So…my history with Warcraft is spotty. I played Warcraft 1 and 2 when I bought the original Battlechest in '96 or '97. I skipped Warcraft 3. I played Wow for a time from about 2006 to 2008 and quit shortly before the first expansion.
Now I’m playing WoW again and…I’m noticing a lot of changes since the last time I really played. I’d sort of like to figure out what’s going on in story. Where can I start?
Oof. Well…
Last you played, we were about to visit Outland. I’d suggest going to YouTube and looking up summary videos for each expansion, starting there (in order: Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, Battle for Azeroth, and currently Shadowlands). It’ll give you a very abbreviated summary of the general plot.
You’re really going to be best off just playing and when you have a question about a something, look for a video about it or read up on Wowpedia for a brief summary.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wowpedia
It’s been… A whole lot since the Burning Crusade.
And truthfully I didn’t even get that far, I think I was level 39 or 40 when I stopped. I should probably start playing Classic and inventory my questions about what happened from that point, first.
I say this not to be a shill, but to give you a condensed version of the story, you should purchase the chronicle series. It covers the beginning of the cosmos to the ending of Cataclysm.
It’s either that or comb through wowpedia articles and YouTube.
Well, luckily Vanilla had very little narrative that carries through. I can give you the basic summary.
Ragnaros was summoned by the Dark Iron Dwarves. We killed him. He comes back later.
In the same mountain, Nefarion, son of Deathwing, did experiments on the other dragonflights and we killed him for it. He comes back later.
The Gurubashi allowed us to walk into Zul Gurub so we could kill all of them before they summoned Hakkar (who shows up in a Shadowlands dungeon). They show up again later.
The Qiraji (bug things) started acting up in Silithus, so we broke into Ahn’Qiraj and killed all of them, culminating in our first fight with an Old God, Cthun. The Qiraji come back later, but shockingly Cthun doesn’t!
Then the Lich King sent the flying fortress Naxxramas to meddle with us. We killed everything there. It all comes back, including Naxxramas.
Oh, Onyxia came around and caught some hands. She came back too.
After Vanilla, we got better at killing things dead. But not by much.
So, of all these factions/character I think I only really recognize Deathwing. I feel like I should just suck it up and play Warcraft III but I have never been able to get far in it, I just lose interest in the gameplay. I’ve played a lot of RTS (of which Warcraft 1 and 2 were second, after Dune 2 on Genesis) but could never get into Warcraft 3 (or Starcraft, for that matter).
You can watch all the story cinimatics on youtube.
There’s this really good video that explains the story of WoW up to Shadowlands.
Honestly? I wanna say don’t bother.
No good way to catch up story or gameplay wise. Blizzard doesn’t care. Play a better game.
Do you have the original discs? From what I hear, the digital remake was kind of ruined.
You could also probably find a run-through on YouTube if you don’t want to play it yourself.
I have the digital non-remake version on my old Windows 7 tower.
EDIT: Looks like I’m still able to download the original version. Don’t know how well it would work on Windows 10, and there’s still the factor of the game itself not capturing my interest (I originally played it right after Red Alert 2 and it felt slow and clunky for RTS). I don’t know, I guess the story isn’t that important to my enjoyment of the game.
Blizzard has timeline summary on their website. It’s essentially a summary from Warcraft 1 to the launch of Shadowlands.
There are videos on youtube that have the collected cinematics of each game including the Warcraft RTS games… that’s all you need really.
Quite frankly you can pretty much ignore all of the Warcraft RTS stuff as that’s essentially the stories of the previous generation of heroes. The cinematics for each chapter pretty much lay it out and gust go to the warcraft channel on youtube for the rest.
First of all, welcome back, and good luck! I personally think the story is easier to catch up on than it was when I first started playing a few years ago, but it still takes a bit of effort on the player’s part to find it all. Youtube and fan wiki summaries can be very useful for filling in the gaps, though. I prefer to play through content whenever possible to really understand what’s going on, but you can of course try catching up with just summaries and such if that works for you. Summaries are also helpful for finding out what happened in outside media related to the game, such as books or comics, or for finding out what happened in content that has since been removed from the game entirely.
