Staying In The Game
The game also keeps you informed of things like how many boar you've killed as part of a starter-quest; there's a sparkling effect on dead bodies which have not yet been looted; and in general the quest system guides you in the right direction. The idea is to stamp out confusion that might conspire to spoil the experience early on. Even later on the game aims to maintain this standard of logic - quests will be logged forever until you discard them, and it'll be obvious which ones are still in progress and which not, and even as you level up the team wants to keep it lively and have you find new quests rewarding in different ways, rather than just having you move from point to point and then moving the points farther apart in time. Even the process of dying and respawning has been simplified - here you turn into a ghost and have to go and find your corpse, without being penalised to a huge extent for having died as happens in some other games.
The experience curve will also be gentler - you'll probably find that you level up quicker in WoW than any other MMORPG you've played, and there's a steady train of different activities and options for you as you advance through the levels. There are level-specific quests and trainers dotted around your opening encampment, and there are of course all manner of level-specific items, weapons, monsters to battle, and places to go. That's before you consider all the possible avenues of exploration - the taxi rides, the intercontinental zeppelin travel (another magical rollercoaster tour through the game's visual panache), and the game's enormous cities, all of which have the believably vast scale of something out of the Lord of the Rings films, and are full of landmarks and hidden depths; things you remember; things you can point out to other people; and individuality and spark that you might not expect.
In some MMORPGs we've played (and we do play them to some extent, believe it or not), you can visit a location and get the impression that the designers and artists were in such a mad panic at the mountain of work they had to do that they just put down a base coat and ran away. That exasperated splatter-the-walls approach seems to be largely absent in World of Warcraft - another product of having all the chickens and eggs safely cooped up. You know, you could probably go and find them if you tried to; they'd probably look great.
Perhaps the best example though of Blizzard's ambition to encourage newcomers, and gamers who can't dedicate the 40 hours a week that some of its fans will plough into their characters, is the rest system, which gives you an experience bonus for the time you're not playing the game, meaning it's perfectly viable to play casually and still keep up with your slightly more addled friends as they surge through the higher levels.
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