I hadn't really planned to examine the 2004 box art of World of Warcraft so deeply, but take a look at this portion. It's lacking in detail, but I think you'll see the same thing I'm seeing:

When WoW was released, I had a hard time convincing my girlfriend to switch. One of her comments was a lack of classes and in a related note she pointed out that there was a race ("with horns") on the box that wasn't in the game. I looked at this little screenshot on the back and brushed it aside as a helm.

Now hindsight is 20/20, I see a female Draenei casting next to a Tauren. Maybe they were meant to be female Tauren at some point? I don't know, I'm not going to read too much into it other than when the game was released, what was in this image didn't make it into the game.

That's not a critical observation, much the reverse.

Yeah, I'm using this in my leverage against the 'polish' catchphrase. To me, this is what polish actually is, Blizzard cut things from their game as late as the box art going to press. They stuck with what was working and they shelved the rest for a later date.

Is this any different from other games? I don't think so. Blizzard had a smaller audience examining their pre-release, plus their PR team knows how to keep things under wraps. There's this myth that they had no beta NDA, but they segmented concurrent betas for PR: the more public one with no NDA, the closed-beta for real testing and even a friends-and-family server in a state between alpha and beta.

Even WoW's public test servers now are notorious for not so much testing (because invariably, most every mistake on PTR will make it to Live) as advertising upcoming changes.

That's the sort of misdirection that Age of Conan, Warhammer and other upcoming MMORPGs are lacking. Hide what you're working on, trickle out the good info and save the hype for what's actually going into the game.

It's pretty hard to do, because people rarely recognize what it is.

Blizzard wasn't perfect at it either, they had features anticipated that never arrived, but they also didn't have the same massive community of anticipating fans that have followed in WoW's wake.

Sooner or later I was bound to take this snapshot, because it's been nagging at me. This is my 2004 World of Warcraft retail box:

A whole lot of people either have selective memories, or they arrived on the scene later, but the release of WoW was not 'polished'. It had numerous bugs, abysmal server stability, barely passable Endgame and virtually none of the faction-PvP features that were highlighted during pre-release.

Sieges of course, were not included. Nor was the "mighty Dragon of Blackrock Spire", although Nefarian did arrive 7 months later.

It was still a great game.

Accolade it for what it was and what it became, not what it wasn't.

Good old Lum the Mad has written the quintessential Age of Conan review, where he hits the nail on the head with the subject line "It's the Fun, Stupid" and then brings it home with this little ditty:

Read the whole thing, it's worthwhile.

I'll note that my most recent AoC article was about putting undead zombies to rest. =)

The raw fun factor is what also drew me to City of Heroes a few years back. The rest of the features will be the deciding factor over how long I stay. For me the most important of those are the immersion and world setting appeal, where I also find Hyboria a win-win.

Blogs and press will focus on competitive Endgame and certainly the more aggressive players will continue to do so as well, but dammit I'm just having too much fun to worry about whether Sieges or Crafting are all that they were supposed to be.

Funcom will have to fix things up sooner or later though, some of these other MMOs might wizen up to this concept of fun.