Project Lore

Lilyterrain's final adventures in Azeroth went out with a whimper, or perhaps a fart.  Barely hours into her career as a hunter, sans pet taming abilities, and the character was left for dead, never to be seen again.  I chalked up the loss of a subscriber to Blizzard's inability to grab Lesley with a compelling story in the early going.  Sure there were quests for her to tackle, but few of them were more than a collection or kill quest, let alone interesting enough to grasp her brain stem and demand its undivided attention. Due to the very nature of the early levels, how fast you get out of them, it makes sense that Blizzard didn't spend an obscene amount of time creating memorable stories.  Why invest money into something that players will complete in a few hours?  To leave a good impression on new characters of course!  Leave it to a commentator to prove myself, and various other readers, wrong, at least partially.  {swc}Ebek.Frostblade (known in the future as Ebek) was the first to point out that there is a sense of cohesion in the opening territories of the game. Paraphrasing from the comment:

• Humans:  Initially the race is worried about a Kobold threat, only to realize that VanCleef and the Defias Brotherhood, a disenfranchised group of blue-collar workers that rebuilt Stormwind, are far more troublesome.  Arguably the earliest, least subtle and best starting chain in the game.  WoW.com & WoWWiki have fantastic wrap-ups of the whole ordeal, one that stretched into vanilla WoW's endgame.
• Dwarves:  Players will continue the civil war with the Dark Iron clan while battling pockets of Trolls in their lands.
• Gnomes:  No longer secretly battling the Troggs that managed to take over Gnomeregan.  Even though the race is playable there is not much known about Gnomish culture outside their affinity for invention.  Chalk it up to the destruction of their capital city, which caused the pint-sized race to be scattered across the lands.  Starting alongside the Dwarves, you'll likely encounter a mess of trolls and dark iron mobs.
• Night Elves:  Young Night Elves battle with demons attempting to taint nature, an aspect the Night Elves hold dear.  Sound familiar?
• Draenei:  The spacegoats attempt to make contact with the rest of the Alliance while they recover their own people from the crash and clean-up the ecosystem that their ship, Exodar, tainted with foreign energies.  The story actually makes the MMO staple kill and gather quests quite logical.
• Orcs:  Orcs continue to fight for survival in Azeroth, which to many of the clans means defeating the Shadow Council that have tainted and controlled the noble creatures.
• Trolls:  The most diverse, and least played, race remains close to the Orcs who rescued them.  Thus, you pretty much go through the same things as the green skins.
• Tauren:  The Horde's nature lovers will tackle the wild bristlebacks before moving on to two factions they believe are defiling the world, the Venture Company and Bael'Dun.  Tauren players enjoy the most impressive early experiences for the Horde thanks to quest pacing, introduction to reoccurring factions and the art design of the opening lands.
• Undead:  In a twisted variation of the Draenei's starting quest (although this obviously came first), the Undead are also trying to find their place in the world.  Severely isolated from their un-trusting allies of the Horde, the Undead are left alone to fight pockets of the Alliance sooner than any other race.  As if that weren't bad enough, members of The Forsaken remain in constant struggle against their former master, the Lich King, and his Scourge.
• Blood Elves:  Although destroyed by Arthas during his initial campaign across Azeroth, the area around Silvermoon City is strikingly gorgeous.  The rapid rebuilding of the once decimated land is thanks to the race's heavy use of magic.   However, players will quickly come across numerous abominations of the magical kind in the fabled woods.

Ebek does have a point.  There is a semblance of a story in each of these zones, but most of them are entirely unremarkable and that is the issue.  Generally speaking, the content is little more than fleeting connections to land that surrounds your "birth."  Aside from the human struggles with Van Cleef, a questline that eventually leads you to Onyxia, not a single opening story will follow you past level 10.  The homogeneous experiences also offer little incentive to start alts outside of class boredom or to fill a role in a guild. Why is it that the humans alone are guided into such an awesome questline?  The rest of us struggle with monotonous grinding, while they are off saving diplomats and putting down rebellion.  Heck, for the most part the connections between the early racial quests are far to subtle to reconize while you are doing them!  We are hit with so much information up front, especially new players, that subtlety isn't the best route. The next time Blizzard adds a playable race (Pandaren please) I want to see two changes.  Mostly, I want the player to be handed a lengthy quest chain that will follow him throughout the game till the late levels.  Rather than forcing players to bounce all over creation, phase the chain so it can be completed in numerous towns.  Roaming NPCs anyone?  As for the chain's direction, it should be used to show the history of the applicable race at the get go, before moving in the direction of the current main conflict (ie Arthas for Wrath).  Second, the opening racial cinematic should set the stage for the quest clearly.  If Blizzard had grabbed Ms. iTZKooPA's attention with the opening machinima, shown her race's importance to her from the start and strung her along with interesting plot points as she became accustomed to the game, I think she'd still be playing instead of labeling MMORPGs as a chore.

