What was your lore gateway thing?

Lore Story Forum
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I think I’m a relatively new player - joined maybe two weeks before Legion pre-patch. My only context of the game was that when I was little, my godfather and his three kids played together. I loved watching them walk around and the sheer size of the world map made my tiny little 7 year old brain explode (I think maybe it was TBC? I didn’t even know english back then so I only had visual cues). They left the game sometime later and WoW sat in the back of my mind until years later. I managed to buy the game and attempt to play it in my old laptop. Poor thing ran the game at 10fps on minimum graphics but I loved every second of it - finally I was able to explore that world.

The story and lore always raised questions but at first I was only interested in levelling and taking everything in. I think while I levelled in Northrend, before Chromie time, I stumbled upon the Path of The Titans. I had seen the “Titans” keyword be thrown around a couple times at that point and at that very moment I asked myself “Just who are these titans??” - At first I tought the frost giants found nearby were titans but I decided to look them up on a wiki and ended up opening a pandora’s box: I think I spent an entire night reading wikis and watching lore videos (My first contact with Nobbel content). I fell in love with the world all over again, and that’s why I kept playing since and don’t plan to stop.

What about you? Can you pinpoint the exact moment/event that made you a lore buff?

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I became a lore buff with Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. Just seeing which missions from Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal, were made canon really drew my interest, and the singular storyline of War3 got me hooked.

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I’ve always been a nerd about “how does it work”.

like, how does a Mage/Warlock/Shaman/etc. cast spells, the actual physical mechanics of it and how they differ per class.

How does the government of insert nation function.

When we go through a Raid, what are our characters canonically doing to fight the bosses, what is actually going on during the raid, what is the Raid Bosses trying to physically accomplish that we are trying to stop, etc.

lots of “overthinking” type things, are the types of Lore I have always been interested in, in any game, and it just carried over to WoW.

I love when lore and game mechanics intersect in a way that is clearly visible through gameplay. and I love it when game mechanics are explained by lore.

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I always enjoyed WC 1 and 2 growing up. Played them to death. But Warcraft 3, and Thrall and the hordes story about finding themselves is what really made me fall in love with Warcraft as a franchise.

And being able to explore Outland in TBC was cool. I loved the nightmare and alien landscape. Draenor/Outland being the second most important world in Warcraft made me giddy to explore the aftermath of Ner’zhuls failed portal spell.

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WoW was my first Warcraft game, I’ve never played any of the RTS games, because I don’t generally like RTS as a genre.

so I guess my level of tolerance with the characters is different than most because I do not have the baggage of having played WC1, 2, and 3 coloring my outlook on how WoW treats those characters.

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I played warcraft 3 and frozen throne practically every afternoon after primary school.

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Started with SC/Brood War and played WC3 obsessively for a stretch. I was actually pretty ambivalent about WoW when they announced it. We dabbled with FFXI for a bit. The WoW betas hooked us, though. My first toon was actually a dwarf paladin.

We decided to give Horde a look in the last beta before launch and ended up sticking with that. Always liked the Horde campaign the most in WC3, despite my love of dwarves.

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I got into the lore before I ever played.

I remember my older brother bought warcraft 3. As he installed and played it, I read the little booklets that came with it. The lore in those little booklets was very interesting. I wanted to dive further into it.

Soon enough, my older brother let me play, and I have been a fan ever since. Particularly of the Blood Elves.

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Story is the reason I play any game, so I was curious from the moment I downloaded to play with some friends. But the first thing I really got into was the War of the Ancients novels.

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Warcraft 3, for me! I found the story quite compelling on all fronts really - with Arthas and Kael’thas being my absolute favourites. This still makes me a little drawn to humans, undead and Thalassian elves.

I was always an RTS gamer, and WoW was my first time branching out into an RPG of any kind. But I really wanted to know what happened next, and I’ve been hooked enough to stay along for the ride all the way through, even if I did start a few years late (I started WoW in Cata when I stopped being a kid with no money :P)

While stories with Arthas and Kael have obviously dried up, I still find compelling stuff here and there. I’m enjoying the mystery of the Arathi at the moment - I hope we find out more about their Empire. And I’m SO hyped for Midnight.

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I started the game pretty blind in terms of lore. My cousin showed me the game when my family visited (both of us young kids), and I had no idea what was going on except she was running around this great spooky forest, talking to zombies and- suddenly, this red-robed figure appeared, she turned her character to run, but it was too late - a red burst of fire followed her and killed her character.

I had no idea what was happening, but I wanted to explore this place.

(Only years later did I piece together what was going on - she had a lowbie undead in Deathknell on a PvP realm, and a human warlock had snuck in and was ganking people.)

So I got the game, made a whole bunch of characters because there was so much to choose from, and started reading quest text. I loved slowly piecing together the past lore of the world, using only the hints and references that questgivers made while they talked about the quest at hand. The War of the Ancients, the orcish invasions and internment camps and new nation in Kalimdor, the fall of Lordaeron and new freedom of the Forsaken, the suspicious actions of Staghelm, the links between the dwarven clans, the dwarven pursuit of knowledge of the Titans no matter where their ruins were… So many stories that I got only a peek here and there, that drove me to keep searching them out.

That kind of environmental storytelling was so cool to me. Even now as I get more into storytelling critiques, I think back on that time as an example of how much lore can be conveyed without directly telling the audience what had happened. And I was a pre-high-school-aged kid at the time, so it didn’t require much literary expertise to pick up on those stories, just interest.

Then I found the wiki and devoured it, because now I could see exactly how these stories all fit together! (This was also the time when I realized the RTS games existed - I thought the story was all backstory and hadn’t realized that these were events from previous games.)

And here I am today, still bouncing back to this game every so often because I want to check on how all these long-running characters and stories are doing. I feel like that is the strength of WoW - its expansive world and historied characters, most of which the player can experience firsthand - and that’s what I hope to see out of the game.

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Honestly, I can’t remember.

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I wasn’t into the lore initially when I first started playing back in TBC. I just played the game and enjoyed doing dungeons and raids with my friends. I think it was towards the end of Wrath or the Cataclysm pre-xpac patch that I decided to give RP’ing a try and should actually read the lore.

So, I went back and played through Warcraft 3 and read Lord of the Clans since I’m a Horde main.