World of Warcraft has been around for twenty years. The game that changed the MMORPG genre forever

In simple terms, advertising is to blame here, which Lineage 2 had many times less than World of Warcraft. Yes, the first game came out a year earlier and had every chance to surpass its main competitor, because the difference of a year is big, but this is what happened: NCSoft, the developer and publisher of Lineage 2, is aimed not so much at those who now called “casual”, but rather at the fact that players, if they really wanted to, would dive in, read it for themselves, find out for themselves – that is, they counted on a more hardcore audience.

Blizzard, on the other hand, was already trying to attract people who were not previously familiar with the genre, trying to create an interface ideal for beginners, easy immersion in the gameplay and complete comfort that can be compared to “driving by hand ”. .” Of course, this cannot be compared to modern WoW, which now does everything it can to get the most inexperienced player into the process as quickly as possible, but in the early 2004s even that version of 2004 was a very casual game. All this led to the fact that World of Warcraft had a great start and managed to lay the foundation for new standards, and when the Lineage 2 developers realized this, it was already too late.

Have you heard of Hakkar’s damaged blood? Even if not, we will tell you, because this particular incident that happened in World of Warcraft became a special case for studying epidemics in the real world. This was the first time in history that an in-game and out-of-control plague affected millions of players in real life.

Hakkar’s Corrupted Blood is a debuff applied to players fighting the Hakkar boss during the Zul’Gurub raid. This debuff caused significant damage over time and could spread to other players nearby. It was originally intended as a mechanic to make boss fights more difficult.

However, in September 2005, an unexpected incident occurred. Players’ pets and summoned creatures can become infected with this debuff and then carry it outside the raid. When infected pets returned to cities like Stormwind and Orgrimmar, they began infecting other players. This led to massive epidemics in gaming areas, killing thousands of players.

The situation became so uncontrollable that entire cities were destroyed and gamers began to avoid populated areas to avoid infection. Blizzard Entertainment had to act quickly. She has applied several solutions:

Interestingly, this situation has attracted the attention of the scientific community, especially epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists. They studied it as a model for the spread of viruses and human behavior during an epidemic, and the knowledge gained from this was applied, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ultimately, the Corrupted Blood of Hakkar incident became an example of how virtual worlds could be used to simulate real epidemics and study human behavior in extreme situations.

As we said before, World of Warcraft had already managed to define the standards of MMORPGs – and what happened next was just a consequence. The game’s popularity grew and a large number of books, comics and of course memes were published. Take the same famous meme with a guy shouting “LIRO-OO-OO-OH-OH JENKY-III-INS” that even people who have never touched WoW in their lives have heard of, but kind of immersed in the have gaming culture. . Where does the same ‘kek’ come from? This all comes from the in-game Orcish language, which automatically translated “lol” for Horde players to “kek” for Alliance players.