I started playing World of Warcraft in about 2006, and it’s a testament to the allure of its world — the fantastical war-laden realm of Azeroth — that I’m still playing it 12 years later. In that time, the world of Warcraft has changed so much. And now, ahead if its latest expansion, one big change to that world is tearing me up inside.
World of Warcraft has been kept alive for 14 years by its expansions, and its seventh (!), Battle for Azeroth, is set to come out in two weeks.
Warcraft revolves around the story of two often opposing factions — the Alliance and the Horde — as they tussle with each other to eke out a living on the often tumultuous world of Azeroth.
While recent expansions have seen existential threats that have brought the Alliance and Horde together as wary allies (the most recent, Legion, saw them working together to stop a demonic invasion years in the making of Warcraft’s decades-old lore), Battle of Azeroth is being hailed as a return to the classic Warcraft-ian ideals of the Alliance vs. Horde conflict that drove the original strategy games in the series.
Right now, to celebrate the impending arrival of Battle for Azeroth, WoW players can participate in a questline called the “War of Thorns”. Its focus is the inciting event that reignites the battle between the two factions — the Horde’s siege on, and eventual destruction of, the ancestral home of the Alliance’s Night Elves, a giant tree off of the coast of the western continent of Kalimdor called Teldrassil.
The destruction of Teldrassil has been known about for a while, but since the conclusion of the storyline went live on the game’s servers this week, World of Warcraft’s fandom has been… let’s say very divided about the way this part of the story has played out.
Especially in its characterisation of the Horde’s current leader, the undead ranger Sylvanas Windrunner, who has been a beloved and prominent figure in Warcraft’s story since the franchise’s early days as a real-time-strategy series.
And also because of, you know, the fact that basically half of the player base has been dragged into committing a pretty terrible act of war(craft), whether they wanted to or not.
But while WoW players are busy arguing for and against this latest chapter in the game’s 14-year-long story, I’ve found myself weirdly more upset about Teldrassil’s destruction than I probably should be about a location in a video game. Teldrassil isn’t just an important place in the game’s lore to me; it’s the first part of Azeroth I ever visited in World of Warcraft.
When I was a spry teenager all the way back in 2006, the very first character I made to play World of Warcraft with was a Night Elf Druid (I like elves, and I like elves that cast magic; this is a fantasy trope that I have yet to grow out of almost a decade and a half later, although I’ve long since stopped playing that Druid).
I had no idea what I was doing because those weren’t really the days when you could go look up guides for optimal gear or ability rotations — but I was loving every second of this weird and wonderful game nonetheless, enchanted by the mystical forests and darkly-lit purple hues of Teldrassil’s environments.
That curiosity of exploration would turn to love pretty quickly, and despite subscription lapses here and there, the enchantment I felt spending hours wandering through that digital space — fighting off giant spiders and angry bear-like creatures called Furbolgs, before finally making my way to the grand structures of the Night Elf capital city, Darnassus — cemented what has become an enduring adoration for Warcraft’s world and story.
Even though my many WoW characters (yes, a lot of them Night Elves) in the years since have travelled well beyond Teldrassil’s roots and onward to new adventures, I’ve always found myself coming back, just to enjoy the atmosphere and its quietness, huddled away from the bustle and noise of WoW’s bigger, busier cities such as Stormwind or Orgrimmar.
But now that this chapter in WoW’s story has progressed, my characters who go through the “War of Thorns” can’t go back. Teldrassil is gone — my mages attempting to use their teleport spells are unceremoniously dumped on the shores of Kalimdor instead. On flying mounts, an invisible wall eventually bars you from getting close to what is now the smouldering ruins of the tree. All you can do is watch as it quietly continues to burn.
The version of Teldrassil that existed before it was all toasty isn’t actually being removed from the game altogether of course — that would be truly insane. It’s a rarity that the developers, Blizzard Entertainment, actually permanently remove parts of Azeroth from World of Warcraft altogether.
The biggest exception to this would be the sweeping changes the 2010 expansion (Cataclysm) brought to the two main continents of Warcraft, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, completely reworking the designs and narratives of zones that had been in the game since the very beginning.
