World of Warcraft: Everything We Know About Shadowlands

Everything we can glean from the trailer for Shadowlands.

The trailer for Shadowlands dropped a bit ago, and it’s a bit of a doozy. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the trailer:

The video is kind of fascinating. For a quick recap: Sylvanas shows up at Icecrown and initiates a knockdown, drag-out brawl with the ‘new’ Lich King, Bolvar Fordragon. Eventually, Sylvanas is the victor, and in a surprise move…destroys the Crown of Domination rather than donning it.

Now for the first time since its creation, there is no Lich King to sit on the Frozen Throne and contain the Scourge. What’s more, the release of the powerful soul(s) held within ripped open a hole to the Shadowlands, the afterlife of the Warcraft franchise.

It’s looking to be a heavily undead themed expansion maybe (hopefully) culminating in the death of Sylvanas, who has been around for a bit too long I’d say without someone putting her down. If nothing else a jaunt into the Shadowlands themselves has been promised, and should be interesting; the place is technically accessible already (when your character dies, their ghost jaunts through the Shadowlands), but somehow I doubt that the WoW team is merely going to slap a black and white filter over the existing world and call it a day for this expansion’s content. I expect a lot of weird and spooky happenings what with the doors to the afterlife seemingly thrown wide open, and if there’s not some return of a previously dead foe as a boss and allies as relevant figures again, I’ll eat my hat.

I hope that Shadowlands ends up as a ‘greatest hits’ for all of WoW’s coolest characters that haven’t been seen in a while, and there’s plenty of potentials. The return of Arthas or Uther as forces of good? A tag team of two Gul’dans? Who knows? It should be exciting as more details are revealed.