WoW Diary Day 1: Bloodhoof Village

After a break I return to WoW and travel on the road north to Bloodhoof Village. On the way I pass the enormous border guards that presumably make the entry areas safe for new players. Most races have their own entry area spread around the map, giving you a chance to find the feel of the game before turning you loose. Bloodhoof Village is a halfway area, packed with side-tracks and diversions. There are more traders and opportunities to train.

There are also more opportunities to get butchered. Here, on the plains of Mulgore I suffer my first death. I pick a fight with a wolf nearby: soon, another joins in and I'm overwhelmed. No friendly Orc passes by. I “release my spirit” and find myself in a ghostly version of the world (pretty again, and it's obvious at a glance that you've died), hanging around a graveyard. My corpse is marked on the map. I trudge toward it, thinking of other players seeing the words as they mouse over it: Corpse of Buushasa. When I arrive I can resurrect, within a few yards of the corpse. I'm not quite sure what the penalty is, apart from the tedium of the walk.

Exploring the many options available from the village, I find myself dying many times. Many, many times. The pacing here is a little off – it seems every beast is two levels higher and has a mate and can outrun me. I make the long walk from the graveyard many times. Often the original cause of my death is still there, stalking about my corpse, daring me to retrieve before killing me again. I find with some relief that the ghostly angel that hangs over each graveyard is a “spirit healer”. She will restore my corpse on the spot, at the cost of damaging my items. Since this damage is cheap to repair, it's a minor blow.

At first, I thought the death system was wrong, it seems a pathetic punishment that only inflicts tedium on the player – always the worst negative feedback. I now think it's cunning. Death is the end of one given excursion, but WoW is a long trail of progression and nobody wants to be pushed far back down the slope. To a beginner though, death is a nuisance. If I had died in the caves at Red Cloud Mesa, my trek from the grave would have been massive, and the extraction miraculous. No beginner needs that.

I am on the verge of despair with the supposed mid-level quests I have agreed to (cleverly, their colour in your log indicates their difficulty for you now: sadly you can't check the difficulty before you agree to it), when one takes an odd and glorious turn. I have to break up a mine by butchering miners, collecting five picks and breaking them on a forge. There is one at the mine itself. I size up the guards and plan how to pick off the guards, when an Orc Rogue turns up and starts killing things.

We form a party and work together. It takes ages because I can't find the button that lets me say things, and I don't speak the shorthand that most players have developed. It's glorious, though! Good teamwork leads to the guards being overwhelmed quickly, then the workers one-by-one, the forge reached and the picks broken. We cover each other against the monsters on the plains, all the way back to Bloodhoof to complete our quests. I just get off “thanks” before he's gone.

WoW is obviously designed for many people to play together, with its classes intended to work together, but still the spontaneous cooperation is a surprise. It happens again later on, as another druid gives me a glimpse of his bear form and rampages with me through another mine. It looks awesome. He's only level 10! I immediately want to turn into a bear, more than anything in the world. As a quest to follow a spirit vision leads me to the city of Thunder Bluff, I intend to find out how to be a bear.