The World is the Main Character
It's November 2004, and I am not at the World of Warcraft launch. That probably requires some explanation, because I had been playing Blizzard games for nearly a decade at this point – Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo – and I was as rabid a fan of Warcraft III as anyone you were likely to meet. You would be right to assume I was first in line. You would be wrong.
The reason why was embarrassingly simple: fifteen dollars a month. As a broke college student, that wasn't a subscription fee, it was a philosophical statement about what things cost and whether I deserved them. By contrast, Warcraft III was an act of grace – one purchase for the base game, one for the expansion, and then nothing. Three-plus years of entertainment for under a hundred dollars. Three years of WoW would cost six hundred. I did the math. The value proposition simply wasn’t there.
So the launch came and went. I kept playing Warcraft III, and though I would occasionally play ladder matches, I spent a surprising amount of time playing on custom maps – Defense of the Ancients, specifically, which at the time felt like the most elegant thing anyone had ever built inside someone else's game. Then a friend gifted me Guild Wars for my birthday in the summer of 2005. It was free to play past the box price, stylish enough, and fine. I didn’t love it with the same intensity – the lore and storyline and worldbuilding weren’t at the same level – but it didn't cost me anything, and so it held my attention through sheer inertia.
Then I met Jared. He was the roommate of a friend of mine who attended university in another town, and we became friends. He also had a WoW subscription. One weekend, I came to visit and crashed on their couch, and on Monday morning, when he was going to go to class, he sat me down at his computer before leaving and said: “you need to play this game.”
He was right, I did need to play it. I tried to resist it, because I knew the cost. I failed.
Booting into WoW for the first time felt like déjà vu, except déjà vu is the wrong word because it implies a false memory. This wasn't false. I had been in the “world of Warcraft” before – which is to say, Azeroth – in the prior games in the series, through years of strategy maps and campaign missions set in this exact geography. What I hadn't done was stand in it. Walk through it. Be small inside it.
There’s a quote attributed to Chris Metzen6 about the game: “The main character of World of Warcraft is the world.” Azeroth itself. I didn't fully understand that until the moment I loaded into Northshire Abbey and thought, “oh my god, this is just the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” Then I left the starting zone, crossed into Goldshire, received a quest to carry something to Stormwind – and realized Northshire was actually just a podunk little suburb, pleasant and forgettable, compared to the city waiting on the other side of that wall.
In retrospect, this makes sense at both a practical and narrative level. Player characters do not achieve things on their own, at least not when dealing with current content. The raids require a group of adventurers, so when you defeat the big bad enemy, you are just one of ten to forty people who took part. How can you be the main character of a story when you are a tiny minority of it?
My choice of character was partly practical, partly sentimental. I chose a human rogue – not because I felt any particular affinity for leather armor and daggers, but because rogues use energy, a constantly regenerating resource, very similar to how it operates in Guild Wars. In contrast, the slow mana regeneration of most WoW classes felt like waiting for paint to dry. That was the practical part.
The race choice was pure sentiment, because I wanted to explore the human lands. I wanted to walk the ground where Warcraft III had happened – where Medivh delivered his warning to King Terenas, where Arthas chased Kel'Thuzad across a dying kingdom, where he finally, irreversibly, lost his mind and ordered the purging of Stratholme. And then I realized that the human faction in WoW was based out of Stormwind, and Lordaeron was at the far north of the continent, and I couldn't reach those places yet. But I could walk the streets of Stormwind.
Walking into Stormwind on foot, the first things you encounter are the statues. Khadgar. Alleria. Turalyon. The heroes of the Second War, rendered in stone, permanent. To a new player, they're a bit of flavor – a nice touch, a bit of atmosphere. To a player who had spent years immersed in this lore, they were monuments to names I'd been carrying for a long time. I stood there longer than a person on a quest to deliver a parcel probably should have.
I looked for Lothar for a long time before someone told me I wouldn’t be able to find him. He's in a high-level zone, facing Blackrock Mountain – where he fell defending these territories. Of course he is.
I couldn't justify the subscription immediately. Not until spring of 2006, when I moved home, found work, and finally had the combination of time, access, and money that the game required. When I did, I rolled an orc shaman – I'd been watching Naruto when I named the character, so he became Enma – and went to find my friends.
What I found, instead, was the real boss of Vanilla WoW. It’s not one of the raid bosses; it’s not Ragnaros, or Nefarian, or C’Thun. The real final boss of World of Warcraft was logistics.
The raids at the time were tuned for forty players, and we were expected to coordinate that with mid-2000s tools. There was no Discord, no Raid Helper, and no LFG algorithm doing the hard work for you. Your guild probably had a website, maybe with some forums. You scheduled a raid time and hoped the right thirty-nine other people showed up – people who had cleared the attunement chains, who had the right gear, who hadn't logged off in frustration the night before. Too often you'd end up with thirty-five. Sometimes thirty. The raid leader would stare at the roster, do the math, and call it. Not tonight. Break into groups. UBRS runs for everyone.
There was a dominant philosophy at the time, that more players meant a more epic experience. Forty people storming a volcanic mountain to kill an elemental lord felt genuinely historic in a way that a lesser number never quite would, even later when the design was tighter and the experience arguably better. Something was lost in the translation to smaller raids. I'm not sure I can defend that feeling logically, but fortunately I don’t have to.
The logistics boss, though, barely touched the player vs. player experience. Warsong Gulch. Arathi Basin. These battlegrounds were small – 10 vs. 10 and 15 vs. 15, respectively – and were contained enough and quick enough to feel more like arenas than campaigns. Good fun.
Alterac Valley was something else entirely.
Forty versus forty. One objective: kill the enemy general. Simple enough to explain in a sentence, deep enough to live in for hours. Friendly towers to defend, enemy towers to storm and destroy, graveyards to capture so your spawn point moved with the frontline, enemy blood to collect for the ritual that would summon an elemental to shatter the opposing forces. The battle moved slowly, in surges, like a tide. It wasn't uncommon to log off for dinner, log back in two hours later, and find yourself in the same match – the same specific battleground instance – where the front had barely shifted.
I loved it.
In an era before cross-server play, reputation was currency. You ran into the same people, match after match. Being the kind of player others wanted to fight beside – or feared fighting against – actually meant something. Your name carried weight.
So I became Enma, self-appointed general of the Frostwolf Legion. I rallied troops. I called targets. I exhorted the defense to hold and the offense to push. And we won – not every time, but often enough that the name meant something, which is all you can really ask.
The world was the main character. I think I’ve always understood that. But Azeroth also needed people in it, and I didn’t mind playing a supporting role to a lead like that.