Warcraft
In 2004, Blizzard Entertainment moved the series away from the real-time strategy genre and released "World of Warcraft", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Requiring a subscription fee to be paid to play, it also introduced regular additional content to the series in the form of patches. "World of Warcraft" gained popularity worldwide, becoming the world's largest subscription-based MMORPG in 2008. The game reached a peak 12 million subscribers worldwide in October 2010. "World of Warcraft" has had seven expansions as of 2018. During the production of "", Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce stated that "If there's a team that's passionate about doing another "Warcraft" [real-time strategy], then that's definitely something we would consider. It's nothing that we're working on right now, we have development teams working on "", "", "Diablo III", and when those teams are all off the projects they're working on, they'll be intimately involved in the discussions about what's next".
Gameplay of World of Warcraft
"World of Warcraft" takes place in a 3D-representation of the Warcraft universe that players can interact with through their characters. The game features five continents on the world of Azeroth, as well as the realm of Outland that was added in the expansion "The Burning Crusade". "Warlords Of Draenor" introduced the realm of Draenor, an altered past of Outland. The second expansion, "Wrath of the Lich King", added a third continent, Northrend . to Azeroth, and in "Mists of Pandaria" a fourth continent, Pandaria, was added. In , they introduce the Broken Isles. In this game world, players use their characters to explore locations, defeat creatures and complete quests. By doing this, characters gain experience points. After a set amount of experience points have been gained, a character gains a level, giving new skills or abilities and making it possible to explore new areas and attempt new quests. As a player explores new locations, a number of transport shortcuts become available. Players can discover 'flight masters' in newly discovered locations and then use those NPCs in order to fly to previously discovered locations in other parts of the world. Players can also use facilities such as boats and zeppelins in order to move from one of the continents on Azeroth to the other. Players can communicate with each other using text-based chat, separated into different channels for ease of use. When a player instructs their character to yell or say something, a chat bubble appears above their head containing the spoken words in a similar way to a comic book image.