A confusion of choices

It takes a little while to download. Then it takes a further while to download, because it turns out the first thing you downloaded was the program for downloading the rest of it. I don't know how long it took precisely, because I set it going either before I went to bed or before I went to work, I don't remember now which.

The bewilderment of choices started as soon as I launched the game — actually, in a lot of ways, the most bewildering moment is when you start the game for the first time. A dozen races to choose from. Male or female? Alliance or Horde? Warrior? Hunter? Mage? Priest? Shaman? Druid? Warlock? PvP? PvE? RP? POE OPE?



Server first.  I knew that, in order to manage its millions of players, World of Warcraft divides them up among many servers, aka "realms," organized geographically to reduce lag time; I knew that to keep things (relatively) harmonious the servers were further subdivided according to style of play.

I was expecting two such styles to choose from and got four, only one of which I immediately recognized: PvP, short for player vs. player — a sort of free-for-all in which you can attack, and be attacked by, any other player at any time in (almost) any place for any reason. For a lot of WoW players, this is the pure form of the game, and anyone who doesn't play it this way is a wuss, derided as a "carebear" — an attitude that was one of the reasons it took so long for me to try WoW (more on this in a later post).

The other options were "Normal," "RP" (for role-playing), and "RP-PvP" and that's where the confusion started. The option I was looking for is called "PvE" or player vs. environment — i.e., playing only against the game itself. I think of that as RP — the general class of games to which WoW belongs is called the MMORPG, for massively multiplayer online role-playing game — but it turns out there's a distinction between PvE (which turns out to be what WoW labels "Normal") and role-playing, and it was only much later, in researching this very post, that I found out what the distinction was. Essentially it's in how much you stay in character while playing and interacting with other players, whether you act like someone sitting behind a computer playing a game (in which case Normal/PvE is more for you) or like an adventurer wandering Azeroth (role-playing). RP-PvP, then, is staying in character while attacking other players.

All of this wound up being moot just then: I went back to my Facebook chats with the friend who invited me and found out which server she's on, and after a bit worked out how to select that server, which turned out to be RP. (If you're starting from scratch, the game suggests servers based on the style of play you choose, with the option of choosing one for you at random.)


Next came choosing the character I would play. The basic binary choices are male or female, and Alliance or Horde; once upon a time the latter was more of a straight-up hero-or-villain choice, but I take it things have gotten a bit grayer since, and now it's more order-or-chaos. The Alliance and the Horde each have five or six races to choose from, with some being off limits depending on what expansion you haven't yet bought. (The upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion will add a race, the Pandaren, that doesn't start in either camp but lets players choose which faction to join after they've played for a while.)  You also have to choose a class — the type of character you'll play, whether fighter, healer, or magic user, or various combinations of the three — with some classes not being available to all races, and some getting bonuses depending on race.

After sitting vaporlocked for a while flipping among the choices, I defaulted to an Alliance mage. A female Draenei, a race that looks like a sort of kinder, gentler demon (which actually turns out to be exactly what they are, but more on that in a later post, too): Why not?

Name? Name. More vaporlock. Then I notice a button under the name field that offers random suggestions (how they're generated, I'm not sure). I click it a few times, wishing I'd written down or could go back to one I'd skipped, and finally decided the last one would suffice. "Naandimira" it was.

I clicked the button, and a portentous voice told me of the Draenei as the virtual camera panned from a large building, across a wide swath of land with large red crystals sticking out everywhere, to a small wrecked building... and to my starting place. It turned out that the small wrecked building was an escape pod, and eventually that the large building was a wrecked spaceship. I wasn't from Azeroth originally, I found out. I was a crash survivor.

The adventure had begun...