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The Queue: The first footage of WoW's gameplay

I've mentioned it before, but WoW's history has really got me intrigued lately. I dug up some of the first footage of WoW's gameplay shown in June 2001 at ECTS (the European Computer Trade Show).

Think about this for a second ... This footage is 11 years old. A kid born when this footage was released is in the sixth grade now.

The Red North asked:

How did the concept of "hitpoints" come to be?



According to Wikipedia (which I believe to be correct here), the origin of modern hit points came from David Arneson's initial Dungeons & Dragons. He needed a way for players to take more hits, and thus hit points were developed. He got the concept itself from an American civil war game, although as far as the first game to use them, it'd be hard if not impossible to track down. Just know that the concept as we think of them came from D&D (like everything else, practically).

Jeff asked:

Now that we are getting such beautifully textured dragons with tendrils of smoke coming out of their nostrils, does this increase of animation have any effect on lag when 10 of them converge in a populated area? For that matter, do more polished races and fighting animations take up more juice as well? Any thoughts or ideas much appreciated.

Yes, it would increase the graphical lag of your computer if your graphics system isn't able to handle it. But it's not inherently increasing the network latency or the time it takes for your WoW client to talk to the WoW servers.

A very common misconception of "this game is so laggy," is actually "my computer sucks and I'm watching [YouTube] in the background and trying to raid heroic Ultraxion with 25 other people."

YouTube -- the real raid boss.

Critical lands asked:

Currently, the guild xp and guild rep a low level character gets for questing is nothing, while the guild xp and guild rep a high level character gets doing dailies is decent. Does this means that going from level 85-90 will get you absurd amounts of guild rep and xp, or is the formula for gxp changed, and if so to what?

It's hard to tell because we don't have a large enough sample size of guilds to draw upon. But I wouldn't be surprised either way, really. Players at 85 to 90 are going to hit max level in their guilds fast enough without a bump, yet at the same time, Blizzard may tune it a little to provide a reward. There hasn't been a blue post on this yet, either, which is the only way we'd know right now.


Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!