The gist is this. I played when the game came out but, I have been away from the game for a long time and just came back. But in truth, when I first started I was overwhelmed and didn’t really understand the full story of WOW as MMO’s were new to me.
But now that I am back I would like to Learn all the Lore of WOW through the game. To see each major story arc from the beginning of the game to the current Dragonflight.
So my question is… does anyone know how to do this? Or if you should start with a certain race? Which quest line goes first then next then next, in order. Or if there is already a guide on doing that. Ya know, that says START HERE then GOES HERE for part 2 and so on.
Just so I can SEE the whole of the history that has been built just by playing the game. I just didn’t know where to look or who to reach out to for this type of thing. Thank you for any input or ideas.
Step 1. Go play the original Warcraft games that has most of the base lore, even stuff not included in WoW.
Step 2. Go read the books that have a lot of the lore not contained in WoW.
Step 3. Play the WoW expansions in order
Step 4. Join the lore discord to ask additional questions because you’re probably still going to have story gaps and things you don’t understand.
WoW does a really bad job of explaining lore and telling stories.
If you’re super insistent, you should start with Classic Wrath. This will let you experience the original vanilla experience, TBC, and Wrath of the Lich King.
From there, you can come back to retail and play with Chromie time.
You’d do Cataclysm, then MOP, then WOD, then Legion, then BFA, then ShadowLands.
You’d want to cap your level at 58 or so, because otherwise you’ll hit 59 or 60 and get kicked out of Chromie time.
Except you’ll still run into problems. See, you can experience these expansions at that relevant level, except you won’t really be able to do any of the post launch content — all the story and expansion stuff that happened after it came out, but was expected to be done by level capped characters.
There is not a great, cohesive, easy way to experience all of that. The game just isn’t designed that way, and I’m not sure you really could.
Not really possible within the game itself, you have all the previous RTS games (orcs and humans, tides of darkness, beyond the dark portal, reign of choas the frozen throne) then you get into WoW, Even then, a lot of lore isnt even in game, you need to read the books, honestly too many to nam. Then go through the expansions in order.
and even after that, lore has been retconned and be confusing. TBH i wouldnt even bother with the story, its all over the place
I’m going to be honest here,you don’t ,if you haven’t played it when first came out you’re getting the summary of the past story . Some of the stories are lost to time ,they are simply gone.
Thank you Nikola. - 1. Good to know. 2. Working on that and that is it’s own little beastie. 3. Well yah, but which quests? 4. There is a Lore discord? I will have to look for that. And I agree, the stories are all over the place. I just find knowing stuff makes it more interesting it seems.
Thank you Sanaera. I don’t necessarily have to do that with 1 character so I might not worry about that cap as long as I do things in the right order. Well, that was a thought.
I am being a sorta completionist at this point. But yep, what you stated is what I am finding out Obvious. Still, gonna make it a nice little personal goal.
I learned more from WCIII than I did in the year or so of playing WoW Alpha and Beta.
Were it not for WCIII, I would have had no idea why Wrath was so “important”. I didn’t play Frozen Throne, so I had no idea who Ilidan was or really anything going in BC.
But I knew enough about it for Wrath.
The RTS scenarios were a much better mechanic for story telling simply because they were (sort of) linear. WoW scatters the story all over the land. And the vignette storytelling style makes it very easy get stuff out of order, to miss stuff, etc. Plus, you have to do all of the content (quests, dungeons, raids), not just “some” of it. And you better know the back lore as well.
The simple truth is that the lore is too deep and varied, the game is not a single source for everything, it’s scattered across properties. I’d love to see a WC4 game that summarizes and consolidates a bunch of the WoW lore into a nice, digestable stream.
I began their games since WC1 on MS DOS. And played all of their games since release ever since. That is the best way to get the lore done. And also play all campaigns, more than once. Do all versions of it, read all the books. Then you will be set.
Play WOW or watch entire game video sets as a full movie and there will be tons of cut scenes added to the game so we can watch from beginning to the very end of dragon
To be fair there isn’t a lot of real narrative or storytelling going on in the old world.
There’s some cool stuff as you get to a higher level but it’s mostly just disconnected quest hubs pretty transparently designed to make you grind mobs.
Which, like, for me, is fine. I don’t play MMOs for the story. I don’t really know why people do.
