The invasion of the Iron Horde is upon us! Two years after Pandaria became a reality (squee!), the latest World of Warcraft expansion has dropped, bringing with it time travel, alternate realities, and a deep appreciation for the history of the Warcraft franchise.

Unfortunately, I won’t be joining the millions of gamers quite yet – my money is needed elsewhere, like bills. But hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m back questing and raiding against the Warlords of Draenor!

Like visiting with old friends

Being the huge Warcraft geek that I am, I’ve decided to celebrate the new release with a list about one of my favorite topics: Warcraft Lore. For those who don’t know, the wildly popular World of Warcraft MMORPG is based upon a whole series of wartime strategy games that came out in the 90s, games that I and my family grew up playing. But Blizzard, the company behind Warcraft, didn’t just build WoW up from scratch. Instead, the developers used the world, the characters and the storyline from those early strategy games to design World of Warcraft. And as someone who grew up with those strategy games, being able to continue that story in WoW is one of my favorite parts of the game.

Join me after the jump to see what I mean, and check out six of my favorite bits of Warcraft Lore that made it into World of Warcraft!

The basic storyline of the Warcraft series is about an ongoing war between the humans of Azeroth and the orcs of Draenor, who invaded Azeroth through the Dark Portal. From that basic premise, three strategy games were made in the 90s and early 00s: Warcrafts 1, 2 and 3. The basic point of these strategy games was to build up your armies and send them to battle, playing either as the conquering orcs or the defending humans.

And to better immerse players in the struggle from the very beginning, the developers went above and beyond creating a rich backstory for both sides of the conflict, complete with heroes, kings, wizards, dragons, fantasy races, castles and more. They also created their own maps of Azeroth and Draenor, so players could visualize the game world. If you were given the mission of building up an army and conquering the hamlet of Goldshire, you could open the map and see exactly where to find Goldshire.

It’s the one named ‘Goldshire’

Then along came World of Warcraft in the early 00s. Blizzard decided to switch from strategy games to a role-playing game. Now, instead of building up an army and attacking your enemy on a map, you got to create your own, unique hero and send them out into the world to complete quests and level up. Blizzard designed a whole digital world in which to go questing, and they designed this world based on all those original maps in the strategy games.

See that map above? All of those towns, from Goldshire to Moonbrook to Stonard, were recreated in World of Warcraft and placed in the world map exactly where they were in that original game map.

Here’s Goldshire in World of Warcraft.

It’s a really quaint place to visit

The whole game is like that, and I love it! One of my favorite activities in WoW is just traveling around visiting all of the familiar sights and locations from the original games.

And this week’s List of Six is of my six favorite people and places to visit in World of Warcraft!

6. The Classic Characters

Khadgar has been around since the beginning

World of Warcraft is full to the brim with characters. There have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs running around Azeroth, some of them doing little more than selling you swords or training you in herbalism. And sure enough, a large portion of those characters are from the earlier games. most of them are rooted in place, so you can visit them whenever you want, and it’s cool as heck to hang out with Thrall or Jaina Proudmoore as they lead the charge into battle. I’ve already done an article on the franchise’s greatest trio: Rexxar, Chem and Rokhan, all of whom are out there in the game. And there are dozens of cool characters beyond them. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something kind of thrilling about having my character hang out with these legends from my childhood.

It’s even cooler when the characters stretch back into Warcraft 1 and 2. Characters like Khadgar the wizard, Garona the half-orc, and Cho’Gall the evil ogre mage are still active in the grand storyline. Even super minor characters like Kargath Bladefist are still around, and with sites like Wowpedia, a lore geek like me can just look up all the characters I remember and find out what happened to them. I’m not the only one who does that…right? Even characters who died in those early games are still around. Gul’dan the evil orc warlock is part of a vision in Outland, and Lothar’s tomb is just sitting out in the open in the Plaguelands for anyone to visit.

World of Warcraft is a game that takes its franchise seriously, and I love them all the more for it!

5. Blackrock Spire

Behold, the mighty Blackrock Spire, stronghold of the Orcish Horde!

Not as nice a place to visit

Not much to look at all the way back in Warcraft 1, but Blackrock Spire was the first game’s boss battle when fighting against the orcs. The humans had Stormwind Castle, and that’s also a major part of World of Warcraft, but Blackrock Spire is so much cooler. It’s a giant, twisting mountain of death located in the Burning Steppes.

Majestic

Blackrock Spire is so huge that it has two separate dungeons inside, one that goes deep into the Earth and one that goes high into its peak – and you’ve got to be pretty high in levels to even set foot in either one. Noobies don’t get to just stroll into the Spire.

