that World of Warcraft has left behind. Over the past 23 years, World of Warcraft has benefited from developers designing with player perception in mind or learning to talk more to the community.

    Then, NetEase took over the World of Warcraft license from The9 in June 2009 after The9’s contract expired, and NetEase was able to secure the launch of Wrath of the Lich King on August 31, 2010, about two years after the Western release.