Who invented azeroth

The tauren and trolls and, yes, pandaren had roamed Azeroth's prairies and forests for ages before, and around 64, years ago, a band of dark trolls discovered the Well of Eternity, a pool of magic deep within Azeroth's only continent of Kalimdor.

Some say it was actually the blood of a Titan who fell in the war with the Old Gods, but whatever its origins, over thousands of years its energies transformed the dark trolls into the night elves, who built a graceful civilization based on the consumption of the well's magic.

This cozy existence ended 10, years ago when Azshara, the night elf queen, sought to use the well's great power to rid the world of what she considered the lesser races. Such power attracted Sargeras, who tricked Azshara into using the well to open a portal for his Burning Legion. The invasion failed through the efforts of the heroes Tyrande Whisperwind and Malfurion Stormrage, and Sargeras himself was trapped in the Twisting Nether as he passed through the closing portal.

But the price was terrible. Loading Advertisement. Its magic disrupted during the battle, the well collapsed and shattered Kalimdor into the multiple continents that comprise Azeroth today. Pained by the Sundering, the earthen dwarves fell into a long slumber. Azshara and her followers survived, but only through a pact with the Old Gods that twisted them into the amphibious naga.

Malfurion's intractable brother Illidan created a new Well of Eternity with three vials of the old well's essence, but the fear of another Legion invasion led to his imprisonment and the creation of the tree Nordrassil to contain the well's power and heal the world. Centuries later, though, surviving members of the night elves' elite caste remained hopelessly addicted to magic. The other night elves banished them to the new eastern continent, where they became the light-skinned high elves and founded the new kingdom of Quel'thalas.

They, too, had preserved a vial of the old well's waters in secret, and used it to create their Sunwell. The orcs had drank the demon Mannoroth's blood and became bloodthirsty warriors bound to his will Desperate for allies, the elves taught humans how to harness magic, and together they ended the troll domination of the eastern continent and forged a peaceful union that lasted almost 3, years.

Around this time the dwarves awoke, now fully altered by the Curse of Flesh. The troll threat diminished, the younger mages founded the city of Dalaran and foolishly conjured demons in their curiosity. Fearing the consequences, Dalaran's leaders and the elves formed a secret council to elect and create a single Guardian of Tirisfal with the powers of both human and elven mages, thus acting as a godlike safeguard against Sargeras' demons.

When one guardian grew too old or sick of fighting, they'd pass on the great power to a new guardian. That arrangement worked fine for almost two millennia, until the guardian Aegwynn decided to pass the power on to her child rather than the council's chosen successor. She fought demons with skill and passion like no other Guardian before her, even to the point of defeating an avatar of Sargeras himself. But Sargeras had planned this, and he transferred his spirit into Aegwynn and used it to possess her son, Medivh, years after he was born.

Sargeras used Medivh to contact the far-off world of Draenor, where Kil'jaeden had found willing recruits for the Crusade in the form of the orcs who shared the planet with the draenei. The orcs had drank the demon Mannoroth's blood and became bloodthirsty warriors bound to his will; only a few refused, including the Frostwolf chief Durotan. Together, Medivh and the orc warlock Gul'dan created the Dark Portal between the two worlds and the first orcish invasion of Azeroth began.

On Azeroth, humans herded the orcs into internment camps Although he got defeated before, the Lich King was not destroyed and is now merged with the Death Knight Arthas. He is once again defeated and the human Bolvar Fordragon becomes the new Lich King and leader of the Scourge. Surely Azeroth can enjoy some well-earned peace after centuries of strife?

Unfortunately not, as Horde leader Thrall resigns in favor of Garrosh Hellscream following the destruction caused by Dragon Aspect Deathwing the Destroyer. That turns out to be a bad choice, as Garrosh destroys the city of Theramore. Garrosh then goes on to commit war crimes in the newly discovered land of Pandaria and manages to escape justice by fleeing to Draenor in an alternate timeline before it became Outland.

