Reminiscing about 'World of Warcraft'
I got into fantasy because my reality growing up was no good. The first videogame I played and really enjoyed, almost to the point of obsessing over it every available second, was Command & Conquer's Red Alert 2. I believe many players of the game will agree it was one of the best games of its genre – 2.5D military strategy – ever made, even to this day, over 20 years after it was first released. In fact, Red Alert 3, which features better graphics and more detailed gameplay, is widely considered to have missed the allure of its king-sized predecessor.
However, RA2 is not the game I continue to obsess about in 2018, over a decade after having first played it. That (dubious) distinction belongs to Warcraft, especially World of Warcraft (the MMORPG). I've played a good bit of WoW (but not so much of Defence of the Ancients, the multiplayer arena), and what keeps drawing me to it is the expansive lore underlying the game's structure, gameplay and expansion since it was first released in 2004. I wouldn't be so foolish to claim I'm the greatest fan of the world of Azeroth, where the game's story is set, if only because this world has so many fans.
To the uninitiated: There are three main factions at play through the entire series – the Horde, the Alliance and the Burning Legion. The Horde and the Alliance are two factions that are native to Azeroth and are frequently fighting with each other. The Burning Legion is an army of demons led by Sargeras, a fallen titan, and a mantle of dreadlords; it wants to extinguish all life in the universe. When the Legion comes to Azeroth, the Horde and the Alliance must put aside their conflicts and protect their world from the demonic forces.
This very simple and emimently trope-filled story has been shaped quite smartly in the last two and half decades, although Blizzard, the game's maker, has occasionally taken its audience for granted. For those who want to know more about the lore, the WoW Wiki is a fantastic resource. There's no one way to enter its network of stories and motivations because it has become so labyrinthine over the years. Even the chronological order won't do because there is a lot of back and forth between multiple plotlines. On the plus side, you can start anywhere and just keep jumping from page to page.
Fortunately for newcomers, the cinematic trailers Blizzard has produced to introduce each expansion of the game to players can serve like a table of contents. After WoW was first released, there have been seven expansions for a total of eight trailers. The production quality on each of these trailers is very high. The animation is slick, the storytelling is tight but, most of all, each trailer does a stellar job of setting the mood for what's to come. (Gamers may or may not internalise this mood but as an aspiring lore-master, I certainly do.)
The trailers are:
- World of Warcraft Introduces the basic races and the world of Azeroth
