Ah Wrath of the Lich King(Wrath)… you utter that name in the WoW community and you will almost unanimously get an approval rating of 1 million or more. You could run for president just by acknowledging that you know the expansion was a thing. It was one of the best experiences that we as WoW community got. So naturally, let’s talk about it!
With all the hype of the WoW Classic being released on the 27th of August, it’s very interesting to note that Wrath is almost always mentioned in the same breath. For those that loved the game when it came out, and hated the way it changed in Burning Crusade, almost all of them came back for Wrath and loved it. From what I remember it was Blizzard’s single most successful expansion to date, with Legion coming close.
Why is that? It is in this article of reminiscence that I want to try and piece it together. Because I have ideas!
I think first and foremost what attracted us back was Arthas. I have written an article about that character specifically here. Read up if you are interested, but to summarize it, he was Warcraft’s best known villain. Notice I didn’t say the strongest, most powerful, the evilest of them all. No, we knew him. We watched him go from Righteous servant of the Light, to a very dark and vile servant of Undeath. We saw his noble intentions and selfless sacrifices backfire in the worst kind of way. He murdered, or so we thought his mentor and teacher, he broke the heart of the woman he loved. He then murdered his father, took over the throne of Lordaeron. The story development was incredible, a hero on the path of righteous fury crossed the line to become the greatest villain with the darkest intentions of coloring the rest of the world in undeath. A Paladin, warrior of light becomes the Death Knight servant of the Frozen Throne. Frostmourne hungers…
When we started out in WoW, for most of us the last story piece that we knew about, was that Arthas ascended to the Frozen Throne, defeating everyone in his way, including Illidan. As far as we knew, the war has been lost and he has won. So when we started in WoW, at least for me, the question was, what do we do about this guy. There were not a whole lot of references to his deeds in the original releases, at least not on the alliance side of things. The horde has their undead story lines which I would imagine mentioned something about the Lich King. So we played through the original game hoping to meet the guy and give him a piece of our mind. But it never happened. Then Burning Crusade came out and we got excited that maybe it was there that we were going to meet him, but alas, all we got is the already beaten Illidan… The weaker villain.
And then the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was announced! We got a whole new continent, Northrend. Not some weird space thing… with weird space creatures, but our very own Azerothian continent. We were going to Icecrown. Arthas better be ready for us, because we don’t take kindly to father killers, and betrayers of light and hope, and nobody makes Jaina cry… NOBODY!
But all of that was going to happen later, at first we needed to settle on the new continent, you had two choices of starting areas Howling Fjord and Boren Tundra. Both were great starting areas but I am sort of partial towards the Norse mythology and went with Howling Fjord. I was not disappointed! The story line was great, nothing extremely memorable, but that’s how most of WoW’s story lines went back then.
That brings me to my next point, the color scheme. After all of the points mentioned above, like Arthas finally being within our reach, a new continent to explore, we finally got to move away from the green in TBC to the beautiful calming blue of Wrath. Now I know there were many other colors involved in that expansion, but for the most part it was light blue. Also you have read in many of the other articles in this series, I absolutely love snow, and a whole continent of snow to explore was my personal gaming heaven.
I have spoken to a couple of people that played with me at that time and everybody has very positive memories of Wrath, the quests felt more dynamic than they ever had before. The areas transitioned nicely from one to another. The leveling experience was more or less smooth, almost directed. A technique that Blizzard would employ almost every other expansion, getting better and better at it.
The one thing about the questing portion of it that was totally new to me and, I think, to the game in general which was called Phasing. What that means is that when you completed a quest and it somehow changed the area around you, it stayed changed for you, while other people around you who did not complete the same quest saw the old area. At first it caused a bit of confusion when you tried to get people to do the same thing you were doing but you were seeing two different things. But eventually we figured out that if you grouped up with people you could get to the same phase either instantly or pretty quickly by completing the quests. It was a new and innovative way to tell stories and at the time it was pretty revolutionary for the MMO industry. Blizzard will eventually take that approach and get incredibly good at telling stories with it, adding cinematics into them and having an incredible platform to tell their perspective of the story.
All of that would happen in the future, and I think the culmination of it is Battle of Azeroth expansion. The amount of times I watched a cinematic or ran around a quest line in custom instance and was almost brought to tears from all the emotional things going on around is astounding. At least to me, I don’t get emotionally swayed by games, but the Jaina storyline hit me right in the feels.
At this point I will split the article into two parts. In the next part we will talk about the new class Death Knight and finally getting to Arthas… There will be spoilers if you have not played through the story line.
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