He and his dad create a new Orcish army: the Iron Horde. In the aftermath of the Iron Horde problems, a gateway for the Burning Legion is opened and - yep, you guessed it - another invasion begins. This time, the fallen Titan Sargeras nearly succeeds in destroying Azeroth. He pierces the earth with his sword before being pulled back and imprisoned by the Titans.

It turns out to be valuable material, so naturally, the Horde and Alliance start fighting over it. Although Bolvar still lives, the Scourge has no leader anymore. Furthermore, Sylvanas has shattered the veil to… the Shadowlands. The Shadowlands is the realm of the departed. All irredeemable souls are trapped inside the Maw, but other souls will typically enter one of four different realms depending on how they led their life.

However, thanks to Sylvanas, all souls now go directly to the Maw. The Horde, meanwhile, decides to take the democratic route; they establish a council of leaders instead of choosing a new warchief.

Unfortunately, many leaders have been captured while the Scourge terrorizes Azeroth. This is the grim reality as we make our way into the new World of Warcraft expansion: Shadowlands.

Things aren't going too well, basically, but as this history-in-brief has hopefully made clear, when has anything ever gone well in Azeroth? See you on the other side! Get the best gaming deals, reviews, product advice, competitions, unmissable gaming news and more! Marloes Valentina Stella. See comments. It felt far away from the role-playing roots of the game. Which I know players hate to hear because for them, it's a huge convenience feature and it's hard for them to understand sometimes why a designer would have mixed feelings about it.

There were smaller changes as well. Wrath of the Lich King introduced a new vehicle system. It worked somewhat like player mounts, but they were temporary and could be used in various quests and dungeons. You'd ride a siege tank in Wintergrasp or Ulduar, or fly a dragon in The Oculus.

It was a way to increase the number of experiences available to a player in World of Warcraft. So of course, Blizzard's developers went about finding out where else the technology could be used. It doesn't have to be like a actual vehicle does it?

A moment was quickly forgotten, but was fun experimentation for me at the time as a learning tool," says Hazzikostas, describing a Doomguard boss that would pick your fellow soldiers up, drain their life, and throw them away. It looked really cool to the player, but it was actually an implementation of the new vehicle system. Pardo describes this general ethos in Blizzard for seeing where new technology can be repurposed as "ninja-ing things in.

Many features and experiences players fondly remember were created by taping bits of the game together and hoping it would it fly. Burning Crusade was successful, but Wrath of the Lich King utterly surpassed it. The game's storytelling improved and it helped to be finishing the story of Warcraft 3's most infamous character. Those who had enjoyed Warcraft 3 saw Arthas' fall from grace, with the culling of the plagued city of Stratholme, it was his first step to becoming the Lich King.

Players could not only face Arthas in the Icecrown Citadel raid, but also see him making his presence felt during questing. As Pardo noted earlier, Wrath was the WoW team hitting its stride to the tune of 12 million subscribers.

That was its all-time peak in terms of subscriber numbers. The World of Warcraft team had other plans. Instead of just adding another continent, the focus of the next expansion was on the original Azeroth.

Flying mounts had been a wonderful feature since Burning Crusade, but you couldn't use them in Vanilla WoW because the terrain wasn't built to accommodate it.

In addition, some of the old content was looking a bit rough; the team had grown in size, experience, and resources since WoW's launch. It just looks stupid. There's some weird quests, some broken quests.

It just didn't feel like the more epic storytelling moments we were able to do in Lich King. And so the idea was to go back and fix the old world," says Street about the early genesis of the idea. According to Hazzikostas, the team began by looking at the entire map of Azeroth and color-coding each zone: Green, Yellow, or Red.

Green zones didn't need much in the way of changes. Yellow zones were going to get tweaks in terrain, geometry, and quest lines. Finally, the Red zones were complete teardowns and redoes; everything was razed to the ground to build anew.

Street notes that when the team began, it started on Silverpine Forest's level area. After reworking that zone though, the team was so happy with it that the desire for fixes grew. Everyone wanted a chance to fix the game. The team is a group of perfectionists and so there was a lot of desire to make deeper cuts," says Hazzikostas. And so what started out as a series of surgical projects ended up with probably redoing 70 percent of the world in a very fundamental way.

