I like playing World of Warcraft. I didn't find it easy to play it the way I like to play it.
This is my attempt to collect everything I have painstakingly learned to enjoy the game how I want to enjoy it, not how Blizzard, or "the median player" would prefer.
This process is still in development, I feel like I am slowly getting a good foothold, but I will update this page when I learn new things.
I actually started with Final Fantasy XIV, a fantastic MMO for someone who has very little, to bascially no prior experience with the genre. I love RPGs, but I just can't help but get severe anxiety when playing a multiplayer game and other players tell me I am not playing the game properly. Thankfully, in Final Fantasy XIV, I can count the amount of times that happend on one hand -- after several hundred hours of gametime.
For one, the culture is generally just really friendly and vibe-y, but it is also structured in a way that playing the game "wrong" becomes very hard, as long as you pay decent attention.
Pretty much everyone I know that got into WoW at any point in their lives, cared about being "the best", in some sense or another. I do not care about being "good" at World of Wacraft.
What I like about playing WoW is *looking* at it. Enjoying the vibes. Partaking in one of the digital worlds, full of experiences shared by millions, in a way that only an MMORPG can.
I choose to engage with the art and passion imbued into the games by tons of talented artists, but must not and will not ignore nor forget the many, many reports of unforgivable, reprehensible misconduct by key figures involved with the creation of Warcraft and WoW.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, feel free to look it up yourself.
Alright, with the preamble out of the way, lets get into what this page is all about!
If you start a new character on World of Wacraft, you get railroaded into the current content, the current expansion, the shiny new stuff that Blizzard thinks is their best foot forward to new players.
The game design and stuff might be good and all, but -- especially the last few expansions -- have a big emphasis on the storytelling. And that's great! The last expansion, The War Within, was even hailed by critics as a new era for the storytelling in WoW.
I don't know about you, but I can't just jump into a decades old, ongoing, longform series at the latest point and vibe my way through all these characters, villains, events and themes. I need to see it from the beginning!
And for some reason, I just don't turn to YouTube videos to catch summaries and get up to speed on what I missed. Having a story filtered through the biases of another person irritates me -- I want it filtered through my biases, dammit!
How to get into the story is unfortunately not straightforward at all. And to this day, Blizzard has not provided a good onboarding experience that is not merly focused on playing the game. Admittetly important, but for my taste not enough.
Through a lot of head-against-wall bashing, I have collected what has helped me find a great appreciation for the story and lore of Warcraft. Let me present it here:
I am not kidding. Just look up the Warcraft 2 Manual online and read the lore aspects. They give you the backbone of the Worlds history. It is also basically what the 2018 Warcraft Movie retells, if you were wondering.
Hey, look, you get to play one of the best PC games of all time! Just playing through the campaign of Warcraft 3 and it's expansion will introduce Heroes and Villains in ways that you can remember and recognize when they inevitable re-appear in WoW and the lore. It's a good time!
If you want to see how the world (of Warcraft) continued after The Frozen Throne, this is the only (legal) way for you to experience. Be aware that it's a lot more time consuming to simply play than regular World of Warcraft (also called "Retail"), and playing it with friends, even for questing, is heavily recommended to speed up a otherwise very slooow game.
This is the most optional part. Since the third expansion "Cataclysm" literally destroyed and replaced the world, and even "Classic" has rolledout this and further expansions, this version is good for seeing WoW in a kind of "middle road" between Retail and its earliest iteration.
Retail is so full of expansions at this point, that it is very easy to start questlines meant for much later in the story, stumble upon parts of the game that are not meant for beginners, etc. Classic is good for players that feel bad having to restrain themselves and having to look up every quest they come across to see if they are supposed to accept it yet.
As of writing this (Classic is at Mists of Pandaria), if you want to play the later expansions with a new character that isn't a special class to start with a higher level, you are expected to level through the earlier content first.
We're finally here. The game we want to play! But oh, what's this? You just get a quest automatically added to your questlog that beckons you to the newest expansion? If you heed the call, you are bombarded with polished cutscenes and high-effort storytelling that means diddly squat to you?! Where to begin, if you want to experience things in the order they were released??
Well, thats where we get into the tools Blizzard does provide. They just do a terrible job explaining them.
The following advice is assuming you are playing Retail.
First things first, just know that up until the Mists of Pandaria expansion, WoW does not have a main quest. That's right! From MoP onwards, it does however, and following the story becomes a lot easier.
Before MoP, there is Vanilla and four(-ish) expansions, where it is important to note: The story for this part of WoW is not very linear.
I think of the narrative in these early parts as a mosaic of smaller stories, whose aggregate tell you what is going on in this world of warcraft.
However, if you have engaged with at least some of the things in the previous section ("Solutions"), then you will recognize names, places and concepts, and your understanding will be deepened by being able to run around and help out with whatever is going on.
At some point, Blizzard declared that certain quest in each "Zone" are now "Local stories". They will often still feel like regular MMO sidequests, but don't be fooled into not paying attention.
Not always, but usually, these quests tend to have something to tell you about the area, or zone, they belong to. Each zone has its own little narrative going on and the local quests, in addition to environmental storytelling, is they way Blizzard is telling that narrative.
