28 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019
MACUSER WOW CLASSIC IS A STEP BACK IN TIMElike, say, The Witcher 3—have a
timelessness springing from the fact that
you can play them over and over again so
long as you have a supporting system.
World of Warcraft, though, has a
dedicated high-population multiplayer
base, a constantly evolving storyline and
world, an old age for a game, and a
sustained faction rivalry that give it a linear
history that few other games have.
Combined, all these factors help World of
Warcraft feel more like a real world than
many other persistent worlds.
This is a special thing, and it’s
unmatched by any other game save
perhaps EVE Online. You’ll find similar
situations in other MMORPGs like
EverQuest and Final Fantasy XIV (go.
macworld.com/ff14; and even Second Life),
but those games usually lack one of the
critical ingredients outlined above. This
sense of a long, shared history and a
persistent world is critical to WoW’s
continued success; it makes it feel like a
place we can always go home to. It
sometimes even leads me to think of my
character as an extension of myself. I was
a member of one of the better-known
guilds back when this content was fresh—
we had a handful of world-first and
-second raid boss kills (go.macworld.com/
b0ss), and a truckload of server firsts—and
the mage I used in those means a lot to
me. I keep him “retired” on a ranch so he’ll
be happy even though I play another class
these days.
This sense of a linear history that
mimics what we find in the real world is
what spurred the concept of the “good ol’
days” in WoW to begin with. It makes
looking at
screenshots
feel like looking
at photos from
the past. World
of Warcraft has
definable eras,
much as the
real world, and
it’s lasted for so
long that you
can even point
to different
generations of“Did somebody
say...?” (Risen on
Alleria spawning
Thunderaan for
the first time.)