World of Warcraft: Has the King of MMOs Truly Fallen?

Picture this: Your friend recently told you about this new game called World of Warcraft. Sure, it's a subscription, but you don’t have to worry since when you buy it, you can play for 30 days after purchasing the game. You and your buddies begin playing to a point where this game becomes a part-time job. You max out your character, join a guild, and complete your first raid, but the unthinkable happens. Your 30 days are up, and you can no longer play.

That was the life of most gamers for when World of Warcraft launched, and it still is for some to this day. But what is World of Warcraft, you may ask. World of Warcraft is a fantasy MMO role-playing game that takes place in the world of Azeroth. World of Warcraft or WoW follows your custom character as they help either the side of the noble alliance or the savage horde. You create your custom character from multiple races and classes. After completing your character you begin your adventure. As you play, you go around killing local wildlife, fighting the opposing faction, and gathering items. It's one of the more casual MMOs out there. But as the years went, the game began to lose its touch for plenty of reasons. Either there are many controversies involving Blizzard or the game lagging behind other games in its category. These problems are what I want to discuss and how WoW may have lost its title of “The King of MMOS.”

Now, the first problem is how much it costs to play the game. Now, WoW is a pretty big game to install roughly 90 GB on a laptop, and some people don’t have the space for that. Along with that, the game only lets you play if you have a subscription, which is $14.99 a month. Mind you, to even play the game to its fullest, you need to pay for DLC when it comes out, that's another 60-70 dollars. Now I know what you are thinking, “a monthly subscription of 14.99 a month isn’t that bad. Even then I can just play the game without the subscription and play past content.” You see, when you first install WoW, you are allowed to play but it's only up until level 20, and if you do the tutorial Exile’s reach, you will already be at level 10 by the time you finish the tutorial you have ten levels to freely explore till you are forced to pay a monthly subscription of 14.99 a month. That entire 20 levels takes roughly 1-2 hours, and with that, it can easily scare off new players from even playing the game. A game like WoW thrives off of world-building and limiting that makes it to where it's hard to get into it. Now, the costs of the game can be big, but let’s say you can buy all of these. This, however leads me into my next topic, the story and gameplay for new players.

Now, the gameplay does seem standard for an rpg, while yes however it can be if you want to be a more casual player, but as you try to get to the more midway point things get confusing. First off, pvp. Now, PvP is a staple in most online games, and this one is no different, but it is how its matchmaking works. Instead of being skill-based matchmaking it's more based on your level. This is because your character’s level will matter heavily if you are in a game, so they put you with characters at your level, making it to where the skills of players are entirely different. This scares new players from PVP and could turn some

even lower-level players away. Along with that, money in this game can sometimes be a pain. There is, however a way for characters to make money pretty quickly, professions. Now professions are skills your character can get from specific trainers, which can be making armor, weapons, potions, whatever. However, this is not shown to the player, making it only possible for some people to discover it through other more experienced players. However, what can be more of a problem isn't just money or PVP it is the story. WoW can have its ups and downs with story expansions, but recently, it has had a lot of downs. Battle of Azeroth had a good setup, for example, more playable races, more zones, and the horde and alliance going to war for the bazillion time, but it flopped. It focused on many other things, like old gods and the world dying. The entire focus of this expansion was the alliance and horde going to war, which became somewhat of a side plot. Finally, shadowlands was the second most recent expansion, and it just sucked. The story and gameplay were terrible, and everything was wrong. Along with that, too much stuff relies on books that are just so out of the way to read you just don’t bother trying to follow the story.

Blizzard controversy is pretty popular nowadays, which was a big reason why Bblizzard was a massive hit. So, in recent years, Blizzard has been in the light of controversy. Blizzard recently had to go through 35 million dollars after countless acts of sexual harassment towards female employees. This made many fans extremely mad, boycotting their games, the state of California suing them, and their CEO Bobby Kotick ignoring these claims. This has made Blizzard lose lots of money and sound like a filthy company. However, I still believe there is hope for this game series, even after all the terrible things they have done.

To answer my question, yes, the king of MMOS has fallen. WoW is in its lowest player count, but I see plenty of gleaming lights at the end of the tunnel. The first one is the newest expansion, Dragonflight. This expansion expands much from the story, bringing back old characters and fixing the problems from shadowlands and better mechanics. Also, Microsoft has recently acquired Activision Blizzard, and rumor is that they plan to remove Bobby Kotick from the picture; we will only know the fate of this fallen king of MMOs in time.