Just open your map, and every exclamation point that shows up there, as opposed of any "!" that appear in the world of NPC's heads or even your minimap, is considered part of the local story.
Personally, I found some zone quests more interesting and engaging as others. Some, I really liked. At worst, it felt like a bit of busy work with not too much insight. At the time of writing, I have finished every zone of the original "vanilla" WoW and am working through the zones in the first expansion.
Since levels were scaled down, or "squished", at some point, you can't just go through early expansions without outleveling everything at lightning speed.
Blizzard's solution is clunky, and doesn't really work that well, but it's what we got: Chromie. Find her at your factions capital and you can choose an expansion to level in.
This will do a good and a bad thing. The good thing is, the zones of that expansion are now full of quests and monsters that scale to your level, so you can play them roughly more or less how they were intended.
The bad thing is that quests and monsters now scale to your level, which means that everything is going to be easy. Trivial, even. Any time a monster is supposed to be stronger than the rest, you are not going to feel that. Anytime something was supposed to be a bit of a challenge for a solo player, you might not even notice.
That sucks. The silver lining is however, that going through older content goes fairly smoothly and comparitvely quickly -- but not as fast and trivial as if you didn't use Chrome and just did everything while being significantly higher level.
Also, Dungeons and Raids are not available to you when using Chromie -- but those are the places where the local storylines lead up to and often climax.
Since I play solo anyway, I made a habit of turning Chromie off after I finish a zone, do the dungeons and raids of said zone, and then turn Chromie back on to tackle the next one. It's annoying, but this way, at least for the early expansions, I get to go into these dungeons and raids way overleveled and one-shot everything. This way I can see the places, get the achivements and see at least some of the story.
Keep in mind, you get locked out of Chromie once you hit 10 under the current max level. So, if the max level is 80, you can only use Chromie to level 70.
Which is where the feature comes in, that you can find an NPC in your factions capitol that will freeze your level and current XP count.
Useful for when you hit max level for Chromie, but are not done with what you wanted to do with that character in that expansion.
Generally, it's recommended to create a new character once you leveled high enough to not "need" Chromie anymore. I sometimes switch, because I enjoy the leveling process and get to try new classes and starting zones that way. But you obviously don't need to.
I'd say this is more of a "advanced" tool, for players that already know the general lore and have played at least one or two expansions.
There is a pandarian in your capital that offers guided questlines that show you the lore behind some of the things you've seen but that was never explained in-game. It's genuinely pretty cool, but was added fairly late and expects you to be familiar with some characters and things that are only introduced pretty far into WoW.
Still, one of the cooler ways to learn about the game's universe.
Especially early on, the lore was always meant to be puzzled together by the player community collectively. So, if you keep an eye out, there are items and interactable objects scattered about with very important information!
But because of this puzzle aspect, it will often be presented without context and is meant to be interpreted with others who have seen other pieces. As a single player, it will take a lot of time and effort combing through everything and putting it together.
Personally, my ADHD ass is not really up for that. Thankfully, there are, yes, community resources, but there are other, offical options as well. Which leads me to the final section.
There are good, comprehensible resources... outside of the games. Yeah, I know, somewhat dissapointing. But since all the games focus on providing a fun gameplay experience first, this probably is one of the best ways to just get a ball of lore and exposition.
The first two (of right now four) recap the fundamental beginning of the universe of warcraft. How the universe came into existence, where all life comes from, how the different forces came to clash with one another.
Most, if not all of it, is irrelevant to enjoy the Warcraft games.
Especially because it deals with chracters and stories that are literally tens of thousands of years in the past when you play the game. If you just want a primer for the setting, world and important characters, simply playing Warcraft III is way more valuable!
That isn't to say there is no value in reading these books. They give specificity to all the implied history that is evident especially in WoW.
Having read the books and then continuing my journey made me feel a lot more secure in my perception of the varied landscapes, even far into the first expansion. I would say they increased my enjoyment of playing WoW, and even Warcraft III. If only because I already had some familiarity with the hodge podge of proper nouns and fantasy concepts the series is built upon.
I believe that the books three and onwords summarize the plot and lore of Warcraft 1 and onwards. I have not been that interested in reading them for that reason.
Technically a community resource, but Blizzard eventually expected that people will use it. If you are stuck at a quest, can't find an NPC, encounter a bug, or just want to look something up about WoW (Retail, Classic, or any other offical version), then WoW Head very likely has you covered.
I especially find the comment section useful. For example, if I have a question about a quest, I look it up on WoW Head and see other people asking the same question and, more importantly, seeing other players answering it.
Also, if you are trying to find the right order of content to play through, it has a list of when what dungeon or raid was added in what patch!
And that's it! That is all I currently know to make getting into this big, old game smoother and more enjoyable.
I didn't talk about actual gameplay concepts that beginners should know about, because those are really, really easy to search for or have anyone who has ever played WoW explain to you.
Just, for some reason, when it comes to playing it for the lore and story of the early expansions, I had to scratch and claw any good info together myself. I hope sharing it with you was helpful!