Comment Re:Can't imagine many will see the point (Score 1) 253
Yes, WoW has evolved substantially since its launch. To all intents and purposes, Burning Crusade was "WoW2", Lich King was "WoW3" and so on. The game changes more through expansions (and even through some of the larger patches) than... say... Call of Duty changes between entire games.
Before WoW, levelling up was almost the whole point of MMOs and end-game content was something only a small proportion of players ever saw. In Final Fantasy XI or Everquest, many players still wouldn't have reached the level cap after playing for a year or more.
WoW's great innovation - and one of the big reasons for its success - was to cut down the length of the level grind and make end-game play (which tends to involve more skill and more social interaction) available to a much larger pool of players. Vanilla WoW was a huge shift in that direction compared to older MMOs and Blizzard have shifted the game even further that way with every subsequent expansion.
Almost every MMO launched since WoW has tried to duplicate that formula, but failed to add enough of a distinctive twist to it to lure people away from it in the long-term. If the re-launched Final Fantasy XIV - which is very impressive indeed and the most successful MMO launch since WoW - has one really killer feature, it is that it shifts the tone and nature of both levelling and end-game content substantially away from the WoW model (without ignoring WoW's evolutions of the genre entirely).