Substitute Addiction

The World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade trailer dropped and somewhere in the back of my head a switch flipped that I thought I’d turned off six months ago. Within hours everyone I know who used to play was sending links to each other with the kind of hushed reverence normally reserved for things that are actually important.

It’s a beautiful piece of work. Whatever you think about the game by late 2006—and I had plenty of reasons to think the worst, given the constant realm crashes and broken battlefields that followed the last major patch—the cinematics team operates on a completely different level. That trailer isn’t selling a product. It’s selling you the memory of why you started.

I’d been more or less out of it for half a year. No dramatic quitting speech, just gradually spending less time logged in until one day I wasn’t logging in at all. The usual trajectory. But the conversation I keep having with friends circles back to the same idea: roll new characters, fresh realm, proper Horde guild, the whole thing from scratch. And the blood elves make this dangerously easy to romanticize. Elegant, broken, morally compromised—the most interesting race Blizzard has designed, visually and narratively. Of course Silvermoon is going to be an absolute zoo at launch. Every tourist in Azeroth will roll a blood elf in the first week. But they always clear out. The ones who stay are the ones who want to be there.

I can’t justify a Wii right now. This is apparently what I’m doing instead. Substitute addiction—I’m not pretending otherwise. See you on the battlefield in January.