The 2014 World of Warcraft expansion reminds me of that brief, happy period when I'd managed to get myself into impressive shape and then hid all the photos of my former bloated self from anyone I dated until we got to know each other a little better. Warlords of Draenor takes that same approach. Blizzard's resilient MMORPG may be 10 years old this year, but it keeps you anchored to the latest content like no other expansion before it. Blizzard wants you to keep your attention on Draenor, and it's easy to see why. While elements of the expansion overemphasize single-player play a tad, the core experience of playing the reigning MMO king has never been so enjoyable.

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With this expansion, WoW places virtually all services in the new faction hubs of Stormshield and Warspear, circumventing the need to cavort about decade-old assets to toss an item on the auction house. It allows you to engage in expansion-specific profession tasks regardless of your skill level. It even allows a free boost to level 90 for anyone who buys the expansion. Thanks to new character models and other updates, WoW hardly looks its age until you move beyond the borders of the old world and into the new content.

Orcs & Humans

It's also Warcraft at its purest. Warlords of Draenor may come packaged in a silly time-travel story focusing on Garrosh Hellscream's attempt to hook up with dear ol' dad for Azerothian invasion fun, but at heart it's a story about the necessity of killing a bunch of orcs. And they're cool orcs, too. Blizzard killed off most of its good villains long ago, but this time-hopping tale to the orcish homeworld of Draenor before the events of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans started allows us to face them all again.

For 20-year veterans of Warcraft like me, it's brimming with nostalgia. There's Ner'zhul, the orc who merged with Arthas to become the Lich King! There's Grom Hellscream, still as much of a punk as ever! Blizzard introduces these guys and a bunch of other, well, warlords of Draenor so quickly in an hour-long instanced segment that it's surely hard to keep track of them all if you're new, but it rarely matters. They look cool, the cutscenes establish their personalities within seconds, and they're fun to fight. If the simplistic story stumbles, it's only in that Blizzard seems to take too many cues from Game of Thrones by killing so many key characters off along the leveling trail just as we've come to love them all over again.

But the surrounding world of Draenor itself is just as compelling a character. It's beautiful, for one, and as with the rest of the WoW, it's populated with snazzy new character models for almost every race. The world itself is technically the same one we already saw in 2007's The Burning Crusade expansion, but setting Warlords before its destruction allows it to assume a different look entirely. The old fan-favorite zone of Nagrand largely remains intact, but here we find grassy, moonlit meadows in place of the barren wastes of 2007's Shadowmoon Valley, and the formerly ruined dome of Auchindoun is restored to splendor. Warlords of Draenor sees Blizzard return to the aesthetic heights it reached in Mists of Pandaria, but here the focus on orcish encampments and savage surroundings appeals to the most primal elements of the Warcraft experience.

It's an environment you'll almost always experience on foot or hoof. Blizzard took the big step of removing flying mounts entirely for Warlords of Draenor, and while the inability to cross a mountain range just by flying over it sometimes stings, the journey is better for it. The shift restores the focus on exploration that’s been lost since the original game, when it was necessary to look around for new pathways to ascend lonely peaks and find seemingly inaccessible treasures. It adds a welcome touch of adventure to the act of hunting down quest enemies, as you need to navigate through dozens of his or her buddies instead of just swooping down a bashing them in the head. At eye level, Draenor feels more like a world we're living in, rather than a topographic map.

But as lovely as the world may be, it's the revised questing structure that gives it strength. You'll still find the basic quests that require you to kill 10 of this or pick up five of that, but they're woven deftly into a world that's brimming with "rare" enemies dropping superior loot and bonus objectives outside the main story that drop bucketloads of XP. Well-integrated actiony cutscenes push the pace along as well as any single-player RPG, and a new chance of winning loot upgrades with every quest turn-in adds a dose of excitement to this most basic of MMO tasks. Little treasures now dot the countryside, allowing humorous insights into Warcraft's lore or the chance of godly loot well below the level cap. Most notably of all, Warlords lets you choose one of two outposts that grant bonuses for each zone, thereby customizing your experience and imbuing the landscape with choice and an additional layer of individuality. In Nagrand, for instance, you might engage in neverending mounted combat astride a fleet-footed talbuk, or you could choose to steamroll through the enemies in your very own tank.

