I'm celebrating WoW's upcoming 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.
The following was originally posted on October 28th, 2006 under the title "Another Lazy Day":
... another day of playing with Nemi. Sorry, I wish I had something more interesting to talk about, but I've simply been enjoying a lazy weekend.
As for WoW, Nemi made me travel a lot today, and we did our first quest in a larger group - as in, about half a dozen people. It was fun, even if we died a few times and the NPC involved was quite weird. (He would complain about being hurt while moving along at snail's pace, spot an enemy, run and fight it, then run back to where he was and go back to walking really, really slowly.1) We even repeated the whole thing three or four times, once because we failed and another time just because we wanted to be nice and help the other people doing it.
It was a fun experience all around, death and all, because everyone involved was very nice and fun.2 There was this guy from Poland who fought until his weapons disintegrated, a level ten warrior who insisted on following us around even though he kept dying and talked about wanting to buy a horse for a few silver coins... it was rather endearing. I also liked being the priest in a group of close-combat specialists3, because I got in relatively little trouble (except when all of us died). I need to work on keeping track of where people are though - it's very annoying when someone dies and you have to send out the whole party to look for the corpse to be able to resurrect them.4
1 I can tell from the description that this was my very first escort quest: Mission In Action in Redridge Mountains, which involves escorting Corporal Keeshan from being imprisoned at the back of a cave all the way back to town. You can tell I was not yet familiar with the tropes of the genre.
2 And thus, my love for pick-up groups was born...
3 Imagine if this had become the common term to describe melee dps... LF CC would have a whole different meaning!
4 It may be that I was just being dumb, but I do seem to remember that in those early days you indeed couldn't target someone for resurrection via the unit frames (at least not if they had already released) so you had to find their corpse out in the world to cast the spell on them... which could sometimes be challenging if the death had occurred during a bout of absolute mayhem involving fears and the like.
Posts
