Draenei mage
Level 1
Ammen Vale
The first surprise was that I was a survivor of a spaceship (well, planar ship) crash. The second surprise was that the crash had just happened — that, apparently, the draenei had only just arrived on Azeroth: my first experience with wibbly-wobbly World of Warcraft time.
I awoke — yes, I'll generally be using "I" and "me" in referring to the character; deal with it — in a valley studded with large red crystals; the crystals turned out not to be a natural feature, and indeed served to drive much of the plot that followed.
(I should also note that, what with one distraction and another, it's been much longer since I actually played this bit than I intended it to be when I wrote this. Which in fact is another reason I kept putting it off. So I'm supplementing memory with Wowpedia, but a lot of bits will still be somewhat vague.)
A lone draenei was there to greet me — the first quest giver, as indicated by the large yellow exclamation point above his head — telling me that the Exodar had crashed and we were lucky to be alive. The first quest was a simple one, establishing the pattern for quests that introduce a new area: the entirety of the quest was "go talk to the guy down the path." The guy down the path, in turn, gave me my first real quest: to go get blood from the vale moths nearby in order to replenish healing crystals to help the wounded. What he didn't say — just assumed you knew — was that this meant killing them. My first combat.
I was spoiled a little by Portal and its sequel, my previous major game fixations, which walked you through the basic keyboard commands from the start. WoW assumes you know about WASD and kind of throws you into the deep end; there is a system of popup windows when new stuff appears that's helpful as far as it goes, but it could have gone farther. I tried reading the freaking manual, but there were two problems: one was that the book's conversion to an electronic file was ham-handed, with graphics in a memory-hogging format that made simply scrolling the page a chore (this might not have been such an issue if I had a more powerful computer, and/or weren't trying to read it while WoW was running), but the bigger problem was that what it was describing wasn't what I was seeing — I suspect it's at least a version or two behind the current release. I do hope they have a new book releasing with the upcoming patch, which will bring even more changes.
So, as I said: he told me to get blood from the moths, but he didn't say how. This led to an entertaining (read: frustrating) few minutes clicking on moths with nothing happening, before I finally guessed that I was supposed to fight them. My initial spell worked well enough to start with, but figuring out what to do after that, with an angry moth attacking me, took a little bit to work out. I don't remember whether the popup window told me to right click on the moth in order to use my weapon, or whether I finally worked that out for myself. It didn't kill me, and I did eventually kill it, but still. And aha: the blood is among the rewards for killing it, what I would come to learn were called item drops.
(I just deleted a longish discussion of the auto attack feature that was threatening to get longer as being too much of a digression; I'll have to come back to that sometime. This was also around the time I worked out what my WoW-playing friends had meant when they referred to "aggro": creatures that aren't hostile to begin with generally ignore you until you attack them; any creature or person who is attacked becomes hostile specifically to the attacker. This focused hostility is what used to be called aggro, although Blizzard now seems to prefer the term "threat.")
Quest followed quest, as they do (at least for a while). Many of the quests had the spiritually and ecologically minded draenei trying to clean up after themselves, undoing the damage done to the native flora and fauna by the crash, and particularly by contamination from the power crystals (the big red ones dotting the landscape) left behind by the crash.
This led to my next bout of major frustration. The object of this quest was to disperse a neutralizing agent in a nearby lake contaminated by a large power crystal. Again, they could have been a little clearer about how. It said I was supposed to disperse the agent in the lake, so I swam to the vicinity of the crystal, clicked on the icon for the dispersant, then clicked on the lake surface.
"Do you want to destroy this inventory item?" the game asked.
Well, no, I want to use it. I clicked "no." But how am I supposed to use it? Perhaps destroying it is how I use it? I tried again and clicked "yes." It, of course, destroyed the item without any benefit to the lake whatsoever. But I did learn how to get rid of an item from inventory if I'm not near a merchant!
OK, now what? I still had the quest and no way to fulfill it. I went back to the quest giver, who started bawling — literally; WoW has character animation and sound effects for it — because of what would happen to the poor lake because I'D FAILED MY QUEST, though she didn't put that last part in so many words; I was the one doing that. There didn't seem to be an option for "give me more neutralizing agent."
There was an option for "abandon quest." I tried that; the yellow exclamation point immediately popped up above her head again. Aha: there's a reset button. I started the quest again, got the neutralizing agent and this time worked out that I was supposed to click on the crystal (the cursor turns into a gear when you hover it over something useful, and the gear turns gold when you're near enough to do it). OK, mission accomplished.
Each quest sends you further and further afield from your starting point. The general pattern is that you start in a fairly isolated place for levels 1-5, move to a broader area for levels 6-10, then graduate to a third area, a sort of finishing school, for levels 11-20. Ammen Vale is isolated even for a starting area — in researching this post I found out that it's the hardest area to get to for Horde players trying to get the explore-the-world achievement. The guards at the passes mean business.
That doesn't mean there are no actual enemies to deal with. One quest sent me to look for a missing scout; the scout turned out to be near death, warning of a nearby camp of blood elf scouts. I killed the number directed by the quest, but they kept coming back — of course they did, because this is a multiplayer game and there have to be more for the next player to take this quest to kill. That sometimes makes progress difficult to gauge, and frequently suggests that in this place, no matter what the quest-completion texts might tell you, progress is a simple impossibility. Of course, because there will be new players right behind you wanting to fight.
(I think this may also have been where I first learned — a lesson that to my irritation I had to keep learning — that you don't want to pause to catch your breath and figure out how to start the return trip right after, and right where, you kill the boss. Bosses respawn pretty quickly, again because there might be someone else doing the quest right behind you, leading to the occasional ridiculous sight of fighting a boss while standing over the same boss' corpse...)
Eventually, I got all the quests done. They're designed to take you through level 5 if you do most of them; if you do all of them you wind up a bit higher — I don't remember where I wound up; 6 or 7, I think. But I did eventually finish them all and got sent out to another "go talk to this guy" quest at Azure Watch, the next headquarters — which was originally going to be part of this telling, but I think I've gone on long enough for one post. It was my first step out into the larger World of Warcraft.
It led almost immediately to my first death.
Freaking murloc.
I detest murlocs.
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