This past weekend at BlizzCon, fresh off the news that Blizzard—and the rest of Activision—would be joining Microsoft officially, the video game developer lifted the lid on the future of its longest-running game, World of Warcraft, in a big way. And in doing so, it reminded us in quite a stark way just how much time has passed in our world, and Azeroth’s.
Instead of its traditional reveal of just the next expansion to World of Warcraft, BlizzCon actually saw three announced in one go: The War Within, set to celebrate WoW’s 20th anniversary next year, and two follow-ups, Midnight and The Last Titan, all held under the banner of “The Worldsoul Saga,” a united story across all three expansions over the best part of the next six or seven years. It’s a way to cap a lot of the threads still lingering over WoW’s two decades of story expansion while setting the stage for years to come. In doing so, next year’s expansion War Within will catch back up with one of WoW’s most important figures: Anduin Wrynn, the former leader of the Alliance and the heir to his father’s throne in the human kingdom of Stormwind.
Players last saw Anduin not in the current expansion of Warcraft, but the one prior, Shadowlands, where he grappled with the trauma of being controlled by a sinister evil known as the Jailer. Shadowlands wasn’t one of WoW’s best-regarded expansions, but Anduin’s long been a fan-favourite character, so his return in War Within—with a hot new look, and a heaping pile of doubts and regrets from his time in Shadowlands—was a highlight of the reveals. But there’s also another fitting aspect to his spotlight for the game’s 20th anniversary: when World of Warcraft began in 2004, Anduin Wrynn looked like this:
Over two decades of WoW’s storytelling, there have been few characters players have been able to grow up with in the way they have Anduin. The game’s story is dominated by fantastical races that have lived for centuries like elves and dwarves, undead, dragonkin, and alien goat people from other worlds. Its more literally human characters are either trapped in a sort of amber, never really aging as the story would demand of them, or they’ve long since perished as part of the narrative—like Anduin’s own dad, Varian, who died during the events of Legion a few years ago. Twenty years is either insignificant to most characters, or long enough for their lives to have been cut short. But not for Anduin—and not for most players, either.
Much like the little lion of Stormwind, over the course of WoW’s operation I’ve grown from a young boy—taking my first steps into the wider world of Azeroth—into a grown man—cursing every week I don’t get a good roll on whatever gear the latest world-ending threat just dropped. As I went from a tween, to a teen, to a 20-something and beyond, I’ve been able to watch Anduin chart a similar path, going from the six year old of the original World of Warcraft to the mid-20s, word-weary adult we see in War Within’s announcement cinematic. I’ve watched him deal with tragedy and hardship that any person growing up would face; through the fantastical lens of Warcraft’s world, I’ve seen him reconcile his morals and ethics within the frame of its factional conflicts. Now, I look forward to seeing him tackle his grief and traumas from Shadowlands in whatever War Within throws at him.
Anduin’s story is, arguably, the story of WoW itself: the evolution of this world over two decades as he is impacted by it, and tries to impact upon it himself, the rare character we get to see physically and emotionally grow and change as its story develops. There are so many mechanical ways in World of Warcraft to go back to old times in terms of content—ways to run old dungeons and raids as if they were contemporary again, options to see some versions of its world before they were forever changed by certain events in the plot. For as many parts of it that are trapped in amber, WoW’s story and its world—one of its defining aspects of its endurance as a pop cultural figure—is about this unique ability to let its community witness a living, breathing creation, one that has gotten to develop and flourish over huge part of their lives.
Time is an inevitable facet of any long-running game like an MMMORPG—it keeps marching on, new things are always added and things change. You can’t ever really go back to a point in Warcraft as it definitively was five, 10, 15 years ago: the fact that you are inspecting a world that has since moved on is always made apparent when you do. Anduin’s growth alongside the player in real time across that story is a huge part of what makes World of Warcraft such a compelling world to begin with. It’s only fitting that its next milestone has made him a core part of the proceedings.
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