I kept my sword close, though I suspected that I wouldn't be in any danger; I was in her company after all.
She sat quietly beside me on a log, staring into the red hued remnants of our fire. She was my elder by a few hundred years, not that you'd know just by looking: Night Elves don't age. Only in her bright eyes, set like iridescent sapphires against the lilac of her skin, did the depths of her experience and wisdom show, and only in her wearied and deliberate movements could you see the strain of a thousand battles and the toll that they had taken.
Her name was Lyara, and I had come to listen to her story. She was regarded by most of our village as an eccentric, and lived a reclusive life. I however, as a student of history, knew her legacy. I knew that, had it not been for her and the alliance of brave heroes she had been the leader of, I wouldn't be alive today; none of us would.
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| Lyara's tale awaits... |
A quick primer for those of you who don't know - World of Warcraft is the most popular Mass Multiplayer Online (MMO) game in the world, with over 11 million subscribers logging into the fantasy lands of Azeroth to play.
And, for those of you wondering what an MMO is - it is, in general, a game which can only be played online, by connecting to a server which runs a persistent world. The player will create a character in this world, to roam and explore this virtual realm, interacting with other characters in the process (most of which will also be played by other players). MMOs are unlike normal games due to the fact that the world does not stop when the player stops playing, his/her character is merely placed in stasis until the next time he/she logs on. They are also unlike normal games due to the complex social interactions that are allowed to arise by having a lot of players running around a persistent world.
A lot of the harder challenges in the game are designed to be tackled by a large group of players (up to 40 in World of Warcraft) - i.e. if you want a slay a dragon, you'll have to grab some mates. This places an emphasis on the ability to co-operate and co-ordinate with a large group to achieve a common goal.
MMO's have gotten a pretty bad rap in the press, mainly due to some of the horrendous addiction stories that have been aired by the media i.e. the Shawn Woolley incident, amongst others. There's no way to put a positive spin on it, so I'm not going to try to; it's the dark side of these games that they lend themselves easily to addiction by their nature.
However, it's not all bad, but it seems to me that the real delights of an MMO are not readily understood by those who do not play and have not experienced it - which includes a lot of the ill informed media outlets spewing their vitriol. In an attempt to explain some of why these games are just so good, and often grab players for years at a time, I'll be writing a series of blog posts in which I recount my own adventures through the World of Warcraft, starting from my beginnings as a Night Elf nobody, to how I rose through the ranks and became the de facto leader of one of our server's most respected and elite guilds, our successes and failures, and finally my eventual acquittance.
It's a World of Warcraft story. Get ready!
p.s. I was trying to find some World of Warcraft related pictures to post, and stumbled upon this cosplay...:D
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