World of Warcraft Wiki

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, first released in November 2004 and regarded as the genre-defining MMORPG. Set twenty years after the close of Warcraft III on the fantasy world of Azeroth, players create a hero from dozens of races and classes aligned with the warring Alliance and Horde factions, questing across a persistent shared world. Core gameplay revolves around solo and group questing, instanced dungeons, large-scale raids, professions and gathering, pet battles, and structured player-versus-player combat. The game has sustained over a hundred million registered accounts and remains live through a cadence of major expansions, the most recent under the ongoing Worldsoul Saga storyline. Its 2026 expansion, Midnight, carries the saga into the Void-touched lands of Quel'Thalas, introducing the nature-wielding Haranir and a player housing system.

• Class and Race System: choose a race-aligned hero from a roster of classes, each with disciplines and talent specializations.
• Faction Warfare: the player base splits between the Alliance and the Horde, with shared faction hubs, world PvP, and battleground/arena modes.
• Dungeons and Raids: instanced group content spanning five-player dungeons to ten-to-thirty player raids with bosses and loot.
• Professions and Gathering: crafting and gathering tradeskills feed the player economy alongside the auction house.
• Talents and Specializations: each class branches into specializations that reshape rotation, role, and gear needs.
• Expansion Cadence: sustained content through major expansions, most recently the Worldsoul Saga.
• Player Housing and the Void War: Midnight's central endgame, built around the Void assault on Quel'Thalas and the new player housing system.