While World of Warcraft is still, ostensibly, a subscription-based MMO it is slowly taking steps towards becoming free-to-play. The first among those steps occurred not that long ago, with players being able to experience the vanilla version of WoW, up through level 20, free of charge.
Now, as revealed by Blizzard today, players will be able to try out every race available in World of Warcraft, regardless of which expansion they own, without paying any additional fee. That means that those aforementioned vanilla WoW players, who didn’t want to fork over the cash for ‘Lich King’ or ‘Cataclysm,’ can play as a Drenai, a Worgen, or a Blood Elf without paying any extra.
Even more exciting than playing as one of the older locked racesis the announcement that, when the ‘Mists of Pandaria’ expansion becomes available on September 25th, those same players will be able to try out the new Pandaren race as well. It’s a huge move on Blizzard’s part, and could be one of the biggest incentives for past World of Warcraft players to return.
There are still some incentives to subscribe to WoW or to purchase its expansions – Mists of Pandaria’s new monk class and level 90 cap can only be unlocked with ownership – but now gamers can give the race a try before deciding on picking up the entire package.
This new “feature” will launch with the game’s 5.0.4 patch – more commonly known as the pre-expansion patch. It’s said to launch on August 28th, and in addition to unlocking all the races, will introduce a new talent system as well as trainers that can reset talent and glyph selections.
The patch itself is not as world altering as the pre-Cataclysm patch, which literally changed the landscape of Azeroth, but it might be equally as anticipated. Many players gave up on WoW knowing that, for them, the experience had reached its zenith, but some gamers who had never even booted up Blizzard’s MMO were waiting for the early stages of free-to-play features to roll out. This isn’t the beginning of that – the aforementioned level 20 limit was – but this is the next big step.
How do you feel about Blizzard unlocking every playable race including the Pandaren? Does it diminish the impact of the new expansion or will it help boost sales after players give the race a spin?
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria releases September 25, 2012 for the PC.
Source: Blizzard
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I think this i the right move for blizzard especially if they will be moving to F2P in the future. All this does is bring in more players to try and the game and bring back old players that have long since cancel subs.
This has nothing to do with F2P. A nice marketing ploy, sure, but not any indication that the game is going to become “more” free.
Pretty sure that I stated that its the right move if they are going to be moving to F2P in the future.
If you’ve played already you have a high level character so being able to play to 20th is pointless and will not bring back people. The game reached its peak with WOTLK & since then has steadily declined.
In my opinion based on experience with MMO’s I would say what turns people off the most is constantly f–king around with classes… or as they like to call it “balancing.”
When I played it seemed like every couple months my class was nerfed, buffed or had to redo talents due to balancing. DAOC / Mythic did the same constantly nerfing one class to buff another. I quit that game for that reason & that lead to one of many reasons for quitting WOW.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but the rebalancing was one of my favorite parts of WoW back in the day. Two or three times a year you get a free respec and new talents to play around with, that was cool to me. It seemed like in the Cataclysm era they finally decided they were happy with class balance and did very little in terms of big changes, and only did small numerical tweaks on a handful of spells or gear sets. Much less interesting, and part of the reason I finally gave up the game for good.
But yeah, I highly doubt the level 20 F2P thing was intended to bring anyone back — which would make zero sense — but rather just to let new people try before they buy. I wouldn’t guess that it’s worked particularly well, but I dunno.
gw2 is out in 3 days so dont care
I’m currently playing Rift. Similar to WOW you can play to 20th for free. The game is a WOW/Warhammer clone. Classes are exactly the same. It isn’t bad but I won’t be subscribing to it even though constant pop up’s appear in game or when I log out telling me to purchase the game.
Subscription based models will be a thing of the past.