If you asked me a few weeks ago if I was thinking of trying World of Warcraft again I would’ve told you a very firm “NOPE” but here I am.

Just to recap the journey up to now. First played WoW in the Friends & Family Beta when the only race you could play were the Undead. Or Forsaken? I can’t even remember the race name. The skeleton characters. Played at launch heavily up to the release of the Burning Crusades then quit. For a while I’d go back to try new expansions, and whichever one the Blood Elves were in was the last time I spent any amount of time at all playing.

At some point post-Cataclysm I tried again but, not knowing any better, I treated it like “Classic WoW” and just went to Northshire Abbey then Goldshire then Westfall just like I’d always done. I leveled so fast and gameplay was so easy I didn’t stay long. Maybe tried the same thing for Night Elves? Then I tried Classic but that was too far the other way, if you know what I mean. I’d done those first zones so often they just felt tedious and THAT leveling was too slow! All this stopped quite a few years ago. 3? 4? 5 maybe? A long while ago.

OK that brings us up to now, and if you’re playing WoW this will all be stuff you already know. I’m writing this more for friends who, like me, haven’t played in a long time.

I rolled a new character (because of course I did) and ran through the new starter zone called Exiles Reach. (You do have a choice of starting in your racial staring zone). I liked Exiles Reach because there was a nice group of characters from various races there which was a good reminder to me that this was “New WoW”. If doesn’t take too long to run through even doing everything (I think I did everything) and when you get out you’ll be about level 10 and you get ported to your race’s main city, in my case Stormwind. Good old Stormwind. It was kind of nice to learn I still knew my way around it without much trouble, aside from that new-fangled Harbor zone. When did Stormwind get a harbor?

Then I had a few choices. The game nudged me towards two, one of which was Dragonflight, the last expansion (this was before The War Within had launched) and the other was, I THINK, the ‘pre-patch’ zone that I’ve heard friends talking about and which didn’t look super interesting from what I’d seen. Seemed just a place to grind up levels, but I could be wrong and maybe that wasn’t even what choice #2 was. They don’t make it very clear (though once you decide on a ‘campaign’ they make it pretty hard to get lost). And if I didn’t want to do either of those I could’ve headed down to Elwynn Forest or something, but I knew I didn’t want to do that, at least not right away. There are also ways to go back and play earlier expansions but I think you need at least one high level character before you can access that system. I’m not sure how interested I am in that, anyway.

In the end I went with Dragonflight, a zone I’d never been to in a game that was both familiar and very alien. I feel like the narrative is much heavier than it used to be, which I’m enjoying. Not only do we get some cut scenes but also there are NPCs with conversation bubbles over their head. When you interact with these it kicks off a discussion between a few NPCs that you just eavesdrop on. I’m eating that stuff up.

There’s now a metric sh*t ton of stuff to collect and a lot of it is account-wide. I was over the moon when I checked the Mount collection and my Nightsaber mounts that my old main used to ride were in there. And you can ride immediately. [That’s Petra riding a Frostmane at the top of the post, though next to Cadet Sendrax both she and the cat look tiny!] Remember when you had to hit level 40 before you could even use a mount? There’s a ton of systems I know nothing about, but I could still take skinning so I can skin my kills and sell the leather, so that felt really familiar!

There’s now the Warband stuff where all your characters across all servers are part of an extended family. Aside from showing a group of them on the login screen I’m not sure what real impact that has. There is a shared bank vault for anyone in your Warband but it costs 1,000 gold which seemed crazy until I saw how fast gold accumulates in “new WoW”. So that’s something fun to work towards. I guess in the newer zones you can set things so that quests that you’ve already done on other characters are hidden which will be handy if I start running alts.

As for the actual minute-to-minute gameplay, that still feels like good old WoW to me. I’m playing a Paladin which I’ve played before. There’s now a specialization system (3 per class I guess) and you get skill points to spend as you level up. I honestly cannot recall if that was in vanilla WoW or not but it seems like another alt-friendly system. I THINK you can switch specializations at will, but I’m not sure.

I’m playing on a low-population server and noticed a lot of other characters had an * after their name. According to Google this means they’re from a different server. I’m not sure exactly how that works…did they choose to come play on Kirin Tor or does the game just magically move them to balance things out. Not sure. To be fair I’ve not interacted with anyone anyway. Even chat is quiet, to the point where I wondered if some channels defaulted to off but it didn’t seem that way. There’s a lot of odd things that don’t unlock until you get a few levels (like area looting unlocked at level 8 or something) so maybe the game is protecting me from “Barrens Chat” as we used to call it.

So yeah, having fun so far. Love learning about these dragon-people, which I didn’t know existed. New cultures with new lore is always fun. The old routine of grabbing 1 ‘big’ quest and then 2 or 3 ‘kill ten rats’ quests that happen in the same spot is both familiar and still enjoyable. Nothing like running back and handing in 3 or 4 quests all at the same time and watching the experience bar move! As I mentioned I’m really digging the heavier story telling.

So that’s where I’ll leave things for now but as I learn and experience more stuff I may be back with more WoW Journal Entries. While everyone else is talking about The War Within you can listen to me yammer on about Dragonflight!