Games That Are Like World Of Warcraft
Gro Bert
As in real-world economies, MMORPG players buy, sell, and trade goods and services in ways that emulate real world economics. Crafters create items like weapons and armor; enchanters offer services to improve items; adventurers put their wares up for sale in the auction house. If you observe carefully, you can learn a lot about real-life business from watching virtual economies in action.
The players who most actively participate in the in-game economy typically have at least two characters: (1) a primary character who goes out into the world and collects items, and (2) a lower-level character who resides in a city that converts raw materials into products or services, then sells them to other players. This setup saves time: instead of traveling back to town after every session, the primary character can simply mail items to the lower-level alternate character, who then sells them. You can view this inter-character cooperation as a simple business.
For example: one character may be skilled at finding wild herbs. These herbs can then be mailed to a second character, who is an Alchemist. The Alchemist would then make potions and elixirs from these herbs to sell to other players. Both characters added value" to the process of making potions, and thus could be seen as creating a simple value chain.
For example, if you want to buy a Stormforged Axe , a good way to figure out how much to pay for it is how much it costs a Blacksmith to gather the raw materials, then include a bit of margin in compensation for their time and expertise.
In real life, you can value products in the same way. Take a house, for instance. You can place a value on a house by (1) calculating how much it would cost to build another house just like it, (2) research what other similar houses in the area have sold for, or (3) figure out how much you could rent the house for, then discount that series of cash flows to the present.
Supply and demand is a basic economic concept that explains how real-world economies handle scarcity and fulfillment of wants and needs. In a virtual economy, you can actually watch supply and demand work in real time.
Similarly, very rare enchantments like Mongoose and Potency can be extraordinarily time-consuming to acquire, and require rare and expensive raw materials. As a result, enchanters charge a premium to cast these spells.
Early on, I found an item I could purchase for 10 silver pieces that I could easily sell on the Auction House for 2 gold. (A markup of 2000%.) Starting from nothing, wholesaling gave me enough money to purchase high-capacity bags and a full set of high-powered gear by the time I reached level 20. All it took was a little research and a few minutes each day to purchase from my wholesaler, then post the items on the Auction House.
Both virtual and real-world economies feature promotional activity. The trade chat channel is typically full of players who are looking to buy or sell items or services directly, instead of through the Auction House. The players who are most successful in creating demand for their items use two primary tactics: (1) creating urgency, typically via reduced pricing for a limited time; (2) publicizing that they sell rare or hard-to-find items or enchantments.
Just as in real life, the benefits of a product are sometimes non-material. Enchanters often sell weapon enchantments because they make the enchanted weapons glow, not because the enchantment is particularly advantageous.
Every so often, events will alter the demand for specific products and services in both real and virtual worlds. For example, on weekends that Warsong Gulch battlegrounds get double honor, demand for Swiftness Potions and the raw materials used to create them usually doubles vs. normal days.
In all virtual worlds, goals are a big part of the game: the point is to reach the next level, find a particular Epic item, or defeat the evil overlord. Completing quests and developing your skills are what make the game satisfying.
World of Warcraft Classic, the "new" version of World of Warcraft that recreates the original experience when the popular massively multiplayer online RPG launched almost 15 years ago, is at once perfectly familiar -- and yet, at its core, it feels like a different game than modern Warcraft.
(Public service announcement: People invited to the Classic beta report not getting any emails. So if you're an active WoW player that has opted into beta tests, check the account drop-down on your Battle.net launcher to make sure "Beta: WoW Classic" isn't already on the list.)
I received a beta invite for Classic, and had also been an alpha and beta tester for the original game 15 years ago. That isn't unique; plenty of people in Northshire Valley had had the same experience, suggesting to me that active players who were Day 1 WoW gamers or had participated in the original tests might have gotten priority invitations to this one.