And so that was redoing 60 levels worth of content, redoing 70 percent of the entire [outdoor environments] from , while also making five brand-new zones for leveling players from 80 to 85, and the new dungeons, new raids, and everything else.

That was a tremendous undertaking. The art team was firmly on board, because it was a chance to make things look much better. Technology had improved and Blizzard's environment artists had years of building elaborate structures and zones like Tempest Keep, Icecrown Citadel, Crystalsong Forest, or Storm Peaks.

Cataclysm was a way to bring that expertise to bear on past work, and the art team jumped at the chance. That brought a lot of excitement to it. And as we started to jam more ideas, that kind of gained momentum," says principal artist Jimmy Lo. I think with WoW it turned out as this kind of stylized, timeless art style where it aged very well.

It never really got outdated. The Barrens were split in half, with the Horde and Alliance fighting over one half. Thousand Needles, formerly a desert area of jutting spires, became a vast lake with some islands. Hillsbrad Foothills, a constant war zone on PVP servers, actually fell completely under Horde control. The Dwarven starting area of Dun Morogh received a new city called Tinkertown for starting Gnome players, and the Trolls moved to the Echo Isles of the coast of Durotar.

Blizzard cut, chopped, painted, and reimagined its old world. There were some technical challenges with the Cataclysmic changes. The developers were drastically reshaping the world, but players were already living in it. If a player logged out on top of a mountain in Vanilla or Burning Crusade, they could log back in during Cataclysm to find themselves in a crater.

Dawson addresses the team's fixes to this situation, noting that he left briefly to help the Overwatch team. Players who would be in dramatically different places just woke up in the game's capital cities, ready to explore this new world. Because if you logged out at the top of the Loch Modan dam what does that mean? And so, Deathwing awoke. He was given the task with protecting the firmament of Azeroth itself from outside threats, but ultimately found himself driven mad by the whispers of the Old Gods.

Neltharion died and in his place was the armored tyrant Deathwing. Deathwing's flight sundered the world, justifying the world changes that Blizzard's team had made.

The goblins of the Bilgewater Cartel joined the Horde as a playable race, while the lost people of Gilneas returned as the werewolf-like Worgen. Questing from level 1-to was an entirely new experience, while elder game players got to look forward to new zones added to the fringes of the existing continents of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.

These zones included a redone Mount Hyjal and the underwater zone of Vashj'ir. One zone was Deathwing's home within the elemental plane, known as Deepholm. I worked on it. I was able to do some conceptual paintings for it and paint some textures. It was a very cool collaborative effort to create that whole look. You know, I still remember painting the textures for the gems. Other artists came in and they were looking at what I was doing. What if all the rocks were like floating?

Cataclysm was mostly a winner, but there were some rough patches to the experience. The rework of the old world was grand to see, but the new zones were dotted about Azeroth. They felt connected to the world, but they really didn't feel connected to each other. Dungeons also became hard again. World of Warcraft has always had an ebb and flow in terms of its dungeon content. Five-man dungeons in classic World of Warcraft were challenging and long.

Burning Crusade dungeons were more compact experiences offering some challenges for players, but being rather doable with proper planning.

Wrath of the Lich King's dungeons were markedly easier, shifting always from careful crowd control to a faster, more bombastic style of play. Tanks would grab a room of enemies and the DPS would use its best area-of-effect abilities. There were Heroic Dungeons, max-level versions with harder mechanics first introduced in Burning Crusade, but WoW's designers didn't really like the shift in play style.

So Cataclysm shifted back to a harder style of play. We knew that having new dungeons in Cataclysm where players were appropriately-geared would make them much more challenging.

I also gave the team the direction: let's go back to 'finishing a dungeon is an accomplishment. Maybe this is something I want. Very, very difficult. If you used Dungeon Finder to find a group, your success rate was very small. In hindsight, he believes the mistake wasn't in having difficult dungeon content. It was not having something for more casual dungeon runners and questing players, many of whom had joined the game during Wrath of the Lich King. Many solo quest chains had their endings in dungeons; if you were more of a story-focused player, a difficult dungeon experience could be intensely frustrating.

