After you choose the starting details of your character, you will be given what looks like a cinematic based on your race with a voice-over giving some background history of the race. This is actually a real-time fly-thru in the game and you will see actual players moving around if you look carefully, and you may get a glimpse of some combat. The fly-thru usually starts at a capital city and flies through parts of the country-side to your starting area.

Depending on your race, you will start in one of eight starting areas:

Horde

• Orc: Valley of Trials, Durotar, Kalimdor. This area is dry and rocky, mostly consisting of reddish desert.
• Tauren: Camp Narache, Mulgore, Kalimdor. Mulgore is lush and green, with large lakes, grassy plains, and mountain valleys.
• Troll: Echo Isles, Durotar, Kalimdor. The recently re-captured ancestral home of the Darkspear trolls, the Echo Isles is a lush tropic group of islands off the southeastern coast of Durotar.
  • Before , trolls also started in the Valley of Trials, Durotar with the Orcs, but with different voice-over.
• Undead (Forsaken): Deathknell, Tirisfal Glades, Eastern Kingdoms. Tirisfal Glades is a dark forest over-run with the mindless undead of the Scourge.
• required. Blood Elf: Sunstrider Isle, Eversong Woods, Eastern Kingdoms. Rebuilt city. The Fly-thru actually begins in the Ghostlands, showing the straight path of destruction left behind by the Scourge after their attack on the Elven city.
• required. Goblin: Kezan and then the Lost Isles, near the Maelstrom. Kezan is the island capital of the goblins, but a recent volcanic eruption has driven refugees to the Lost Isles.

Alliance

• Dwarf: Coldridge Valley, Dun Morogh, Eastern Kingdoms. A snowy area with mountain paths and frozen lakes.
• Gnome: New Tinkertown, Dun Morogh, Eastern Kingdoms. The push to re-capture Gnomeregan has pushed into high-gear with the establishment of New Tinkertown just outside it's gates. It is a typical gnome town of strange metal buildings and crazy contraptions in the corner of a wintry lake basin.
  • Before , gnomes also started in Coldridge Valley, Dun Morogh, Eastern Kingdoms with the Dwarves, but with different voiceover.
• Human: Northshire Valley, Elwynn Forest, Eastern Kingdoms. A low, forested region with various human settlements in it.
• Night Elf: Shadowglen, Teldrassil, Kalimdor. A huge, ethereal, twilight forest that perches entirely on top of a colossal World Tree to the northwest of Kalimdor.
• required. Draenei: Ammen Vale, Azuremyst Isle, Kalimdor. Misty forest area around the crash site of the Exodar.
• required. Worgen: Gilneas, south of Silverpine Forest, Eastern Kingdoms. Gilneas is a brooding, dark, foggy peninsula that is home to the stoic human people who built a great wall to keep outsiders out, but now it may serve to keep something more disturbing hidden within.

See also: Category:Questing guides