WoW Will NOT Be The Same! MAJOR Retcons & Changes For Shadowlands

retcons changes the unexpected these things that happen that you kind of just feel in your bones sometimes they're actually good sometimes they're maybe not so good but to be fair to blizzard warcraft is getting on a bit so it's no surprise that shadowlands is looking to fill in a lot of grey ares that it changes our perspectives on things we may be thought to be true and on the whole attempt to expand wow's lore i mean hey just look at sargeras he went from a demon to a space demon primus to a fallen titan to uh what an arrogant [ __ ] who maybe got manipulated by the jailer and a bunch of dreadlords it's quite a lot in that sense legion was kind of like the finale of season one of warcraft it put all of those things to bed for a while season two though is this crazy wacky cosmic time i mean just in this video you're going to see double luthor's who saw that coming also double disc plates i don't know did you see that coming maybe you did they are our sponsor and if you follow my link down below in that video description and you use the promo code pumpkin you will get 36 off yeah that's pretty sweet and i mean man right look at this lovely witcher concept art display isn't it so nice ah so also here's our old meeting space for the game dev studio and here's our new meeting space hey looks sharp and all i had to do was slap magnets on the wall and put the disc plate on the magnets that was it and for that the team are working on a science fiction project that you'll hear about in early 2021 so i thought that the hubble piece would be a perfect fit of course though i mean you're on this channel you probably like blizz if you like blizz stuff displayed have got the license now they're all high quality metal prints i love the matte finish in particular it's real smooth real premium looking love it and what's great about it is you can just swap around you know to customize your place so easily it's perfect for renters like me they're also great to artists they plant a tree for every cell which is pretty awesome and well we're going to be doing a special thing with them soon and also they pass on 20 of your purchases back to us for the week after this video it's quite the win-win isn't it so a big thank you to displayed for sponsoring and supporting our team and with that said let's get into the video let's talk about these ratcons during blizzcon 2019 steve denuzer altered chronicles level of canon by telling us that warcraft chronicle was from a titan and titan aligned perspective of course everything is written from someone's perspective but chronicle at least initially was announced as very much being a project to solidify world of warcraft's lore to get it all written down firm in one place that is in fact what the printed forward of chronicle volume 1 says so really chronicle was never planned to be a titan account chronicle really was always planned to just be the definitive lore book that now is something that is open to a lot more interpretation and we have heard it from the horse's mouth that chronicle is not the be-all and all of world warcraft lore this is a massive change it is a retcon to what we thought chronicle was in a way and it's a change you will have noticed through our videos covering say the dreadlord schemes and the first part of our lich king series so it really is major the titans therefore we can extrapolate from all this can be fallible can be wrong can be biased or just can be unaware all of those things now apply to chronicle for it is from their perspective that it comes or at least the perspective of them and their sort of followers allies etc which would include us now this overall is a ratcon of the context of chronicle and it is one that opens much of it up to reinterpretation and it actually gives the development team a hell of a lot more wiggle room when it comes to future stories as an example we now know that the cosmology chart is a titan view of how big and how complicated the cosmos is and ian actually said that what when he said this in an interview with me that we should zoom out on the cosmology chart and if you've not seen our recent coverage of the in-game book enemy infiltration then well you really should because in that you will actually see how the fall of sargeras was likely engineered by the jailer that is something that reinterprets the events of chronicle in a way where they weren't really presented within chronicle but actually gives us a new meaning behind it a new sort of origin point for that cult of dreadlords that sargeras met on that fateful day on that fateful world you know then now we sort of know the voidlords are not the big bad of the warcraft setting a sargarus ii but rather they are another antagonistic power in the universe a universe where the cosmic powers are all vying for dominance this is all fairly different to how it used to be in the past indeed i do think the blizzard may have shot themselves in the foot when they said that chronicle was the truest form of the cannon they may i think have been better served by going in the direction of warhammer 40k that's a universe wherein the looseness of the canon is actually explained through the canon how the imperium of man's masses of bureaucracy are incredibly stupid incredibly inefficient and stuff just gets lost all the time so with the chronicle issue covered let's jump a little bit more into the changes to the warcraft universe titan plus plus we believe to the titans the planet-sized beings of seemingly immense power were the most powerful beings in existence we really thought they were the be-all end-all we certainly believe that in the days of vanilla well they are no longer the gods of the universe the legion expansion expanded the lore and now shadow lance is introduced as the devs themselves actually put it a titan plus plus sized threat now this re-contextualizes much and it's actually right in line with ian asking us to zoom out on that cosmology chart so yes this character in question the jailer is a titan plus plus size threat according to the developers and that means that he's more of a threat than a planet-sized titan that might seem insane but you can actually see how it would make sense