A New Journey
On that basis though, you might reasonably anticipate that the set-up itself is, to a certain extent at least, steeped in proven MMORPG convention. As you start out you're expected to pick from a clutch of some eight different races (Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, Undead) split into nine different classes (Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior), and divided again into Alliance and Horde factions - the goodies and the baddies, for want of a better description. You can manually customise or just randomise your appearance, choose which gender you'd like to be, give your character a funny name (and, with apologies to Blizzard's Chris Sigaty, "Grom" is not a funny name), and then spawn on a server for the first time.
Once there you're expected to take on quests, establish yourself by learning a pair of professions (previously known as 'trade-skills'), mix with your fellow adventurers, level-up your character by earning experience from plundering and experimentation, and even just plain old exploring - find a new area and it'll be marked on your map forever more and you'll earn experience points for discovering it. Eventually, you'll also invest in the talents system, which helps define your character's individuality - the idea being that by placing the customisation largely in the hands of the talents system, you can pick virtually any combination of race and class to start with and not find yourself hamstrung by your choices at a later date when you decide to branch out. You'll be able to unlearn professions pretty easily should you want to try your hand at something else, but unlearning talents will be a bit harder. Blizzard views these as the defining characteristics of your adventurer, so there will probably be a specific quest or cost associated with unlearning talents, and any time you might try to reacquire that talent at a later date you'll have to go through the process of becoming proficient at it all over again.
But, just in case any of your eyes are starting to glaze over, it's important to stress that Blizzard is making the sense of accessibility key to the way the game works, minimising the dullness that sometimes pervades other MMORPGs as the player or group moves between objectives and enemies. World of Warcraft tries to make it obvious where to go, for a start - non-player characters with quests to offer are marked out by question marks floating over their heads, and they also appear on a mini-map, while NPCs whose quests you've already accepted are marked with grey question mark icons. Quests are also colour-coded to reflect difficulty, which is revised as you level up, and you can also invite a friend to share in the quest you're tackling, without him having to go off and find the spot where you picked it up in the first place.
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