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Seriously, My Girlfriend Thinks My Hobby Is A Chore! I tried to get my girlfriend to join me in Azeroth with the best of intentions.  Really, I did.  We spend tons of time together, from cooking to working on our domicile to watching numerous TV series and movies.  Sure, we have our differences - Battlestar Galactica vs The Hills - but we find common ground in every facet of our life - STRIKEOUT Plants vs Zombies STRIKEOUT Dishes vs Laundry - we both hate them.  With that in mind I thought introducing her to World of Warcraft would be worth a shot.  After all, I am forced, arm-twisting and all, into playing hours of WoW a week.  Why not spend some of that time, and get some extra material, with my girlfriend? She thought the idea was cute and obliged with a long decision making session (a female-played female drawf!).  After that tiring ordeal we waited a bit before tackling the early levels.  We never got through them.  It wasn't the controls, the universe, the inability to level outside of combat or the massacring of defenseless animals that got to my partner in crime.  She didn't dislike WoW for any of the staple reasons.  Nope, it wasn't just WoW.  It seems that she'd hate nearly any MMORPG because it was the entire idea of quests, the openness of the world and always having something to do that got to Ms. iTZKooPA.  To her, all of the content that we crave was seen as a "chore"! From a game design standpoint, I'd place the blame on WoW's lack of an engaging story.  Looking back the designers should have included an early storyline, preferably started in the opening cinematic, that would capture players right off the bat.  Extremely casual players like Lesley need to be enthralled with fun or entertaining mechanics (Tetris, Super Mario Galaxy) or a well-crafted story in the first 20 minutes or they are lost.  As most of you will agree, there is little in the way of memorable storylines or exciting gameplay in those very early levels.  Thus, the Lilyterrain experiment was an utter failure (I wish I was tauren so I could say udder and get away with it), but I am glad we attempted it. It looks like I will remain the sole player of WoW in the house, but it isn't then end of the world.  We do plenty of other activities together to keep us both happy.  Having your own little slice of life to yourself isn't a bad thing either.  I wonder what the success rate on converting your partner to an MMOG is.  How many of you have tried and failied?  How many of you have pulled off this life achievement?  How many dare not try for fear of ruining your "me" time?

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Also didn't expect a nose ring.

