Few developers are as fond of Easter eggs as Blizzard, but the studio went one step further in World of Warcraft: Legion, hiding a secret raid boss for players to uncover.
It is hard to overstate the importance of World of Warcraft as a multimedia franchise. Blizzard's epic MMORPG is not only a culturally important video game, but a creative juggernaut that has had a hand in spawning other titles like Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and the record-setting Warcraft film earlier this summer. It is perhaps because of the way World of Warcraft has appeared on televisions, silver screens, and computer monitors worldwide that Blizzard has also become one of the studios renowned for including Easter eggs that reference various iconic pop culture moments.
That reputation has also led to some World of Warcraft players inadvertently becoming excellent detectives after uncovering some of the more obscure and well-hidden Easter eggs the MMORPG has to offer. When players are passionate enough about a game to reach World of Warcraft: Legion's level cap within six hours of its launch, it's a safe bet that there are similar fans willing to do the same while unearthing the game's many secrets. Even after more than a decade of gameplay, however, today was a first - a group of players looking for some of Legion's hidden content accidentally ended up spawning a hidden world boss for everyone.
A detailed Reddit post made earlier today confirmed that the hidden boss, called Kosumoth the Hungering, was spawned after a treasure hunt that started after players began searching the new Legion zones for an item called Reins of the Long-Forgotten Hippogryph. That item has been in the game files for years, and people have been searching for it in every expansion on the off-chance it has finally been included in-game. That search led players to discover a series of complex and hidden caves in the Broken Isles, and, after a player triggered a separate Easter egg with a NPC named Drak'thul, a map that indicated the location of a series of mysterious orbs.
As if that wasn't enough, players then had to experiment with clicking each of the seven orbs in a specific order, finally getting the sequence right and creating a world event that spawned Kosumoth. It's that kind of ingenuity and dedication that makes the recent DDoS attacks on World of Warcraft so puzzling - targeting a game that brings people together over solving an obfuscated puzzle seems malicious rather than annoying.
Although the details of the Kosumoth event, such as whether the steps need to be repeated each time and what kind of loot he is tied to, are still being figured out, the story behind its discovery is remarkable. It's not just that players were able to solve an extraordinarily hard puzzle in the first weeks of the expansion's launch, although that is also impressive - it's the fact that Blizzard implemented the puzzle in the first place and believed World of Wacraft's playerbase could solve it. It appears Blizzard's development team is firing on all cylinders, and if that's the case, players can look forward to a World of Warcraft: Return to Karazhan that's just as satisfying and intriguing.
World of Warcraft: Legion is available now on PC.