A lot of blizzard's success is the failing of it's competitors. I tried Warhammer. It was... yeah there are no words for how bad compared to WoW. The classes have no balance. The starter areas are horribly designed. You have to follow the specific paths laid out before you because if you try and jump over something you can get stuck. I once got stuck walking down a ramp. A RAMP I WAS SUPPOSE TO TALK DOWN. I was like, dude, first year game designers can do better than this. I tried 5 classes and they all where lame in various ways. Warcraft manages to turn the lower level quests into something not horribly unfun to do. Warhammer, not so much. You end up spending most of the game running around the map looking for some quest objective marked on your map by a huge red blob. One quest had me looking for a skull. It was sitting on a table in a ring full of mobs and had a elite patting around the ring that could kill me every time. What they call a champion mob. I looked around the area avoiding the mobs for literally hours trying to find this skull. Finally I moused over it and it glowed for a moment. It was on a table blocked from view but from the opposite angle that you arrive from and it was smaller than my mouse pointer sitting between two other objects. The area on the map find this one super small hidden object? The entire forest.

Blizzard doesn't need to very hard to be better game designers than this.

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