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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

The most impressive aspect of WoW to me was just how well the game ran on commodity hardware at the time. EQ2 came out the same month and ran very poorly on top-of-the-line PCs. Vanguard beta hit a year later and it was nearly unplayable on anything but the most cutting edge of systems. I really think Blizzard's focus on performance optimization and UX had a very significant contribution to the success of WoW and widening the playerbase.

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So many people I played with were able to enjoy the game because it would run on the $350 eMachines PC they got at Walmart. Accessibly really increased the draw of the game for regular consumers because you could get your friends into it easily.

I ran the game on a beat up dell laptop for several years, 40 man raids and everything. Had to run it on the lowest settings, but was able to get 30 FPS on it.

I remember I played so much that on the left side of the laptop where my palm rested all the paint had worn off of the laptop.

This.

I wonder how different things would have played out if the other AAA titles had lower requirements.

That being said, WOW also focused on other game tools that opened it up to a wider audience that other games who only listened to their "core audience" never would consider.

I think we've seen this with most of Blizzard's games. StarCraft was such a big phenomenon partially because it was able to run on almost any machine during a Korean recession when people were time rich and cash poor and when a large amount of computing was done on non-gaming machines at internet cafes.

And then of course you have Minecraft, PubG, Fortnight, The Sims ect

Yep. I could play, raid, etc. in a fully functional way on an okay-ish laptop. This was a pretty big deal for me.

Indeed. The greater bulk of my play during original game, The Burning Crusade, and even the beginning of Wrath was all on an iMac G5 with a Radeon 9600, not a top end gaming PC. Original and TBC both ran great on it with trouble only starting to creep in with Wrath and its texture resolution bump.

If I remember correctly the game ran somewhat fine on my geforce mx440 (passively cooled).

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