Lore and order

I first saw World of Warcraft over the shoulder of a friend, and was quite surprised because it didn’t match up with my mental image at all. I think that was likely because I hadn’t ever seen a paid MMO before – the ones I’d witnessed were produced on a smaller budget with a lot less quality than WoW. Additionally, I’d played Warcraft 2 and 3, so somehow just focusing on the one character didn’t match up with my images of it. I knew of the game, of course – I had friends talking about it from the beta to launch and onwards well before I ever saw so much as a screenshot of it. That first glimpse was a couple of days after battlegrounds first came out, since he was trying those out.

A long while later, I was staying at a friend’s place for the night when my second introduction to WoW occurred. He’d purchased one of the $2 trial CDs that you can find for sale everywhere (and which probably attribute to WoW’s accessibility quite a bit, since it’s rare to have an MMO with a demo) and had fired it up for a bit, saying that it was pretty neat and I might like it. He’d never played the Warcraft RTS games like I had, so it was all new to him, but I was keen to give it a second look. I ended up using his account to make my own character, my very first – his name was Thrudd, and he was an Orc Warrior. By the time I was Level 3, I knew I had to give the game a whirl myself.

So I did. I purchased my own trial CD and played the game a hell of a lot during that trial period. I was so enthralled with it that I bought a second trial CD since I didn’t have the funds needed at the time to buy the full game (and anyway, Burning Crusade was literally around the corner by a month or two away as a point of reference). Shortly after Burning Crusade launched, I finally bought the real game for myself along with the xpac and got stuck into it. The rest is history. I will also freely admit that my first character made on the full game was a Blood Elf, simply because I hadn’t tested those yet. RP servers hadn’t ruined them forever for me by this point.

Speaking of RP servers, that’s where I rolled those first few characters. And that really gets me to the point of why I started playing in the first place.

See, for me it wasn’t the allure of the MMO genre. I didn’t even like MMOs at this point (and I’d argue that I still don’t) since, again, WoW was the first real, paid for, non-Korean-grind-to-insanity kind of MMO. It wasn’t necessarily on the strength of the game, though it always has been fun. The two primary reasons that I played World of Warcraft were that I had enjoyed the RTS games immensely and really wanted to see how the story and the world continued, and because it was a new stomping ground for me to RP in.

At this point in my life, I was a rabid roleplayer. I’m still very much into it these days, though I’m not nearly as active in as numerous communities as I was then. I’m far more selective now about my roleplaying companions, although admittedly I’m not entirely content about how infrequent my RP is these days. Regardless, that’s for another time. The point remains: I was a big RPer, and when I saw that WoW had RP servers, I knew I had to be a part of it. I loved the games, loved Blizzard’s comparatively unique take on Orcs and Trolls, liked the Night Elves and the concept of playable Undead… and eventually came to adore the Draenei and their complete uniqueness.

So that’s why. I did it for the lore. And the more I came to play the game, the more I explored the world, the more quests I completed, the more characters I made and roleplayed… the more totally engrossed I became in the lore. It was a lot of fun for me to read up on the stories of the game, particularly the parts that I had missed by being a BC Baby, and being a big part of the action was very appealing. Every character I made from then on was designed from an RP standpoint before they were played, and I tinkered with their stories as time went on. To this day, I get writing practice by RPing and writing short stories regarding Arisza.

Arisza has a fairly fun story, really. I set her up as a librarian on Shattrath during the peaceful years of life on Draenor. You know the sort – the quiet, shy, bookworm kind of character who preferred to read about lives than live them. And she could have lived a lot of them – Draenei, you know, and Arisza has been around for well over a millenium at least. So she sat there for hundreds of years, keeping chronicles of Draenei history and culture and art from being lost in the Nether.

Then suddenly, Orcs. And her library *was* lost to the Nether, along with most of Shattrath and all its defenders… including her parents. That was something of a wake up call for her, and Arisza intended from then on to take more action in the world. She wanted to work to preserve history  rather than keep records of it that could be so easily lost and destroyed. So she learnt how to fight, and ended up going with the group that hijacked the Exodar from the Blood Elves and brought it to Azeroth. Soon enough she found herself exploring this new planet and getting very, very deeply attached. So she vowed that she’d do whatever she could to avoid a second Draenor and preserve Azeroth to the best of her ability… in both her new way, and her old way.

Arisza reads a lot of books and goes exploring as much as she can. She’s something of a Draenei Indiana Jones, and I’ve often tried to play up that aspect of her character. In a way, she represents my love of the Warcraft universe – she wants to learn it all and cherish it, just as I do. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog, and that’s the reason I’m playing Arisza as I do.

And for that reason, it was plainly obvious to me from the very outset just what kind of title I wanted Arisza to wear. Even as I levelled her and geared her up to replace the aging Paladin character, I began to work on the side at the real achievement of her character. Finally, a few months ago, I got what I wanted.

Cataclysm is going to change Warcraft forever, and much of the locations and the lore that I came to really respect and appreciate and love will disappear. So if nothing else, I’m glad I got to see it all before it went.

Like Arisza, I’m a preserver of history. A couple of years from now, I’ll be able to tell new players of World of Warcraft just how things have changed, what used to be interesting and cool. Maybe one day I’ll even be worthy of the title of Loremaster myself. We’ll see, I suppose. Either way, WoW grabbed my attention for the lore and the RP, and to this day the lore and RP keeps me here.

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