What the game needed was dungeons for more casual players and more hardcore ones. They had nothing they could do in Cataclysm. They would get to max level and burn out of the game, because there's nothing for them to do," he admits. These features would offer something easier and harder, catered to players who liked that kind of content. Not every promised addition was delivered. It was meant to be the second leg of a storyline that began in the Throne of the Tides five-man dungeon in Vashj'ir, with a scheduled release in Patch 4.

The team even put some work in on the dungeon itself, creating new technology for some of its effects. I remember we were blue skying that one. There were a lot of high-concept ones, but that was cool because we actually ended up working with engineering. We wanted this kind of underwater feel and this idea of water being parted where you see a wall of water that was held back by magic. We did a conceptual piece and have a cool engineering department; they're oftentimes inspired by art.

So they ended up developing this cool new water shader that we utilize and now have within our tools moving forward," remembers Lo. Ultimately, the dungeon was cancelled though. According to former Blizzard designer Greg Street, the team just didn't have time to keep working on the dungeon and ship it out without something else suffering. We were really worried it was going to disappoint players," says Street. He acknowledges that players were unhappy with the cancellation, but he chalks that up to heady expectations of what the Abyssal Maw would've been.

Street believes it would've turned out closer to the Ruby Sanctum in Wrath of the Lich King; a quick experience with reused content. After several fairly dark and heavy expansions, putting players up against Illidan, Arthas, and Deathwing, Blizzard wanted to try something more lighthearted.

Back in Warcraft 3, the studio introduced the Pandaren, a panda-like race that was more of a joke than anything else. The race offered a new opportunity though, a chance to explore a different look and aesthetic than players had become used to.

Getting back to a vibe of exploration and adventure after a series of world-ending threats," Hazzikostas tells me. We had been looking for an opportunity to fit them into the game at some point and so decided to kind of double down. Once again, Blizzard's art team had a chance to really cut loose and try out new ideas. Pandaria was a whole new continent featuring clear influences from Chinese art, architecture, mythology, and pop culture. It was very easy for the team to begin making concept art and prototypes.

At the very beginning everybody knew what it was about. There was not as much time trying to figure that out and now we could spend all that time figuring out what kind of cool stuff can we do now. The style and overall tone of the early expansion also led to a lot of freedom on the part of the art team. What if the whole dungeon was a brewery? We were having a lot of fun just exploring that and jamming with people. You had that freedom. Not everything has to be super dramatic or serious.

So that was a cool, different shift for the expansion," Lo says. Blizzard also dramatically changed the Talents system. Before Mists of Pandaria, players had to put points into various talent trees. The one you put the most points into determined your specialization.

World of Warcraft had carried that system forward throughout the years, but there was a problem: With each expansion, the talent trees were just getting longer.

Blizzard could trim the trees, but that would just punt the problem down the line. He was worried that the system we'd made was not scalable, and I think he was right.

I want to give him credit for kind of identifying that that was something we needed to change. He and I kind of worked on the side project to see if we could build [a new talent system] for a class, because we were worried it'd be so controversial," says Street. Instead, the player chooses their specialization first. Every certain number of levels, the player has the choice between one of three talents; the talent line tends to have a flavor, but each talent has a different focus.

It's a streamlined system that was supposed to prize real player choice, as opposed to some of the false choices the old trees offered. You could put talent points into anything, but in practice, players would crunch the numbers and go with a build specifically tailored and maximized depending on what they wanted to do.

The complexity looked like choice, but it really wasn't, according to Street. You're making more choices. You have more room for specialization. That's a fantasy. I think we never really delivered on it and most games try to offer things like that never really deliver on them, because it's so hard to get right," he says.

I just realistically don't think that was something we could develop a balance for. Mists of Pandaria represented a strong effort by Blizzard to knock down some of the walls built into the game. It offered more choices and more things to do. Dungeon Challenge Modes allowed players to run difficult dungeons for timed rewards. The Pet Battle system was added, turning all of those collectible pets into a Pokemon-style fighting system.

