Don’t ever test Raph Koster on MMORPG history, because you’ll probably lose.
The Star Wars Galaxies and Crowfall designer challenged a recent Rolling Stone article and a resulting Reddit thread on its portrayal of World of Warcraft back in its earliest days as the community prepares for WoW Classic. In particular, Koster takes umbrage with the “minimal storytelling” that the piece attributes to the vanilla game.
“[World of Warcraft] launched with probably literally 100x the story of any preceding MMO ever,” Koster said on Twitter. “Helped, no doubt, by spending a minimum of 4x the budget of any other MMO except Sims Online. Anyway, it’s just funny to read an argument that the great STRENGTHS of WoW at launch were its weaknesses.”
He went on to chide the author for downplaying WoW’s quest system: “Lest we forget, its use of quests to guide players, and its soloability and lack of interdependence with other players, were the keys to unlocking a general gamer audience and broadening MMOs beyond the smaller MMO fan market. They cut the time investment for getting to the fun.”
Koster also pointed back to a piece that he wrote about the MMORPG back during World of Warcraft’s 10th anniversary.
