While online gaming existed prior to 2004 – even with 56k modems and the ever-present danger of losing the connection if someone picked the phone up — it was the arrival offrom games company Blizzard that year that heralded a huge change in the gaming landscape.
“One is the art style, it is the Blizzard style, I think it is timeless and it has held up over the time but obviously we’ve made a lot of improvements to technology and added hi-res graphics.” It’s certainly taken me back to my early days of dabbling in the game in 2005 or so, after wondering why all my staff were clearing off at 5.30pm on the dot to take part in multi-person dungeon adventures known as ‘raids’.The graphics are a bit simpler, the world is less vibrant, but it’s still unmistakablyand even from a decade and a half in the future, I can absolutely see how this was the foundation of one of the most successful MMORPGs of all time.
Mr Hight said the idea behind the Classic version was to provide something accessible for new players while still letting“We want to make it a comfortable place for players to come in – we have different levels to things, you know all the mechanics, if you’re a long-term player you’ll probably drop right into heroic or mythical raids, if you’re casual we’ve created things like a ‘looking for dungeon’ feature,” he said.
Good news, joshmonaghan