Collections allowed players to manage their pets, mounts, and eventually their Transmog appearances in a single UI window. Transmogrification was a feature added in Cataclysm, very beloved in certain parts of the community. Players could now make their current armor look like any of the other armor they had obtained.

The problem was you had to keep all the gear in your inventory. With the switch to Collections, Blizzard wanted to do away with the need to keep all that Transmog gear. The new system simply unlocked the appearance in Collections once you obtained the item.

Blizzard also wanted to retroactively give you all the appearances you had previously earned; the game knew which quests you had completed, it was just a matter of giving you those rewards as appearances. Go ahead and put that in your database. Thanks,'" explains Patrick Dawson. We said, 'Here's a bunch of stuff we already know.

Does it matter that it's there within five minutes? So over the course of a few minutes we'll actually upload your items to the transmog database,". I think they used my character as a litmus test.

I am a hardcore raider and a collector. So yeah, it's pretty crazy. Dawson was also a part of "the second biggest re-architecture of World of Warcraft that we've ever done," in order to enable cross-realm zones. This new feature would seamlessly bring players questing in certain zones across different realms together. It allowed Blizzard to solve the problem of low population servers, you could just make sure they're in a cross-realm group with a high population server and those players will never be alone.

Like Elwynn Forest is different than Westfall. We didn't really have that before. What we actually had was more of a grid-like architecture, where we would split up the load based on where you were out of the grid. Everything was unified, so it wasn't about Elwynn versus Westfall.

It was about, are you going to cross this boundary? Now the boundaries are zone-based. And as a result, when you cross the boundary you might be moving to another piece of hardware. Dawson says the system faked the seamless nature by logging the player in and out when they crossed a zone boundary.

Some players noticed some small hiccups back when cross-realm zones were introduced, and this was because of this logging process. The system no longer works that way, but at the time, it was the best Blizzard could do. Cataclysm changed the world, but Mists of Pandaria offered a number of system changes to the game itself.

For veteran fans of the game, the departure from their expectations proved a bit too much. While players had liked the Pandaren as a small character in Warcraft 3, they did not like an entire Pandaren-themed expansion.

Mists of Pandaria introduced the Pandaren as a new race for the Horde or the Alliance and the new martial arts-themed Monk class. It was a new flavor for World of Warcraft players and they simply didn't want it. And I think in retrospect players agree, but there was definitely-understandably-this initial dissonance. Like, 'Wait, pandas? That's just like kiddie stuff. I don't get it. What do players expect to see from any Warcraft expansion and how can we make sure that what we're presenting really matches those expectations.

Not named the expansion after it, not put a Pandaren Monk on the box, we probably wouldn't have gotten that response. People saw the Pandaren and I think that was when they're like, 'Wow, they're forsaking their roots. Mists of Pandaria did push forward the game with even more unique content.

The expansion introduced Scenarios, dungeon-like encounters that used assets and enemies from outdoor areas. Scenarios were built to be completed by one-to-three players, but with no composition limits. Anybody could join a Scenario and have a good experience, regardless of what spec they were. The mandate was something like one developer, one designer can make on their own.

We should be able to reuse existing chunks of the world, but we can do things players wouldn't normally be able to see. We could do much more focused storytelling. And then on the player side of things, we wanted something lighter weight than a dungeon rather than a commitment of 30 or 40 minutes with trying to find a healer that can actually keep up," says Street, outlining the aims of the new mode.

You're working your way through to confront the final boss. Scenarios often felt like part-dungeon, but also more of a directed form of outdoor gameplay.

Hazzikostas is quick to note that Mists of Pandaria wasn't World of Warcraft becoming easier. World of Warcraft is still hardcore today, but that's not all it is. It offers solo content, dungeons and Scenarios to run with your friends, pet battles, Professions, the Auction House, and high-end raiding.

With World of Warcraft today, Blizzard is trying to offer something for everyone. With time and distance, many players see Mists of Pandaria as one of the better World of Warcraft expansions. There were a host of smart system changes like cross-realm zones and Collections, some excellent dungeons and raids, and some of the best-looking zones in all of WoW history, like Valley of the Four Winds, Jade Forest, or the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.