World of Warcraft

A while back, I explored the cinematics in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, examining their creation and development and, in some cases, trying to find out how the locations featured had translated into World of Warcraft when it was released in 2004. This time, I’ll be looking at the intro cinematic for World of Warcraft itself, also known as ‘Seasons of War’. For this article, I consulted a book called The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft for information, which is a fascinating and highly recommended read. There’s a lot more information in this book than in my article, especially concerning the more technical side of computer animation, so anyone wanting to find out more about World of Warcraft’s cinematics should definitely check it out.

But before we delve into ‘Seasons of War’, I want to look at the two cinematics seen in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, since I forgot to mention them last time.

The Awakening

The dark and moody opening cinematic for The Frozen Throne shows the demon hunter Illidan Stormrage standing on a cliff in a bleak, grey, rocky land. Thunder crashes and the sea churns. From the ocean depths, monstrous serpentine shapes emerge. These are the naga – former night elves that were thrust to the bottom of the Great Sea during the Sundering 10,000 years ago and twisted into aquatic reptilian beings by the malevolent Old Gods. Their leader is Lady Vashj, once a Highborne handmaiden, now a naga sea witch. Illidan had heard rumours of the Highborne’s fate, and now he is casting a powerful spell to call the naga to the surface world.

The naga rise fully from the waters and slither onto the shore, their scaly, sinuous forms illuminated by lightning. Illidan has gained powerful new allies, and he will need them in his task – to destroy the Lich King’s Frozen Throne.

The Ascension

Unlike Warcraft III, The Frozen Throne doesn’t feature cinematics at the end of each campaign. The only other true cinematic in the expansion is seen right at the very end of the game. It features Arthas Menethil, who, having travelled to Northrend and defeated Illidan Stormrage in combat, now walks up the long, spiralling stairs to the Frozen Throne itself. The voices of people whom he once knew and loved – Muradin Bronzebeard and Uther the Lightbringer – flood his mind as he ascends.

Finally, Arthas reaches The Frozen Throne. The spirit of Ner’zhul, the Lich King, awaits him, trapped within. He instructs the death knight to release him from his prison, and Arthas shatters the Frozen Throne with one strike from Frostmourne. The throne chamber itself begins to crumble, and Ner’zhul’s helm lands at Arthas’ feet. He picks it up and places it upon his head. In doing so, he becomes one with the Lich King. The cinematic ends with the new Lich King sitting on his icy throne, silently lording over his domain.

Next, I want to briefly look at the cinematic trailer for World of Warcraft, which was revealed at the European Computer Trade Show in September 2001 when World of Warcraft itself was first officially announced. Instead of following one narrative storyline like most previous Warcraft cinematics, this one is basically a series of small vignettes. First, the camera approaches the Gates of Orgrimmar, which slowly open. We then see various playable races from the game: a tauren on a wide, grassy plain carrying a halberd; undead shambling forward in front of a windmill in a dark, decaying land; a human exploring a forest and pulling out his axes when he hears a sound.

There are then some quick action shots to build the pace – an orc swings his weapon at the screen, and the human warrior in the forest raises a shield in one hand to block incoming arrows. The World of Warcraft logo is shown, then a dragon rises up from below and breathes fire towards the screen. As a brief cinematic to get people excited about World of Warcraft, it certainly did its job.

Now, let’s move on to the main cinematic for World of Warcraft. It begins with a map of Azeroth, while a female narrator briefly explains the world’s recent history following the events of Warcraft III and the Battle for Mount Hyjal. ‘Though Azeroth was saved, the tenuous pact between the Horde and the Alliance has all but evaporated,’ she says ominously. ‘The drums of war thunder once again.’

The cinematics in Warcraft III focused on specific characters and storylines, but the WoW intro is all about vibe. It is about getting people psyched and drawing them into the world they’re about to enter. Several establishing shots are shown, taking viewers on a whirlwind tour of Azeroth and introducing several of the game’s playable races and classes: a dwarf hunter, a night elf druid, a Forsaken warlock, a tauren shaman, an orc warrior, and a human mage.

The first thing we see in the cinematic is the now-iconic shot of a dwarf hunter trudging up a snowy hill in Dun Morogh in the middle of a blizzard, accompanied by his loyal bear companion. He pauses to survey the terrain before continuing on his way, his musket doubling as a walking stick. We see the dwarves’ capital city of Ironforge in the background, carved into the heart of a mountain. It’s a serene scene, but the movie soon jumps to other locations and characters, each shot representing a new corner of an unexplored world rich in adventure, mystery, and age-old conflicts.