I recreated my very first character -- a human warrior, because in the last-push alpha test I joined in 2004, there was no Horde -- and logged in. Immediately, I was surprised by how good the graphics actually looked, for being 15 year old textures-on-polygons. Warcraft's bright colors and cartoony aesthetic continue to this day, so all the increased resolution and better-contoured characters in Lordaeron don't really change the game's visual aesthetic.
Plenty of gameplay things have changed -- more on that in a minute -- but one thing almost immediately transformed the game for me. I was killing my fourth Kobold Vermin (sorry guys, I'm taking those candles) by auto-attacking it and waiting impatiently for my lone ability to light up, when it struck me: This was going to be slow. Really, really slow. And, after another minute, I realized that was okay.
It was the first time in a decade that I wasn't gunning for the end game, pillaging the beta test to determine the fastest way to level and get to the "good stuff," and tweaking my add-ons to skip as much content as I could to get there. I even read a quest or two, though I admit to using the option (still available, even in vanilla) to turn off the line-by-line scrolling of quest text.
I've been privately snarky about Classic. Blizzard Entertainment president J. Allen Brack at one point (before he was president) famously said that people who said they wanted Classic didn't really want what they thought they wanted. I agreed.
The original WoW was painful. Mobs took forever to die; one additional enemy in a fight was a pain, two probably meant death. There was a ton of running. Most buffs lasted two minutes, many took reagents, abilities were trained and often out of reach if you lacked the necessary gold. Warlocks had to farm shards, hunters had to carry ammo -- even my warrior did, since in vanilla WoW she can carry a bow and fire arrows herself.
If the end game feels miles away, and min-maxing is difficult because frankly, you're gonna take what you get and like it, then the focus of the game changes completely. Suddenly it's about the experience of leveling again, and hanging out with friends, and chatting with people in Goldshire (well, for purely innocent reasons anyway -- the Moon Guard server's Goldshire crew still does plenty of chatting).
There are a ton of caveats here. I'm in my first night of a new thing, and that always adds a rosy glow. It's a beta test, and apparently a very small one at that, which means that people are (as in most closed Warcraft beta tests) friendlier, more mature and more invested in their fellow man.
As someone who's leveled enough Alliance and Horde characters to fill multiple accounts, it remains to be seen whether replaying content I've seen many times before will keep my attention in the long term. But even the thought that it might suggests that for many people, this could represent a novel experience compared to the modern game, something at least worth a try.
Released in 2004, World of Warcraft brought new meaning to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre. Even about 20 years later, the game still boasts millions of active players.
There is never a shortage of things to do in World of Warcraft, yet players might want alternatives after grinding hundreds and possibly thousands of hours. The most elite players have spent potentially years across multiple characters (and usually accounts). Fans looking for alternatives should try out these games for a challenge outside World of Warcraft.
Updated June 16, 2024 by Mark Sammut: World of Warcraft is eternal, but a change of pace can be nice every once in a while. Consequently, a few more games like WoW were added to this article.
Those looking for a unique type of MMORPG may want to consider diving into New World. This release from Amazon Games has developed a bit of a cult following, with many players still logging in daily to play through the massively multiplayer online release. Those looking for something a bit more action-heavy compared to World of Warcraft should enjoy New World's unique combat.
Players are free to enjoy the adventure as they see fit, working on building up their character to dish out major damage or simply working on collecting items and other useful things to sell on the marketplace. With a booming PvP scene and lots of things to uncover and craft, New World can be a lot of fun for MMORPG players looking for something off the beaten path or to play a healer.
Guild Wars 2 is a pretty unique MMO that many fans have grown to love. Its steady stream of content updates means that players can jump back into the experience and enjoy a wealth of new content to explore, which is especially entertaining with a group of friends.
The sheer number of things to do in this game is mind-boggling and will ensure that players can sink hundreds of hours into the game without feeling even slightly bored. Guild Wars 2 is a massive achievement that shows just how much the MMO landscape has evolved with its innovative mechanics.
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