In the shadow of no dam

NAANDIMIRA
Level 44 draenei mage
Thousand Needles

MACABURR
Level 23 dwarf warrior
The Wetlands 
 

Time is more than wibbly-wobbly in Azeroth — it contorts, in ways a pretzel would envy, to serve the twin needs of storytelling and gameplay. Thus, even though people may have been playing the game for years before you, for your particular story time starts at zero every time you create a new character. To take the two examples I've personally experienced: If you're a draenei, the Exodar has only just crashed on Azeroth; if you're a dwarf, the Cataclysm has only just happened.

I said time starts at zero, but that's not quite true: the oldest players remember a time before the Exodar arrived on Azeroth, and I think most remember the time before the Cataclysm. (1) This also means that from one perspective, the new draenei is starting almost four years before the new dwarf, which is one reason you shouldn't think too hard about World of Warcraft.

I'm one of the newbies, so I don't remember a time before the Cataclysm. That makes me traveling in Azeroth a little like how it would be in real life if I were to visit New York City, a place I've never been. I've seen plenty of photos, TV shows, films, read plenty of books set in NYC — but I've never actually had the experience of standing in a New York City where two 110-story towers rise over lower Manhattan, and now I never will. (Or at least, not those particular 110-story towers.) Likewise, I've never been to The Park in Stormwind, never experienced Loch Modan as a place that was filled with water, or Thousand Needles as a place that wasn't.

A lot of stories start just before or just after a (lowercase-c) cataclysm, and there's a reason for that: it's inherently dramatic, increasing the challenges that those who survive face. Plenty of adventures start off with adventurers wandering a ruined land, rich in history — that is, rich in backstory. There's a lot of history in Azeroth as well — but one of the things that makes WoW interesting and unusual is that players have experienced at least some of that history.

That's something that exists, in potential, in all shared worlds. The only other multiplayer online game I have extensive experience with — you couldn't really call it massively multiplayer — was Myst Online: Uru Live, set in a city deep underground that's been lost, oh, at least twice, if not three or four times by now. I was there the (depending on how you count) third time it was lost, and there again when the cavern was re-reopened, and the only real reason I'm not there now is that the current, open-source iteration isn't yet available for Mac.

I was there the night the collapse killed Rose, and an insane bahro killed poor Wheely. A memorial went up that included their names, and others. At least one of the characters memorialized turned out not to actually be dead (I was there when he returned, too), but the memorial also included the in-game names of players who had died — the real-life players, I should stress, not just their characters; I suppose their names wouldn't have been there in a more massively MORPG, but the fact that it was we happy few tightened the sense of family.

But the cavern itself didn't change in a substantial way while I was there. It might have, likely would have, had Cyan had time and money enough (and there was the incident of the wall collapse that opened up the tavern area, but that was before my time, in the first beta before Ubisoft pulled the plug and D'ni was lost for the second time).

Azeroth has changed substantially — again, before my time, but not before the time of many if not most of WoW's players. Once the mighty Stonewrought Dam held back the massive Loch Modan; now the dam lies in ruins, though how precisely it came to be in ruins seems to be a matter of some argument. Many of the level 10-20 dwarven quests in Loch Modan, and the level 20-30 quests in the Wetlands far below, downstream from the loch and dam, deal with the effects of the dam's collapse.

Likewise, Thousand Needles used to be a salt flat marked by occasional spires — opportune, like the salt flats on Earth, for trying out rocket speed machines. But the water that made the spires and canyon and left the salt has returned with a vengeance, and what's left of the rocket park is full fathom five. (Actually I have no idea how deep it's really supposed to be.)

For many games, this would suffice for backstory — and for new players like me, arriving post-Cataclysm, it essentially is backstory. But other people I know have raced rockets along the Thousand Needles salt flats, and fished from the Loch Modan dock that is no longer near water. To them, it's more than backstory spoken of by the game's non-player characters, or NPCs — it's part of the history they share with the game.

Which makes things more confusing for the newbies like me, the same way as a native offering directions will tell you to turn left where the Dairy Queen used to be. My own native guide will have to stop every once in a while to work out whether a memory of where a particular item is or how a particular quest went is pre- or post-Cataclysm. Websites I consult — WoWWiki, while frequently helpful, is also bad in this regard — sometimes have outdated information, or in WoWWiki's case bury the current, post-Cataclysm info under the outdated pre-Cataclysm data. (Are there any servers that still have the pre-Cataclysm WoW?)

They're events that happened years ago. And, if you just started a character, just happened, right before you arrived at your starting point. Quests I've taken touch on things that both just happened and are almost ancient history: When exactly was King Varian Wrynn kidnapped and ransomed? And is Onyxia dead, or alive, or what?

Right. Don't think about it.

(1) Another source of confusion: the login screen shows the huge dragon Deathwing arriving at Stormwind and is labeled "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" — but in the free starter game or the purchased Battle Chest this turns out to signify only that the Cataclysm has occurred in your game, and you still need to buy the Cataclysm expansion to get its extra stuff.

So, do you need to buy the expansions at the start? Depends. Most of the extra stuff with the expansions only enters in when you get to and past the game's original level 60 limit, but at lower levels the expansions let you play extra races and classes, and the Cataclysm expansion lets you use the profession of archaeology starting at level 20 — the basic game has archaeology trainers, just to be more confusing, but gives you a blank popup window if you try to train with them before buying the Cataclysm expansion.

The current expansions, Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, have gone on sale for very cheap at places like Best Buy in the runup to the late-September launch of the new expansion, Mists of Pandaria — and if you hunt around on the Battle.net website you can find an option that lets you pre-buy Pandaria and buy the the other two expansions for only a few dollars more than the cost of Pandaria by itself. (I'd offer a link to the page but since I've already bought it Battle.net won't let me back there.)