For many gamers, World of Warcraft is more than just a game. Azeroth has long since become a piece of home – also for MeinMMO demon Cortyn.
Video games have a major impact on our everyday lives – no gamer will dispute that. After all, they are our favorite hobby. And next to work, games are often the biggest time waster, what we spend most of our waking hours doing.
But few games have had as great an impact on me as World of Warcraft has. It’s time to sing the praises of the game that moved me more than any game before it.
Note: The article is originally from 2017. We have updated it again for Easter 2023.
A world you know inside and out
If I were dragged out of bed at 4:00 a.m., I could explain in a flash how to navigate Blackrock Depths to get to the final boss. I could explain today how to complete a tribute run in Dire Maul and still know exactly which tent on Thunder Bluff contains the merchants I’m looking for.
On the other hand, if someone asked me exactly how to get to the nearest Sparkasse, I would have to think for a moment about the directions.
I think that’s why Cataclysm was a problem for many longtime players. The revamp of the old world has done WoW well and made the zones more meaningful and exciting. But it was a piece of home that was changed. You no longer knew exactly where everything was and a few fond memories began to fade.
It’s a bit like the old kitchen where you spent years munching on your mom’s delicious pancakes after school. When there was enough money for a new kitchen, the pancakes were still just as delicious. But somehow the old flair was missing. And the fact that the cutlery is now in the second drawer from the left instead of the first is something you will never really get used to.
WoW players: Loyal, stupid and blind to mistakes?
Again and again one hears that fans after so many years of WoW simply forgive too much. Some players are only attached to WoW because they have gotten used to it. And to a certain extent that’s true.
However, this does not mean that you lose sight of the errors. Precisely because I know WoW so well, annoying errors that I wouldn’t notice in other games immediately jump out at me.
An example? The Facial tentacles of female draenei characters clipped into her body during a patch. I could fuss all day about how Blizzard could overlook such a bug. When I look at my character and see that the tentacles are now fused into the shoulder instead of resting loosely on the collarbone or swinging back and forth slightly during movement, it makes me sad. It’s such a small detail, and yet suddenly it wasn’t “my” draenei anymore.
But it is precisely this feeling that WoW still triggers after more than a decade that makes WoW something special.
I can still get hyped when a new addon is announced. And I can still grit my teeth when a feature has been dropped or a mechanic isn’t fun.
The second home, Azeroth
No other game manages to keep me hooked. Then I come back and sink into the world for a while, even if I haven’t played for half a year before.
The 24-hour role-playing sessions, the great successes as a 40-person raid, the laughs in TeamSpeak when someone was killed by the elevator boss again. All of these memories are on an equal footing with “real” experiences, as they came about in exactly the same way with other people.
After all the time I’ve put into World of Warcraft, with all the friendships that have developed over the course of well over a decade first in WoW and then in the “real world”, I can only come to one conclusion: Azeroth has become a “second home” for me – one that’s always reachable, even if the address changes in the real world.
All of this makes WoW more than just a game to me.
Do you also have a connection to WoW or another game? Or are all games just a temporary pastime that you don’t really want to lose yourself in?