As with other areas of the game that have been affected by major moments in Warcraft’s overall narrative, there will be tools — dressed up within the fiction as the influence of the timeline-controlling Bronze Dragonflight flinging you back into the past — to allow players to revisit the zone as it was before the events of Battle for Azeroth. I could visit Teldrassil any time I wanted, with the press of a button.
But it wouldn’t be the same.
It’d be like looking back at a photograph — a point in time trapped in a bubble to remember it by, but you can’t actually go back to those memories and re-experience them. I can kid myself all I want walking around the Teldrassil of the past that I’d spent days, maybe even actual weeks, of my life in (those dungeon queues could take a while, and I always liked the atmosphere there while I waited for them).
But the minute I step out of that bubble, the minute I let the story continue, it once again turns to smouldering ashes, and those old memories I have are all that can remain.
I realise that this outpouring of melancholy is all a bit silly — I’ve never actually visited this place, I’ve just run a bundle of polygons around inside another bundle of polygons, in a video game about magic and monsters and other fantastical, not-real things. Darnassus isn’t really mine, it belongs to me and the millions of other players who’ve likewise trudged digital avatars through it for years and years.
But the worlds created by the fiction we love most, regardless of medium, have the power to transport us to places unlike anything we can experience in our actual lives. The interactive quality of the worlds in video games, in particular, have a power beyond other mediums to root us in those fantasies even more deeply, to feel connections to these worlds that are made even more personal by directly placing the player within them.
World of Warcraft’s 14-year history — a living history that’s grown and expanded and evolved, all while being witnessed by a community of millions who are living it out together — carves out a niche for itself that pushes those personal connections even deeper than almost any other game can claim to. There’s nothing really quite like World of Warcraft, in that way.
It’s why, when I finished the storyline that culminates with Teldrassil’s burning, I couldn’t help but feel weirdly like I’d lost something that’s been part of my “real” life.
Comments
11 responses to “A Tree Is Burning In World Of Warcraft, And I’m Strangely Sad About It”
Ive been loving the story so far. Im just hoping launch day runs fine as its the first time we have had a worldwide simultaneous launch.
I’m optimistic. The Draenor launch was “ok” in that it was shit for a few days and had some shocking opening quest bottlenecks but smoothed out after the first week. Legion for me was flawless from day 1. The level scaling and fact we could go to any zone initially meant the load was spread nicely. The new WoW phasing and sharding tech seems really good so yea, I’m optimistic BvA will be their smoothest launch yet even with a worldwide launch. Fingers crossed!
What’s the deal with comments on Gizmodo?
and lifehacker. I’ve been asking for a while, still no idea what’s going on there.
I can still comment and see comments on Lifehacker, just Giz for me…
My mistake. Maybe it was always just Gizmodo. I could’ve sworn there was another site that inexplicably cut the comments.
For the horde!
I understand this.
I played from vanilla, just before BC launched to when the pandas turned up, and have dipped in every now and then when I get the “free weekend” email but otherwise have left WoW behind. That said, back in the old days, my first toon was a warrior (hated it) so second was a night elf hunter. Your article took me back. The music, the colours, the design…the starter area was magical and the graphics incredible for those days. I even recall being unsettled heading into the spider cave given how underpowered our first toons were.
WoW will always have a special place in my heart. When I was dealing with some personal issues back in the 2006, 2007s, it was great to escape to another world, and the whole community thing (I was running a large-ish guild of good people) was awesome. But time marches on, and I refuse to pay $15 per month and $60 for expansions of a game whose graphics and gameplay mechanics are ten years out of date. No ill-will to those that do of course.
Mind you, were Blizzard to suddenly announce they have redone Azeroth in Frostbite or something, I would have no choice but to plug back in and go wandering……
Unpopular opinion:
People only care about this because the pre-patch is crap and there’s no new content. If they actually had something new to do they wouldn’t be bothering to post on reddit and forums about it.
I’m going to miss Teldrassil. I’ve only got the one Night Elf but I’ve played through the zone a bunch of times during my years with WoW. And I love it. It fits the Night Elves perfectly.
i will admit i shed a few tears watching Teldrasil burn. especially trying to save the people inside.
Teldrasil was the first zone i even saw when i started playing in 2005 and as a nightelf and then a Worgen Darnassus has a very special place in my heart.