Quite the journey

I've been thinking recently about my early experiences with WoW. It's been a long time since I first started out, and the game has almost become somewhat second nature to me. I don't know nearly everything about the game, but I am still very familiar with a great deal of it.

I remember first starting out, and getting lost in the gnome and dwarf starting area because I thought it was so huge, then as I go through the cave and reach the other side only to find a new area much bigger, and realizing that this was just a fraction of the entire world. I was a little overwhelmed at first.

Playing alongside my friend, we eventually made it to Loch Modan, which was a nice change from the snowy Dun Morogh. We decided to go exploring and found the entrance to the Badlands. Oh man, we were only level 12 or so, and seeing those dwarves with skulls for levels was so scary. We had no idea what level they were, but we booked it back to the Loch very quickly.

Now I pretty much know all the zones. Maybe not everything there is to know about them, but I know the names, level ranges, where any towns are, and the other basic stuff you pick up along the way. I can read other blogs, and when they explain their progression through a zone I have a picture in my mind of exactly what they're doing.

Thinking about that, I realize that anybody who has never played or isn't to experienced with WoW would never have enough familiarity with it to follow and explanation like that. All the bloggers out there assume their readers have at least a basic knowledge of the game in order to explain things, otherwise a lot of their posts would be impossibly long with explanations and pictures to point out every reference you would need.

Luckily, anyone who has enough interest in the game to actually think about looking up blogs about it is almost guaranteed to have the required knowledge to follow what the blogs are talking about. I guess I just find it amazing that a game can have so much detail that you need a good amount of experience with it just to understand what's going on in someone else's story about it.

Soon I will be taking another step and changing realms to play with some other friends. At this point I might just move all my characters over there. I really don't want to lose that synergy they have with their professions.

I also want to have some options open to me on which character I want to play. Even if one character turns into my main and the others end up being solo projects, I still want to be on the same server to get that interaction with my other friends.

I sure hope all my characters get to keep their names. It would be quite disappointing if I had to change any of them.