You’ll definitely want to at least read a summary of the events of Warcraft III, since a lot of Burning Crusade content assumes that you already know what happened in that game. Wrath of the Lich King leans on that knowledge as well, but it does a better job at catching up new players with the basics than Burning Crusade did, in my opinion. The Warcraft III cinematics are pretty good, if dated in their lack of high definition, and several of the later WoW cinematics make visual references to them, if you are interested in that sort of thing at all. I’d recommend at least watching them in order with some summaries for context if you aren’t particularly interested in playing through Warcraft III.
Unfortunately Vanilla WoW had much of its content removed during the Cataclysm revamp, but since WoW Classic now exists you do at least have the option of playing through it in that version of the game. Once you are satisfied with your knowledge of Vanilla, you can play through most of the content from the other expansions more-or-less in order. If possible, I would recommend finding a way to play through the raids in order as well, as they often serve as capstones to major storylines. In my case, my partner had been playing WoW since Vanilla and had several level-capped characters who could solo most of the old raids while I tagged along for the ride as I leveled up, so I could at least see most broadcast text or cinematics attached to the raids in context. That was several years ago, and the leveling has changed since then, so you might be able to solo many of the old raids yourself once you’re character is high enough in levels.
Good luck, and have fun!
Yeah, I really need to get caught up there. I don’t mind dated cinematic graphics, I play a non-trivial amount of retro games, and I still think the Warcraft II intro is one of the coolest things ever (and even before playing it, I was like “Whoa, I gotta buy this game”). I played it on a demo disc that came with a Macintosh magazine my parents bought, which incidentally is how I first played a lot of games like X-Wing, Castles: Siege and Conquest, and Marathon, and of course the DOOM shareware.
It was my first game with a really classic High Fantasy theme too (I found some D&D Endless Quest books at a yard sale around the same time and got into Dragonlance and LOTR not that long after).
It’s still a cool intro ~25 years later and still gets me hyped.
The Warcraft III cinematics really are quite excellent, in my opinion. The Warcraft III story forms a lot of the basis for WoW, so you’ll definitely want to have a decent understanding of the basics of that game’s story, as there’s some major shakeups in the status quo between Warcraft II and the end of Warcraft III. I personally still haven’t played through Warcraft III myself even though I own Reforged (I really should get on that…), so my knowledge is from summaries and watching cinematics and videos, but I feel like I understand enough of it that I’m not confused by WoW content that references it now.
If you like cinematics, you’re in for a treat! WoW has had some fantastic cinematics over the years. In addition to the various cinematic trailers and story cinematics and cutscenes, you may want to check out some of the raid patch trailers as you go. Some of them have nice machinima-style cinematics that give additional backstory for their respective raids.
I found I have the Reforged version of III (I guess you have it for free if you already owned a digital copy?). I just started playing it and honestly I don’t see much of a difference between it and the original for better or worse. It seems fine for getting the game running on a modern system, I had heard it was a really bad update but it seems mostly the same to me. Though not being a fan of the original release I don’t have a deep knowledge of the game.
It seems like the same kind of slow but functional RTS-trying-to-be-Pseudo RPG it’s always been.
One big difference that I know of is that two bosses from the Culling of Stratholme are in it, Meathook and Salramm the Fleshcrafter.
Yeah any map involving Stratholme, Dalaran (excluding undead finale in base game) and Silvermoon got changed. For better or for worse.
The secret mission in the blood elf campaign is harder on the reforged map.
It turns out I don’t actually have Reforged, the Battle.Net app just shows Reforged’s logo on the War3 page, confusingly…or maybe it is, the title screen also says Reforged but…I don’t know. It’s the same digital Warcraft 3 I’ve had for years AFAIK. Just completed the Human campaign, it’s entertaining so far.