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Legion-Feature

World of Warcraft'southward player base has been on a downward trend for years. Granted, in Blizzard's case, that'southward a very relative measure. The 5.5 one thousand thousand subscribers the company reported in November 2022 was a low point that the championship hadn't striking since 2005, merely WoW still dwarfs other massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). When Blizzard announced last yr that WoW had fallen to 5.5 million subscribers, it also said it wouldn't exist sharing subscriber information going forwards. But a quote from a recent interview with game designer Tom Chilton seems to imply that the company'due south figures accept leaped skyward once again.

Co-ordinate to an interview in the Polish mag Pixel, WoW's subscription figures have surged to ten.1 meg in the wake of Legion'south launch, nearly doubling the company's reliable total. While this nevertheless doesn't bring WoW back up to its celebrity days, it very nearly does — as the chart below shows, WoW peaked in mid-2010 with 12 one thousand thousand subscribers. Blizzard, however, refuses to ostend or deny this effigy, merely maxim information technology won't provide data on subscriptions going forward, and that Chilton did not state a figure of x.i million subscribers to Pixel magazine. Whether Chilton intended to speak off-the-record or a language issue caused the problem is unclear.

Subs-1

Information from the now-defunct MMOData.internet

Bringing subscription numbers support to 10.one one thousand thousand, even if its temporary, would exist a huge boost for Blizzard — and WoW is still the behemoth in the industry, even if information technology has lost a little weight. While I hate to rely on anecdotal data for subscription data, I've seen a number of old friends and guildmates popping back to play the expansion and staying for more than the scattering of weeks required to level up and consummate the initial content.

A well-deserved success

We're working on a full review of Legion, but in low-cal of the subscription spring, I'll say this: Based on my experience thus far, World of Warcraft: Legion is the best expansion Blizzard has ever released. While I can't claim to have played them all, I was an early airtight beta tester for Earth of Warcraft and played the game from early on 2004 through the end of Cataclysm and the early zones of Mists of Pandaria. With Legion, Blizzard decided to emphasize a single-player storyline — and while WoW's lore is fairly standard fantasy fare, focusing tightly on your role player'southward individual grapheme makes the game more than interesting.

Overall, this is the most polished I've e'er seen an expansion be this soon after launch. That doesn't mean there are no rough spots — play an MMO long plenty and yous notice at that place are ever crude spots, and since the game constantly evolves, you oft get them all sanded out about vi months earlier the next expansion launches. I've never been specially interested in the story behind WoW until this expansion, and I'g still running around finishing zone quests just to run into how the plot plays out. There have e'er been individual quest chains in WoW that commanded that kind of interest, but there are more of them in Legion — and a lot more for individual players to do without worrying virtually signing upwards for the 4-6 hour raiding grindfests that often made the game inaccessible to those with express amounts of time, or who simply didn't want to play with 39 other cantankerous people while trying to progress through terminate-game content.

The slideshow higher up highlights some of the new zones and environments of the Broken Isles, WoW's latest new continent to explore. Feel free to driblet your comments beneath — do you like how Legion has evolved, or did you prefer one of the previous expansions? While in that location's no guarantee that Blizzard will retain a larger player base in the side by side few months, Legion's story and overall gameplay have been strong enough that I plan to stick around a picayune while to come across what happens next. Getting back into the game was rough, but I'k glad I did.