That WoW Vanilla Feeling

I had to put lots and lots of hours into the TESO beta lately. You know, for work. And the whole time I couldn't stop thinking of my early WoW days, back when World of Warcraft was in beta and finally got released. Many of my friends and many of our users describe that magical "first time" kind of feeling, how everything is all new and mysterious and exciting and how that feeling never came back in any other MMO or even any WoW expansion post Burning Crusade. And here I am, going crazy about The Elder Scrolls Online and suddenly that good, old feeling is back. And I think I'm starting to understand why.

I'll never forget the first (retail) day of WoW. I rolled a night elf, I had to kill jumpy little demons and boars, looted my first bag (yay!) and then I had a timed quest to gather ingredients for an antidote and I came past a lake and the water looked kinda nice back then andand... it's weird. I still remember it in great detail. Spider cave. Lots of yucky, green crawlers. Then I left that little starting outpost and there was an owl and it bit my face off. There was also a satyr, but he's a dickhead and you could play a prank on him.

Those shoulders were earned in world PvP - we didn't need arenas and pillar-fucking back then!

Everything felt so huge! So strange! Overwhelming! There were those giant tree guardian thingies outside Darnassus and they were like level 55 and had a skull on their portrait and I was really impressed and thought, "Damn, I'll never be level 55!" At the same time, my old man was playing a dwarf in Dun Morogh and my brother was somewhere in Elwynn Forest. We were all part of the same faction, but it felt like we were all playing different games! I had no idea how to get to them. I had no idea how to get better gear. I bought mostly vendor trash. My first green item felt like a massive achievement.
And then - Westfall. Freddie Krueger harvest golems. And people in chat looking for a group to kill some guy named Van Cleef. And people telling me to go fuck myself when I died and asked for a rez in chat. You see, I just got there from Final Fantasy XI and on there it's common courtesy to revive people if somebody dies near you and it's perfectly normal to ask for that sort of thing in global chat. On WoW it's perfectly normal to tell people to get fucked.

When you read this stuff, you probably can't help but think, "What a noob!" Because I was - we ALL were! There were no excessive guides based solely on early beta phases, no video playthroughs, no "go there and do that", people didn't already know the entire game before ever touching it. Now fast-forward a few years to, say, Cataclysm beta. I was curious about the Worgen, so I looked them up and before I knew it I was watching TotalBiscuit's playthrough of the Worgen tutorial. And since his videos were pretty entertaining, I went and watched his heroic Deadmines playthrough. And so forth. You can see where this is going. By the time Cataclysm was finally out, I was already familiar with a huge chunk of the content. There was no "Oooh, what's this" or "How can I do that" and "Where do I go now", because I already knew. Everybody did.

Quests in vanilla WoW? You had to read the description. They told you to go east or west or wherever, there were no fun little quest markers pointing out exactly where you had to go on your map. No DeadlyBossMod telling you exactly what to do in a boss battle. Most of that stuff was created by the community until it got implemented into the game by default. The game tells you exactly where to go for your loot, which boss spawns where and drops what, where you have to click for your quest and how many more things you have to click. Maximum user-friendliness and convenience, zero immersion. No need to look, explore, read or think.

Playing Peekaboo has never been more terrifying.

"But TESO has quest markers", I hear you think, because that's apparently something I can do now. Yes, it does. They're optional, but they exist. But TESO doesn't breadcrumb you from one quest-hub to the next. You want to find all the quests, all the dungeons, all the skill points? Go explore! Uncover the entire map! I didn't know that at first, so I just went wherever the story lead me, picked up the most obvious quests and suddenly I had "nothing left to do" or all the quests and baddies around me were too high level. That's when I realized I had not uncovered shit. I missed so many little dungeons and stories and adventures and once I figured out how I was supposed to play this game, I had a blast.

We're creating guides for this game right now, because sadly, I'm part of this industry, which thrives on spoiling every last secret and every bit of content before most of you even get to play. But you know what? Figuring out the perfect build and play style was hard, because it's new, it's different and we all had to experiment - a lot! TESO makes me feel like a complete noob again. In a good way! The game isn't vomitting epix all over me, I have to earn my loot and the quests, while not frustratingly hard, are more difficult and challenging than any recent MMO has been in a long while. If I screw up, the game punishes me. I can fail. When's the last time you died leveling a toon on WoW?

I fucking love it. The devs didn't grant us access to aaaaaaaaaall the content way before release, there is still so much I don't know about TESO and there will be ooohs and aaahs and surprises and I can't wait to get on there, to be a total noob and to do stupid things, which will make me facepalm a while later, when I'm at the level cap and done with whatever content I choose to enjoy. So, unless you're hell-bent on leveling up faster than anybody else, unless you're super-competitive or just worried you might miss something or you're a complete newbie desperate for help, well... Do yourself a favour. Don't look at too many videos. Don't read too many guides. Don't spoil your own fun. The game is worth being experienced first-hand. Don't just see every last bit of content through magazine, websites and youtube. Especially not youtube! Okay, fine. Maybe just a little youtube. Mkay?

-Cat