The now twelve-year-old online game World of Warcraft is still running strong in 2016, despite having long since passed its peak. It isn’t remotely the same game that launched in 2004, but most of those changes have simply been a result of time, and the necessity to adapt as competitors learned from its success and brought new changes into the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre (MMORPGs). The latest Warcraft expansion, titled Legion, has launched with a fair bit of hype behind it.
The fight for Azeroth has begun!
Play World of Warcraft #Legion now: https://t.co/jaDMMmQei4 pic.twitter.com/cUflRt9Ol4
— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) August 30, 2016
While generally seen as a favorable expansion, previous effort Warlords of Draenor did not accomplish all that developer Blizzard Entertainment hoped it would. Early sales brought back a large number of players that had moved on from the game, but those numbers saw a sharp drop over the first quarter of 2015, indicating that the expansion had poor player retention. Paying subscriber numbers actually fell a full 300,000 below where they had been before Warlords of Draenor was released.
Legion hopes to change that with a raising of the player level cap (from 100 to 110, a far cry from the original cap of 60), as well loads of new content, including a new area to explore, and a brand new hero class that players can start at level 98.
And while World of Warcraft’s narrative side has spun out a bit (thanks to the alternate-timeline hijinks of Warlords of Draenor), Legion is very focused on offering players a very narrative-driven experience. The latest Warcraft expansion lets players fight for and alongside well-known heroes from the franchise, including Illidan Stormrage (last seen back in World of Warcraft’s first major expansion, The Burning Crusade) and King Varian Wrynn of the Alliance. It has the most voice acting of any Warcraft expansion and aims for a more cinematic experience than the game has offered before.
If that sounds tempting enough to pull you back into Azeroth (it’s unlikely Blizzard is targeting too many new players at this point), you can start playing World of Warcraft: Legion right now.