Mr. Garrison

All of the associated quests emphasize that the story here is all about you. You're not just some adventurer; you're the "commander" – the slayer of the Lich King and the bane of the dragon Deathwing – and NPCs salute you and murmur admiringly about your exploits as you strut past. This philosophy comes to a head in the Warlords of Draenor's new Garrisons, where you can build and expand your own little city in the corners of each faction's Draenor starting zone. As with the outposts, the main garrison is all about letting you customize your playstyle as you wish, and it affects almost all levels of gameplay. Want new mounts and immunity to being dazed while mounted? Build and upgrade your stables. Want your own access to a both personal and guild banks and an auction house? Build and upgrade your trading post. And my personal favorite: Want more chances to get upgrades from quest loot? Toss up a Dwarven bunker.

Across three tiers, garrisons evolve in much the same way that bases did in the old Warcraft strategy games, morphing from ramshackle fortifications to full-on castles with stone walls and spires. But there's more than a little touch of Facebook social games here: you log in every day, harvesting the convenient herbing and mining nodes (regardless of whether you're an herbalist or a miner), and you send off various followers you've recruited through your questing to bring back resources and gold. Games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood already pioneered similar concepts, but in true Blizzard fashion, Warlords of Draenor takes the idea and makes it more fun by including brief little animations showing the outcome of their off-screen ventures and by letting them hang around your garrison to chew the fat. It's addicting fun in the same way that social games can be fun if they get their hooks in you. (And like social games, garrisons can be disastrously expensive if you're not prepared. I've already pumped around 17,000 gold into my own, and I'm nowhere near finished.)

I worry, though, that garrisons focus too heavily on the single-player aspect, to the detriment of World of Warcraft's community. Garrisons pull key services such as banks, herbs, mining nodes, stables, vendors, and even auction houses into a single-player instance, thereby minimizing the need to even go out into the world and interact with other people. And the strengths of those interactions (barring the omnipresent racist and spiteful spew in general chat) has always been one of the factors in keeping WoW above its ambitious competitors. Many of us come back to WoW at least partly because that's where our friends are, and garrisons potentially reduce the chances to make more friends.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

That said, the traditional avenues for hobnobbing with other players remain, whether it's in the dungeons, raiding guilds, or on the new 100-on-100 player-versus-player battlespace of Ashran. Blizzard's removal of flying for Draenor has also had the happy effect of making random conversations with nearby players more common than they were in the time of Cataclysm of Pandaria, as we now have to work together to find paths to objectives or take down tough rare enemies in Nagrand for reputation items.

So far, it's good enough to keep me logging in every day to build up my garrison and complete the steps to earn the legendary ring all players have access to, much as with the legendary cloaks from Mists of Pandaria. The excitement of the leveling experience dwindles a tad at the level cap, although this should be temporary. The first raid for Warlords of Draenor (due December 2) hasn't been released yet, and thus much of the currently PvE endgame centers on obnoxiously grindy daily quests for the apexis crystals that'll be used as currency for better loot. On the bright side, players are figuring out that they can get Apexis quests done faster if they work in a group, thus providing a welcome counterpoint to the dicey though enjoyable single-player focus of the garrisons.

Elsewhere, the new PvP zone of Ashran strikes me as little more than a melee-hostile, zergy tug-of-war arena between Horde and Alliance (and thus establishes itself as one of Warlords' few weak points), but it provides some fun partly though the ability to summon big bosses in the style of the old days of Alterac Valley. I've always been a lover of World of Warcraft's dungeons, and I'm pleased to report that they remain in top form here despite a poor introduction from the yawn-inducing Bloodmaul Slag Mines at level 90 or so. They're not terribly hard even on their heroic modes (and even that challenge will likely dissipate once more players get geared), but they're fun, as exemplified by the banter of the foremen in the Iron Docks or the entirety of Grimrail Depot, which follows your adventures as you hijack a moving train. If the raids prove as entertaining, Warlords of Draenor could easily end up going down in history as World of Warcraft's best overall expansion, and there's no better way to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.

Of course, Warlords of Draenor hasn't exactly been the smoothest of World of Warcraft's launches, and I once spent over eight hours in a queue before getting in. Thankfully, after several emergency maintenance periods and server restarts, the trouble on that front appears to be over – and Blizzard has compensated everyone with five days of free subscription time.