Tag: World of Warcraft

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:

1. World of Warcraft Introduces the basic races and the world of Azeroth

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dYK_Gqyf48Y%3Frel%3D0

2. Burning Crusade Introduction to Illidan Stormrage, one of the more interesting actors in the lore, fitting the “misunderstood pseudo-bad guy willing to do anything to protect the good guys” trope. This is also the first time WoW fans hear his famous line, “You are not prepared!”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lp5XsILypYQ%3Frel%3D0

3. Wrath of the Lich King [My favourite trailer] Shows Arthas Menethil merging with the Lich King as the former awakens from the Frozen Throne, the power of his sword Frostmourne, and suggests his soon-to-begin quest to be king of Lordaeron (where Arthas was earlier a lawful-good prince).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BCr7y4SLhck%3Frel%3D0

Aside: Illidan and Arthas have similar stories: both of them loved their homes dearly and went to great lengths to protect it, ultimately sacrificing themselves. However, this expansion depicted Arthas as being more powerful than Illidan, an idea I could never get behind because Illidan had a more mature vision of the future and his role in it, always seemed to be more aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and was always fighting for a greater goal.

4. Cataclysm This is when Blizzard was going nowhere with the plot and fans were growing frustrated. So the makers drastically reshaped Azeroth by having an ancient and powerful dragon break free from its prison deep in the world, flying to the world on the surface and setting the skies on fire.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wq4Y7ztznKc%3Frel%3D0

5. Mists of Pandaria [My least favourite trailer] An orc and a human warrior are shipwrecked on a seemingly unexplored island. As they begin to fight each other, they are interrupted by a mysterious, quick-footed, mist-cloaked fighter wielding a long bamboo stick. As he bests them both and pushes them back every time they engage, the human and the orc team up against what is soon revealed to be… a panda. All this time, the panda – rather, pandaren – has been talking in the voiceover in a Chinese accent about how their goal is to “preserve balance and bring harmony”. *retch*

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wvYXoyxLv64%3Frel%3D0

6. Warlords of Draenor Jumps back 35 years to reveal how the dreadlords’ scheme to enslave the orcs came undone. This section was not very well-received because it was an alternative timeline that changed the story of Gul’dan, one of the primary orcish antagonists of the series, in ways that made him seem less complicated as a villain than he was in the Warcraft (the video game, not the MMORPG) timeline. His arc also continued into the next expansion, Legion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TLzhlsEFcVQ%3Frel%3D0

7. Legion Varian Wrynn and Sylvanas Windrunner fight together against the Burning Legion, which is now trying to open the Tomb of Sargeras and bring its supreme leader into the world. The trailer has some funny scenes (such as Varian striking a heroic pose as he jumps out of the water and takes on fel-beasts while the viewer realises the water had to have been only about two feet deep there). It also doesn’t spell out the expansion’s full story, which has many twists.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eYNCCu0y-Is%3Frel%3D0

8. Battle for Azeroth Like Star Wars, WoW comes a full circle with this expansion, taking a break from the inventive turns of its predecessors and reintroducing an old conflict in an attempt to put the franchise on familiar, stable ground: the Alliance and the Horde are at each other’s throats again. Sylvanas and Varian’s son Anduin are seen fighting on opposite sides.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jSJr3dXZfcg%3Frel%3D0

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I’m not fond of the trailers apart from the one for the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ because they seem to display many of the stereotypes of our reality, and which fantasy is usually expected to defy. For example, though Azeroth’s technology may indicate its society is similar to that in medieval England, there’s no reason the humans – rather the Alliance – should eventually be led by a white man (Anduin Wrynn) carrying a sword that draws its authority from the heavens. In fact, a significant portion of the non-white races in WoW are cast as evil or misguided.

For another example, almost all the violence in the game – and the consequent disruption of natural order, whether of history or of place – is led by male fighters. The sole major exception to this was Queen Azshara’s betrayal that first invited the Burning Legion to Azeroth. On the flip-side, the restoration of order meant the restoration of a monarchy, typically led by a king (not queen). Again, the sole major exception was Sylvanas’s anointment as warchief of the Horde by Vol’jin, that too only because the spirits had asked him to. Azeroth may be an imperfect world but it didn’t have to be so in ways so closely mirroring reality.

