WoW Diary Day 1: Camp Narache

World of Warcraft is a fairly painless experience to start. Creating an account is not significantly more complicated than creating one for, say, Amazon. You don't need to submit credit card details from the off, and cancel your account later. (As it turns out, they do not need to deceive people into paying for WoW.) The download client is small – the trial version streams content as you need it, but you can download the 5 GB full version if you want – and the details of logging on are kept out of sight. Only your password is required with each new session.

Once logged in, there is a choice of many “realms”, each an individual instance of the game world. Some realms follow different rules, but I'm playing a vanilla realm, Bloodhoof. The program recommends a a few realms for you. Character creation is simple – choose a side (Alliance or Horde), a race and a class. A few cosmetic choices later, such as gender, skin colour and face shape, and you're ready to go. I quickly create Buushasa, a Tauren (glorious bipedal cow) Druid.

As everything is streamed in the trial, there's a few minutes while the first area loads, as it's unique for each race. I'm finally placed in Camp Narache. A quick look over Red Cloud Mesa to the south confirms that this game is pretty. WoW's unique lo-fi bright style is different from everything else: simultaneously undemanding and staggering, casual and gorgeous, gauche and... pretty. It runs on low-end systems, where it looks just as good. I have seen some pretty games in my time, but I can't name many where I've been excited to just see the next thing.

I'm told to fetch feathers and meat from the plainstriders that are south of the camp. They look like ostriches, and I collect their feathers and meat by hitting them with a stick, until they are dead. It's the quintessential MMO experience – butchering animals for items to impress an NPC. Once this is done, I'm sent to collect mountain cougar skins, slightly south-west. My foes at this point are too weak to present a serious threat. After three of these slaughter quests I'm getting fed up, and the drip-feed of slightly better armour is not enough to compensate. I decide to play one more quest and have a break.

I'm sent to butcher some “quillbacks”, I think, to the east. If I could finish their chief as well, that would be great.

Weary, I trudge back to where I was just butchering some mutant boars to find the camp, and suddenly my heart leaps as a hole in the ground leads seamlessly to a cave and an underground warren, crawling with critters. My heart leaps again. It is a peculiar quirk that killing animals on the plains felt like butchery, since there was no real hunt – I just picked the animals off one at a time. However, fighting a humanoid tribe – enemies of my proud and mighty tribe – feels like war. This is suddenly meaningful. The corpse of another player, just inside the door, emphasises the point.

WoW is very good at showing you something amazing just as you are about to smash your keyboard. I don't know how it does this, but it's the reason play the game hour after hour, day after day, month after month. Quests are offered such that you can push past the butcher quests to more interesting things (though there are far too many of them), so players can explore to their taste. To some players, exploring means seeing new things: to others, it's mastering and expanding their own powers. Whether the combat is, or can be, truly interesting is another question.

You can certainly get better, however. In the cave I get out of my depth and I'm on the verge of depth when a passing Orc, controlled by another player, saves me. He tells me to be careful: “long way from graveyard here”. I can't even get the chat up in time to say thanks before he's gone. It's my first real contact with another player, and I'm the one who acts like a dick.

I kill enough of the enemy to complete my punitive quest, but I settle for not getting the chief. Now, my growing visions and trials as a druid direct me out of the enclosed camp, designed to let me find my newbie feet, and I head out north for Bloodhoof Village.