Forty-day mount money, no flight between continents, and a talent tree with 51 points in it. Most of what players now call the game was not in the box.
Photo: World-of-Warcraft retired servers 20210313 · Wikimedia Commons
Expansions
Ten expansions, and the one they went back to
A dated record of every WoW expansion from vanilla through the Worldsoul Saga, and the decisions each one made that the next one had to live with.
11 pieces
BlizzCon is where the announcements land, and where several of the decisions documented on this site were first stated out loud.
Photo: Tahir Xəlfəquliyev / Pexels
ExpansionsOutland Was a Corridor, and That Was the PointOutland replaced the open continent with a sequence of gated zones. Every expansion since has argued about how linear to be.
ExpansionsTwelve Million Subscribers and Then the CliffTwelve million subscribers in October 2010 is the high-water mark, and it has never been approached again.
ExpansionsCataclysm Deleted the Map Twelve Million Players KnewThe 2004 world was not extended in 2010. It was replaced, and the version eleven million players had learned stopped existing.
ExpansionsMists of Pandaria and the Expansion That Took Ten Years to WinDismissed on announcement, praised a decade later. The reversal is documented in the same outlets that panned it.
ExpansionsThe Garrison Gave Everyone a Fortress and Emptied the WorldThe garrison was the most efficient thing in the expansion, and it meant the optimal way to play a massively multiplayer game was alone at a table for eight minutes a day.
ExpansionsLegion's Artifact Weapons: Power That Expired by DesignArtifact weapons were designed to be taken away. That was the point, and it became the template.
ExpansionsAzerite Armour and the System That Required Three RevisionsThree structural revisions in three patches: 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3. The revision history is the record.
ExpansionsShadowlands: Four Covenants and a Decision You Could Not UndoFour Covenants, one choice, and a switching cost high enough that patch 9.1.5 had to undo it.
ExpansionsDragonflight Brought Back the Talent Tree Warlords RemovedThe tree Cataclysm stripped to six passive choices came back in 2022 with more nodes than the original had.
ExpansionsThe War Within and the Three-Expansion Bet Blizzard Made at BlizzCon 2023Announced at BlizzCon in November 2023 as the first of three. Blizzard had never committed that far ahead before.