‘The intro cinematic […] was born out of a desire to put the world, and not any one character or story, front and centre,’ explains Matt Samia, who directed the cinematic. The team wanted it to be an invitation for legions of players to enter the world and craft their own stories, and showing them they could play as a hunter – a class that can train pets to battle alongside them – seemed like an exciting way to start the cinematic.

The cinematic team ended up doing more dynamic simulations for the World of Warcraft intro than they had ever done before. Every bit of cloth, every bit of fur and hair, and every little dangly thing that was hanging off a character would need to have its own simulation. At the time, one of the most difficult things to accomplish in CGI was realistic hair, so the dwarf hunter, with his beard, braids, and pet bear, required a tremendous amount of time. ‘We had done very little hair prior to the World of Warcraft introduction,’ says Samia. ‘For StarCraft’s Brood War expansion, we had done a little bit, guys in crew cuts, but very little.’ The team also pulled from its work on a cinematic for the cancelled StarCraft: Ghost. While most of the Marines featured in that cinematic were bald or had close-cropped hair, Nova, the main character of the game, had a ponytail. The team even had one of the game team’s developers braid his hair in the dwarven style and take headshots for reference.

The scene transitions from the snowy mountains of Dun Morogh to the mystical forests of Teldrassil, bathed in purple light. A night elf finds a broken sword on the ground and examines it. Then she hears a sound and starts running through the forest before transforming into a black panther. It turns out she’s a druid. In Warcraft III, it is shown that female night elves are archers and huntresses, while males are druids. But the cinematic shows straight from the off that, even if you roll a night elf woman, you can still play as a druid.

The cinematics team began work on the World of Warcraft introduction long before many of the in-game character designs had been finalised. Originally, the game was planned to have only three playable races: humans, orcs, and tauren. For these races, the game team had already built elaborate concepts. Cinematics used these as a starting point and then worked to increase the models’ fidelity. But for other races, such as the night elf, there was much less to work off. So, the team experimented with her look, including the style of her armour, and that design formed the basis for the in-game models.

In the cinematic, the night elf druid transforms into a panther, but originally, she was destined to turn into a raven. When the in-game ability to transform into a bird was shelved (at least, for the time being), the team reworked their plan for the scene. The team studied the movements of mountain lions, including how they use their long tails for balance, to help animate the druid in cat form.

For the orc warrior, the cinematics team wanted to give him a ‘commanding presence’ by highlighting how each of his muscles and tendons fire as he swings his club. Doing so required creating separate ‘morph targets’ to control his musculature, each dedicated to different flexes, allowing for subtle movements across the orc’s torso and neck. The end result is the impression that he’s rippling with strength.

Here, we have a tauren shaman in a shot similar to the one seen in the 2001 trailer cinematic. The tauren model from that earlier cinematic was pretty much rebuilt for the WoW intro to more closely match what the tauren now looked like in-game. According to Blizzard artist Sam Didier, the tauren in this scene ‘originally […] looked like a cow-man. It took a lot of work to make a realistic tauren.’

Later in the cinematic, the tauren shaman slams his totem into the ground, an ability referred to by the cinematics team as a ‘totem stomp’. While early iterations of World of Warcraft did indeed contain that ability, it was ultimately cut before the game was released.

Towards the end of the cinematic, we see an undead warlock in the gloomy Tirisfal Glades. A ruined windmill can be seen in the background, similar to the one from the 2001 trailer. ‘In Warcraft III, the undead were sort of the enemy. You could play them as an army, but there was never any sort of typical undead male, undead everyman,’ notes Sam Didier. ‘Cinematics started to define that for us with these early interpretations.’

This particular character went through a series of iterations, each a bit more gruesome than the last. ‘We tried all kinds of things to make him icky and rotting and just kind of nasty,’ says Matt Samia. Concepts explored levels of decay for both the warlock’s dress and skin, and extra attention was paid in rendering his eyes to look almost like shrivelled grapes. The end result is a suitably unpleasant and ghastly individual, though he doesn’t have many of the typical undead elements that we would eventually see in World of Warcraft, such as short spiky hair or missing jaws.

Next time, we’ll be looking at the opening cinematic for World of Warcraft’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, which gives players a glimpse of the new playable races, the new high-end content, and the new end-boss, Illidan Stormrage.