My favorite bit of trivia about Blackrock Spire is that it’s filled with leftovers of Warcraft 1. All of the bad guys are part of the Dark Horde, the remnants of the Warcraft 1 faction that didn’t set sail across the ocean in Warcraft 3. And their leader is Rend Blackhand, son orc Warchief Blackhand, the leader of the orcs in Warcraft 1. I just love how it’s all connected!

4. Old Dalaran

Behold the demon Archimonde destroying the wizard city of Dalaran!

That’s one of the cut scenes of Warcraft 3 as the villains lay waste to the human world. Dalaran used to be this glorious city, full of gleaming towers and magic everything, but then it gets wiped out in one fell swoop. That’s pretty bad news, right? So what do the game designers do for Dalaran in World of Warcraft? Show a big ruined city? Nope! Mysterious purple dome!

Many questions were asked

That’s the magical dome that covers the Dalaran Crater, the land protected by the magicians who used to live there. I can still remember my first visit to the Hillsbrad Foothills, running around and exploring for the fun of it, and coming across this giant, mysterious dome. I didn’t remember Dalaran and had no idea what the heck was going on. Of all the things I hoped to find while running around a forest, a giant purple dome was not one of them. Still, good times, and a quick Internet searched revealed its classic game roots. Dalaran even appeared on maps from Warcraft 2.

As for the mages that lived there? Don’t worry. They rebuilt Dalaran as a floating city in the northern continent of Northrend. So win win for everybody.

3. Medivh’s Tower

This takes me back…

That’s a screenshot from Warcraft 1, a mission that sent your team of heroes into the haunted tower of the wizard Medivh. He was the big bad of the early games, an evil wizard who opened the Dark Portal to bring the orcs to Azeroth. It was one of my least favorite missions in the game.

Sure enough, when World of Warcraft came around, they included Medivh’s tower.

…to a place of nightmares!

The official name is Karazhan, and it’s an epic dungeon in Deadwind Pass. If you scroll up to that map from Warcraft 1, you can see where the Medivh Tower is in relation to the human and orc towns, and that’s exactly where it is in WoW. The devil is in the details with this game. Unfortunately, you can’t actually fight Medivh. He died in the third game, but you can visit his grave site just behind Karazhan – if you can survive the battle!

2.Demon Fall Canyon

Witness the most epic Warcraft cinematic of all time! In Warcraft 3, orc heroes Thrall and Grom Hellscream hunt down and slay the demon lord Mannoroth in an epic, glorious battle!

Warcraft doesn’t get much cooler than that. Now, one may think that the fight takes place in some nondescript valley. It’s not like the valley itself shows up in Warcraft 3; the game isn’t built that way. This fight just kind of comes out of nowhere in the middle of that game. But sure enough, Demon Fall Canyon is a real place in WoW, and you can go visit any old time you want. It’s buried down in the corner of Ashenvale Forest and, of course, is filled with demons of all kinds.

It looks evil enough

You can stroll through the valley and look at the fallen artifacts of the demon Mannoroth, like his double-bladed spear. There’s even a memorial for Hellscream you can visit. There wasn’t much to build on from that cinematic, but I’m so happy that Blizzard decided to build the whole thing in the game. It’s a neat place to take a walk and run a few quests.

1. The Dark Portal

Here it is! One of the biggest, coolest, most important settings in all of video game history! The Dark Portal!

Or more importantly, here it was all the way back in Warcraft 2!

Doesn’t look so bad

The Dark Portal has been part of Warcraft lore since the very beginning. The evil wizard Medivh opened the Dark Portal to another planet, the orcs poured through, and there has been war ever since. The Dark Portal has always played an important part in all of the Warcraft games, so when it came time to build the World of Warcraft, you better believe that Blizzard practically gave the Portal its own state. The Blasted Lands are a sparse, Death Valley-style wasteland, and right at the center is a giant crater containing the monolith that is the Dark Portal!

In the glory of 3D!

In the beginning, the Portal was just for show. There were super high level demons standing around it, and only the best players in the game could even think of getting close. I still remember the first time I saw it. I used a guidebook to figure out how to take my low level human priest out to the Blasted Lands, then had to get myself killed so that my ghost could safely walk past the demons and check it out. It was great! Unfortunately, even those high level players couldn’t actually walk through the portal. It was just decoration – until the first expansion pack, which let you pass through the portal back to the orc’s home planet for even more adventures! And the Dark Portal is once again in the news as part of the new Warlords of Draenor expansion!

So get out there and get exploring! Maybe I’ll even find the desire to get back to Azeroth sometime soon…or at least the cash!

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Are you guys and gals excited for Warlords of Draenor? Are you in the game? What are your favorite places to visit in the World of Warcraft?

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