There were other games at the time, that may have been better at some things, but probably not better at what it aimed to be good at. WoW certainly wasn't a better RTS than the Warcraft games before it, but those are just different games. WoW was probably the best game out there in a category defined as an immersive online multiplayer game world with actual game and roleplaying elements.

I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience I'd played since final fantasy, but with everyone else playing in the same world for no explicitly stated reason. If you think it rose to the popularity it did because previous rts/roleplayers were just continuing their love for the franchise, you're missing the rest of the picture.

I would be curious though if you have anything specific in mind that beats my claim

> I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience

In what way was it immersive for you? Not saying it's not immersive, but I didn't find it immersive. I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750. But at the time there was no end-game, liniar progression, once you level there's no need to go back to other area's, etc. So it was quite boring.

But I know people who have played since day 1 till now who swear by it.

I started with Ultima Onine, tried EQ, Lineage / Lineage II, AC, DAoC. But while alot of people during those days played SNES/N64, or games on PC like War Craft, Counter Strike, AOE/AOC. Me playing UO and such I was a 'computer geek' etc, but when WoW landed all of a sudden it was cool to play WoW, people who didn't even know MMORPGs were all of a sudden talking about upcoming WoW game. At the time I didn't understand because gameplay was much more immersive in other games, but they didn't want to play any of the games I played.

I think WoW got alot right to get people into the game even tho they are things I don't like. The hand-holding, bound items, and questing system. But WoW success was definitely not because it was a good game. It got better over time and became great, till it ended up being terrible again. But on release it wasn't good.

> I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750.

Might be the fact that you just power leveled through it.

I played UO and remember when starting on WoW it felt "dumb".

Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.

I think WoW did well by simplifying the mechanics and having more developed storyline which then helped people immerse in it more approachable or enjoyable way. I even read the lore on the internet and the books later, and I think all of that added more. I always enjoyed the questing and adventuring to new places the most, not that much about trying to min-max every aspect of the process.

> Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.

I miss this aspect of UO. Full loot PVP was fun, especially when you would get cheap gear and go ganking with people. One time on a shard (Novus Opiate) there was a ~50+ vs ~50+ blue vs red war for a few hours where we opened portals to the PVP towns and ran in ganking all the reds and they were ganking us.

Lots of fun those days. I missed the PVP because in WoW there was no loss and so no one really cared to try run or fight back, the only loss was exp so they sometimes just stood there let you kill them. It's one of the reasons I rushed 60 was to do PVP but then PVP didn't really exist.

I played the full 30 days and had 2 characters, 1 max and the other I was trying to do all the side quests and I stopped at like lvl 40 cos I just got bored of repeating the same sort of quest over and over in different zones, kill this, collect that, talk to X.

Did you never go over to Tarren Mill? IIRC, back in 2004 there was a ton of world PVP going on there, and one of the most fun aspects of it (IMO) was exactly the fact that there was no purpose other than "hey let's go fight some other players". Then BG came out and kinda ruined that aspect of things by making the PVP experience far more systematic and I guess purposeful. They may have improved it in later years but by then I had lost interest and stopped playing.

I didn't play at launch, but have heard that it could have probably used a few patches before it would have been so immersive. The pace of leveling however probably was its slowest at launch, and it seems like to do that, you would necessarily have been sucked in, because it would have probably taken a hell of a lot of playing, especially without all of the web resources we currently have. I started probably around 2005/6 I'd guess, before leveling was quickened. I'm not really sure what you mean by hand-holding exactly; at best there wasn't much in terms of assistance through any means. Though it was never a technically difficult game, I found it immersive in that it was slow, if you weren't deliberately trying to hit max level in the shortest possible time. I just played it to do something, that had some gradual reward and power system that felt intuitive and meaningful, and it probably took me a year to hit max level. Doing that with people is really what made it compelling, I couldn't imagine playing it alone at that time, it wasn't that kind of game. In contrast to your experience, none of my friends stopped playing the other games you mention, but WoW uniquely augmented our daily lives with questions about what gear you recently got, what level you hit, doing dungeons and raiding together, bumling into someone from the opposing faction and killing them or getting killed. Runescape had elements of that, but the graphics and gameplay were sluggish and more rudimentary, whereas WoW felt like I was "in" something more than ever before.

It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.

In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.