When I introduced my girlfriend to the classes of WoW, I had two guesses in the back of my mind, a druid or a hunter.  This may seem stereotypical of me (sorry to the bra burners out there, but it seems that many women like playing a nurturing role even in their high fantasy), but my assumption was based on my girlfriend. Although, the statistics did play a part.  I have known a few locks played by women, but the whole aligning with dark magic and demons just doesn't fit her. Despite the high probability of Lesley selecting a hunter, I honestly thought she would go with a druid.  This guess was based more on the knowing her part and less on the numbers and graphs I love so much.  She is a rather earthy person, doing her best to be one of Al Gore's minions, giving to Goodwill, hiking around the planet and things of that nature.  The keyword there is nature, she loves it.  Perhaps it was the "primal connection to the beasts of Azeroth" that drew her to the fold of ranged DPSers.  Now that I have dwelt on this further, I should have had a Shaman in the running. Race selection was a little less straight forward.  At first she was leaning towards rolling a Tauren rather than the short and stocky Dwarves.  Apparently the switch was influenced by me a bit.  My description of the Alliance versus the Horde possibly labeled one side as the "bad" guys and the other as "good" guys, although that was not my intent by any means.  In lieu of describing the factions at all, I should have just pointed her to Blizzard's description on Horde versus Alliance and the races.  That would have rendered any subconscious feelings I have about the "misunderstood" Horde moot. A little personal history, I wanted to roll Horde from the start, but all of my friends went Alliance...After being forced into my faction choice, I was then forced into my racial selection by my ex-girlfriend.  I had basically no choice when I entered WoW. T_T.  Lesley's perception of the Horde may have been swayed a bit, but I had little to do with her selection of a stocky female as her avatar! I am a bit baffled as to why she settled on a Dwarf, or even the Tauren for that matter.  She has had little experience with high fantasy (or, and possibly more accurately, never really cared for it) as evidenced by not knowing what an Orc (or Ork) was.  In conjunction with that, aside from viewing SolidSamm in action, Lesley knows nothing about Warcraft either. Despite my best efforts, there is a slim chance that I ruled out her playing a human.  When we first started discussing the whole prospect weeks ago, I mentioned how unimaginative selecting a Human as a race was to me.  Who knows if she took it to heart, or even remembered it though.  Night Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves may have been all that was open to her.  Draenei you say?  Space goats may have gotten ruled out for being such an oddity until Ms. iTZKooPA becomes more familiar with the universe and its lore.  Perhaps as an alt if we get that far. For reasons unknown to me, it ended up being a stout, female Dwarf hunter.  I highly doubt she looked over and analyzed the racial traits and figured that a Dwarven Hunter would get a small bonus.  I would love to be surprised by such a fact though! The whole process took more than an hour to complete, and at that point we packed it in and called it a night.  Lilyterran, the fierce dwarven hunter with generations of training, has yet to encounter a single quest, or even load the opening cinematic.  Now to walk the fine line of helping while not hand-holding...A battle for another day. Oh, and I forgot to sign her up via Recruit-a-Friend.  What an idiot I am!  Think Blizzard will let me beg my way into it?  And thanks for the tips, keep em coming!

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Not the actual occurrence.

I have touched on this subject before, but I never truly broke it down for you. I have been dating a lovely lady for almost eight months now and we have enjoyed our time together thoroughly. Heck, those vacations I took, the ski trip and holiday break, were with her. Needless to say, we fancy each other quite a bit, and yet she has managed to avoid a large facet of my life, video games.

She knows that I enjoy them and write about them frequently, but she hardly ever sees me play them. Unlike some gamers, I am not ashamed of my hobby. In fact, I tend to glorify it in my clothing, my home's decorations and even the name of one of my ferrets, Cloud. Lesley just happens to miss most of my playtime due to work hours. So the issue of games didn't really come up for awhile.

When I discovered that my fair lady still thought of video games as Tetris, I knew I had a job on my hands. I introduced her slowly to the newer games, mainly focusing on lighthearted, easy to grasp Wii titles before handing her the axe for Guitar Hero III. Then one night, I handed her the controller during a mission in Grand Theft Auto IV. Hilarity ensued.

Ms. iTZKooPA turned the game into “Grand Civilian Auto,” slowly driving through traffic as if she were in the South. After waiting at lights, allowing other automobiles to have the right of way, and extending the crosswalk to pedestrians, her vehicle strayed into a barrier into a Toll Booth. It caught fire. Panic quickly consumed the rookie gamer behind the controller.

Lesley spammed buttons on the controller until Niko fled the burning car. Once she swiveled the camera around, a horrible realization struck her, half a dozen cars were piled up behind hers trashed vehicle, blocking the exit she was planning on taking. As the fire roared louder and pedestrians begin fleeing, Niko turned...and got back in the car seconds before it exploded.

Our friends who were there upon the fiery demise of Niko have never forgotten the episode. Nor will they let Lesley, but I didn't recant the tale to make fun. No, no, I simply wanted to give everyone a feel for what kind of gamer is finally going to make the leap into Azeroth.

Just to be clear, I am not forcing her to do this, nor is she going the “if you can't beat them, join them” route. We both believe that the experiment will be a fun endeavor and something new to do with each other. So this weekend, Lesley will subscribe to her first MMOG and make her first character. While I will be by her side on a new alt, SolidPumice a soon-to-be Prot Warrior, I will not be helping her too much. The discoveries and designs MMOs have to offer are half the fun.  Wonder if Recruit-A-Friend still works...

Who knows, you may see some Horde-based coverage on ProjectLore as I won't restrict her faction choice!  Any one who has done the same have any tips?

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