The Game Archaeologist: World of Warcraft is unfairly portrayed as the villain

In the years that I’ve covered MMO history and news, there’s been this accepted narrative that’s gone unchallenged in this space. And that narrative goes something like this: Up until 2004, the MMORPG genre was diverse, vibrant, and thriving with tons of potential. Then mean ol’ World of Warcraft came along and sucked all the air out of the room, homogenized the genre, and killed off plenty of promising games past, present, and future.

Basically, this viewpoint sees World of Warcraft as something just short of a Disney villain, cackling with laughter as it defiled a genre and cast aside wonderful titles. It’s a viewpoint that I’ve even contributed to plenty of times in the past, even as I’ve grown more and more uneasy with parroting this perspective. Today, I’m actually going to challenge it.

Here goes: World of Warcraft wasn’t the villain of 2004. Bad game design was.

Before I potentially rustle any jimmies, I want to lay out a few disclaimers here. I’m not poo-pooing all MMOs that came out before WoW, dismissing their historical importance, or saying that they weren’t fun to play. I know that thousands of people absolutely loved games such as EverQuest, Ultima Online, and Star Wars Galaxies. I’ve covered those titles extensively and appreciate their vision and ambition.

I also want to say — and this is germane to this discussion — that the MMORPG genre was still pretty young in the early 2000s, with studios still figuring all this out. It was bound to be messy and all over the place until it gradually settled down and started establishing universal traits, as with any other video game genre. The MMO industry had yet to standardize, but that standardization was inevitable, because it happens everywhere sooner or later.

And that’s something that people look back with fond memories, and I get it. The pre-WoW era was special and unique. It was a lot of people’s “firsts” into the genre. And there was definitely a lot of trailblazing happening.

Still, I’m going to push against this narrative that the whole industry was throwing this nonstop party of innovation, joy, and good times until World of Warcraft showed up to steal everyone away from those games and make all future games be like it.

Because if we take off the rose-colored glasses of selective nostalgia and be very honest here, these early MMOs were not approachable from the perspective of your average player. They were not user friendly in the least and often required steep learning curves. I have very strong memories of trying games like Anarchy Online and Final Fantasy XI, only to encounter titles that seemed to resent my presence and do very little to instruct me or deliver a fun time.

Graphical MMORPGs descended from text-based MUDs, which were complex games designed by geeks for geeks. Hey, I’m a geek, that’s not a put-down, it’s just the truth. Nobody made those games with your average Super Mario Bros. or Windows Solitaire player in mind. These games evolved with a complex design that required memorization of dozens of slash commands, understanding of specific terminology, and additional comprehension of culture and mores that existed within that virtual universe. They weren’t impossible to learn, and if you put in the effort to do so, you’d be rewarded with a much deeper experience than jumping on Koopa Troopas.

When text MUDs evolved into graphical MMOs, it was the same brand of geek designers who took the genre into that space. They were smart, brilliant, and imaginative, and, again, their ambition was commendable. But what they weren’t was thinking of the mass market. They weren’t making games approachable. You learned these MMOs on their terms or not at all, and your knowledge of one MMO didn’t often translate well into the next one.

MMOs in the early 2000s were moderately successful for their novelty (online! with other people! in persistent worlds!), drawing in tens and even hundreds of thousands of players. But what we don’t talk about are all of the people who bounced right off these titles during that time. These were players who liked the idea of MMOs but were frustrated at the obtuse design of them. These weren’t friendly, welcoming titles that you could pick up and play intuitively. User interfaces were cluttered and bizarre, the community spoke in strange lingo, and the initial gameplay wasn’t that thrilling.

This user unfriendliness was the unspoken problem that the industry wasn’t eager to solve, and that’s what truly hurt these other MMOs. If it wasn’t World of Warcraft, it would’ve been another game with a slick, casual-friendly, intuitive design to come along and scoop up all of those disaffected potential players — and a chunk of long-suffering MMO players who simply wanted a smooth experience.

For the most part, World of Warcraft wasn’t trying to innovate. Instead, it took the ideas and basic design of MMOs and transformed it into an approachable product. It polished the entire experience, from the combat loop to the UI to the animations to the questing system, and then it handed it to players who’d been dealing with slash commands and player-killers and obscene corpse run and recovery times. No wonder why everyone stampeded right over to Blizzard’s new game the first chance they got.

One telling example of how starkly WoW’s player-first design put the rest of the industry in contrast is how Star Wars Galaxies responded by trying to pivot quickly and retrofit the game with the NGE. Now, yes, that was a huge mess and not the right approach for this sandbox, but it showed how devs in other studios realized that their games weren’t that easy to understand and enjoy, and they were scrambling to bring that accessibility into their titles.

So paint World of Warcraft as the villain of 2004 if you must, but if those other games were doing their jobs better, that year would’ve been much more of an epic struggle between the establishment and a well-funded upstart rather than a complete rout. I think WoW does deserve some praise for giving the industry a wake-up call that games should be far more approachable — something that we started seeing employed in earnest in many excellent titles in the years that followed.

Believe it or not, MMOs did exist prior to World of Warcraft! Every two weeks, The Game Archaeologist looks back at classic online games and their history to learn a thing or two about where the industry came from… and where it might be heading.