I never got into playing WoW as much as I did reading about it. My two roommates in senior year of college would play it almost 24/7, getting up only to go to the bathroom. I played a little bit after college but couldn’t take to it. The gameplay is rich, complex, offering each player multiple ways to accrue resources, assimilate them and develop their characters. Although teamwork is mandatory to complete WoW’s bigger in-game tasks, players have been able to find a formulaic way of doing things after running through each task repeatedly, perfecting their sequence of actions until they’ve found perfection.

I miss those days from time to time, when Warcraft lore was all that passed as conversation between friends.

Featured image: The Lich King from World of Warcraft. Source: YouTube.

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you

Mae govannen! On this day, in the year 3019 of the Third Age, the hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee cast the One Ring, Ash Nazg, into the fires of Orodruin and destroyed it. Thus was ended the reign of Thû, one of the last lieutenants of the dark lord Morgoth Bauglir, and his dreadful ambition to rule all of Middle Earth. The War of the Ring would end 223 days later with the defeat and killing of Sauron in the Battle of Bywater.

Of all the worlds I’d like to escape to (when reality as it is becomes too much or makes for too little), there are three: Middle Earth, Lether and Azeroth. The tales in which they are situated all exhibit an affinity for ecological inclusivity, where human agency is evaluated in its total environment, including the natural elements and forces. The choices also make me realise I have a thing for paganistic fantasy.

(Spoilers? Not really.)

Middle Earth is the cultural third space that inhabits J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of the World (Arda) as it should be, the continent on which The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy are set. Tolkien’s literature, beginning from The Silmarillion and ending with Return of the King, has  journeys and exoduses as prominent features. As the books move through time, so do its peoples move through space. The result is for their evolution to be shaped by as well as mirror the lands they occupy, for geology to be as much a driver of plot as their actions themselves.

Exemplary subplots: the persistence of Rivendell and the events from Frodo’s capture by Faramir to Gollum’s actions in Cirith Ungol.

This connection between living things and the land is also a common feature of Steven Erikson’s epic fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen. It is set on multiple fictional continents. One of them is Lether, which was trapped and preserved for thousands of years within a magical cage of ice created by Gothos. And when finally the ice cracked as the world warmed, Lether was recolonised by its native tribes. However, none of them realised that the form of magic that they practised was now considered ancient because the rest of the world had moved on; that while Letherii magic still clung to the oracular mode of Tiles, everyone else used the Deck of Dragons. This discrepancy is a major plot-driver in book #7 of the series, Reaper’s Gale. It serves to exemplify how, when foreigners conquer a native land, they can only hope to replace bodies – and that the land, the culture and the government will simply have new staffers, nothing more.

At the beginning of the book, I remember thinking that Gothos’s enforced stasis of Lether was quite the contrivance, drawn up by Erikson to prevent the repetition of a plot device that runs throughout the series. However, Reaper’s Gale quickly turns out to be one of the best books in the series (of ten) because of the detail that Erikson fills it up with. These aren’t details of irrelevant things but of an allegorical post-colonialism, where the coloniser was simply a great stillness of time.

Exemplary subplot: the battle at Bast Fulmar (The Valley of Drums).

A very good example of a proper contrivance occurs in the World of Warcraft mythos: the event known as the Cataclysm. WoW is set in the fictional realm of Azeroth, comprising Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms separate by the Great Sea. Like in the last two examples, geology plays an important role in the shaping of events. In fact, like in The Silmarillion, there is a great sundering of the world brought about by greed and betrayal. However, there is then a second sundering called the Cataclysm, where the black dragon Neltharion (a.k.a. Deathwing) breaks out of his prison deep within the land of Azeroth to lay waste to the world even as its features are rapidly reshaped by violent seismic forces. What makes this a contrivance is that, following Cataclysm, life goes on as it might’ve without it, except for things just looking different – clearly, it’s creators were simply looking for a change of scenery. Nonetheless, I do like Azeroth for the events that played out until then.

Exemplary subplots: War of the Ancients and the events from the Culling of Stratholme to the discovery of Frostmourne.

Every year on March 25, I’m prompted to look back on why I continue to admire Tolkien’s creations even though I’ve publicly acknowledged that they’re far surpassed by Erikson’s creations. An important reason is primacy: the LotR trilogy made for the first modern great epic fantasy, its guiding light so very bright that even those who came after struggled to match its success. Another reason is that, through the books, Tolkein managed to edify all of epic fantasy by bringing together the perfect minima of characters, devices and plots – and of course language – that could make for a lasting classic.