World of Warcraft and the archaeology of game design

By Matthew Rossi

The facts are simple. World of Warcraft is the ultimate fulfillment of an MMO design paradigm that began back with AOL and Steve Case, if not all the way back to Essex MUD. Games like Ultima Online and EverQuest have championed and used this basic design scheme, but it was in World of Warcraft that we saw the tank/healer/DPS triumvirate come to dominate group content.

Every level of WoW today uses this, from five player dungeons to various flex raids to LFR and Mythic Raids. Even World Bosses tend to be dispatched using this model. Whether you consider the original AOL version of Neverwinter Nights or later MMOs like Asheron’s Call or EverQuest to be the “first MMO,” the genre has long held onto the idea of players who take damage, players who heal damage and players who deal damage.

How did all of these games come to have the exact same features? To find out, we have to dig into the archeology of MMOs past.

Excavating the origins of our favorite MMO

Figuring out exactly when these design elements entered into the MMO sphere is difficult. It’s fair to say that EverQuest and Ultima Online set the basic formula for fantasy MMOs, while WoW is itself what you could call a second generation MMO. Games like Dark Age of Camelot could be considered second generation, and for a while DAoC was the biggest rival to EverQuest — but the coming of WoW changed the market forever.

Even today, years after the high water mark of Wrath of the Lich King the scope of WoW is hard to comprehend — the sheer volume of its expansions alone is pretty amazing. Every expansion period is like a period in paleontology. You can dig back through the past and see the game frozen in the amber of itself. Look at the introduction of certain races a classes, the specific raids and dungeons and continents that accompanied each new release. You can dig into the past expansion of the game to see the buried strata of entirely different Worlds of Warcraft past — the amount of change that’s happened since 2004 means that we’re living in an entirely different Azeroth than we first saw when the game launched.

Similarly, you could easily set out to excavate out the origins of WoW in previous games. Does one credit Dark Age of Camelot for WoW’s faction based PVP? Would you blame EverQuest and the Sleeper (supposedly unkillable, but first killed in 2003) for world bosses like Azuregos?

Examining World of Warcrafts past

There was a time when Fury Warriors wore leather and used daggers. A time when Paladins stood out of melee and raised dead raiders non-stop, buffing between fights. A time when Hunters used mana, when the Alliance didn’t have Shaman. Talent trees went up to 31 points and you got one talent point per level until you capped at 60. So many fundamental truths of the game have been taken as gospel only to melt away over the years, replaced with new ideas that would in turn be changed or discarded. (See: Reforging, Armor Penetration, Expertise, Defense, DK tanking in any spec, Horde and Alliance never sharing a race due to the silhouette theory… I could go on and on with this.) Is World of Warcraft even remotely the same game it was in 2004, when everything from the maps to the UI to the classes have been changed, reworked, altered so many times?

Once, you couldn’t PVP except out in the open world, and dishonorable kills actually mattered. Hunters started in leather armor, as did Shamans, while Warriors and Paladins started in mail armor. You got your first mount at level 40 and your epic mount at 60, and it could go twice as fast as your character running, which was the fastest anyone could go while mounted. Flying mounts were an expansion away. Now they’ve been with us for every expansion since. Digging back through the strata of WoW we see holdovers from those older MMOs mixed with entirely new ideas, plus ideas borrowed from MMOs that came after WoW. Garrisons, Order Halls, and Followers all seem borrowed from other games. The current floating dialogue boxes we see doing World Quests on the Broken Shore seem borrowed from Warcraft 3.

And these are just some examples. World of Warcraft is continuously evolving and changing, shedding its past like chrysalis after chrysalis. Still, it carries everything it was like introns dormant in its code — dormant, but you never know when someone will bring it back, like Southshore vs. Tarren Mill rising anew to bedevil us in PVP. WoW is an artifact of previous generations of games, and even when within the game itself, it is composed of layers of its own past, a design that dates back 13 years now, and in some ways well beyond that.