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It's funny because on TBC release this pretty much flipped overnight because of the Blood Elves. But it feels weird to even have this conversation now, so many years after the species of gamer that would flame now long defunct forums about this topic all are not just responsible adults, but retired elders for some of them.
So much has happened since, and yet so little has happened to MMOs as a genre. Perhaps nothing even since that fateful South Park episode. Except a slow grind of convenience features spiraling towards ever more lonely massively collective gacha existence.
It really feels like WoW and its vortex of attention was the alpha and omega of MMORPGS. Like D&D for pen and paper. The grognard in me who used to get a kick out of VtM and DAoC snobbery hates that the beginning and the end of the genre has been themepark slop. But render onto Caesar.
The promise of MMOs was that you could build a new life in a new world on the internet, with new relationships unburdened by physical limits. And then the most peculiar thing happened, and the real world just became the internet. In a sense all social media is just MMOs without the game attached. So the only reason to keep making the game is nostalgia for the frontier.
Sometimes a game just nails the genre so well that there's nothing left to do. Blizzard also did that with Starcraft and RTS games, IMO.
Reading about WoW's development, the biggest thing they nailed that got me into the game in 2004 and back in 2026 is that they are obsessed with making it run on everything. They didn't want you to need serious gaming gear to play it, so that more people could play. It's one of the few good games that will run on my macbook air without fiddling around with a bunch of nonsense that crashes anyway. I've downloaded a few games people recommended over the years, only to find that my computer wouldn't run it for a variety of reasons, and given up. I'm not going to spend hundreds on a new console or a gaming pc, and even a bit of friction in getting a game to run on my computer tends to leave me cold about trying it.
Doesn't AI fix this now?
Iterating AI queries after its first 3 “solutions” don’t work is actually very frictional.
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