because if the jailer wins then he's sort of consumes all life in the universe and that certainly is a level of power that makes a titan destroying a single planet seem rather trite shadowlands introduces a new group called the first ones they seem to be the group who actually brought structure and form to the shadow lands instituting the purpose as the overarching belief system of the denizens of the shadow lands and of course also constructing much of what you actually see in the shadow lands examples include the covenant soul forges the maw's waystone and of course the city of orobos along with its many different automaton so who are they who are the first ones are they indeed the first ones well they are an invention of the shadowlands expansion who appear to have titan-like aesthetics but be older that does make you wonder if they actually came before and even more wonder just how primal the first ones are indeed their name would very much suggest that they well were involved in i would say setting up you could say just about everything and if that is the case then certainly this is a major recontextualization of how we actually see the cosmic powers and the various different pantheons if it's true there's a pantheon of order and the titans the pantheon of death and of course the people we deal with in the shadow lands but then this mysterious group called the first ones then what does that mean did they in fact create the titans i'll tell you what we do know a few years ago we thought the titans were that big mysterious group of beings the fate of which we really didn't know anything about that's what the titans were now we know about the titans but a new group has taken up that mantle and that group is the first ones blizzard have in interviews asked the question of where a titan goes when it dies and they have said that each type of being goes to its home plane the demons go to the twisting nether then mortals go to the shadow lands and then they teased us they teased us with the likes of where do the old gods go when they die where do the titans go when they die and the fact that they're teasing that is enough to confirm that they go somewhere lizard pretty much said that yes they do go somewhere and this has large implications number one i do have to wonder where the azerothian gang of old gods are now and doubly so i also have to wonder if n'zoth somewhat planned to be defeated i mean he really did get just pummeled by us didn't he now as for the titans well the ones that we know of are alive they're probably keeping watch over sargeras somewhere some mysterious location but what about the two dead titans remember argus was destroyed and then sargeras long in the past killed a world soul so beyond that of course we also have no idea how many titan world souls were just destroyed or never made it to a maturity so we do know there are dead titans out there and now the blizzard are teasing these things we have to ask the question where did those titans go and this of course is quite a change in how we viewed things with warcraft just like the shadowlands expansion has given form to what was previously a loose concept in the lore we do then have to wonder what will happen to the other cosmic planes what a change in direction this is i mean blizzard have said that we will be exploring the cosmos and that sure does make us wonder what are we going to see are we going to see the titan home realm are we going to see the demon citadels of the twisting nether maybe the true leader of the demons and much more past that yes you can see here that by doing a slight recontextualization of a few things and dropping a few hints the blizzard have actually well they have humongously humongously expanded to the world of warcraft universe especially through the lens of that cosmology chart they've made it so that it's far larger and that indeed in the future we'll have far more places to go [Music] let's bring things back down to earth with one that we can all relate to since day one whenever your character died in world of warcraft they actually met an ascended kirian yes that is right spirit healers were somewhat retconned they were changed a little bit they now are actually kyrians who were sent to azeroth to resurrect people who died before their time or to send souls to the shadowlands you see originally spirit healers didn't have much place in the lore they were mostly just a game mechanic a way to deal with whatever happened to players whenever they died now well that was the case angels were mentioned throughout the world of warcraft canon they were seen quite a bit including in the warcraft 2 manual when paladins use resurrection in war three there was actually an angel that appeared there also the ceiling of karazhan's cherubim and also the angels found in wyrmrest temple those angels all looked like spirit healers or at least many of them did and that led to many theories such as spirit healers being feral titan creations and various other ones of course then when we saw the valkyr in wrath of the lich king well we were a bit confused but we assumed based on the visuals that they did at least have something to do with the spirit healers well it's now far more clear because it seems obvious that odin modeled his original valkyr off the kirians and this simple fact ties the whole thing together remember the first valkyr was helya and she was not pleased about it leading to her going rogue and that actually explains why the lich king had the scourge valkyr because helya is an ally of the jailer the jailer is the master of the helm of domination so therefore it is no surprise that the scourge actually had valkyr and it makes of course no surprise then that those valkyr would later pledge themselves to sylvanas whenever she decided that it was time to sign up with the jailer and a smaller example of something that has been changed by this is the lore of anara she was the spirit healer who had a romantic relationship with zurygos not sure how that worked but of course we now know that she is a carrion now as a kirian she will have had to have shed all of her personal attachments so for her to be well getting it on with the dragon is somewhat not in line with how kyrians are supposed to live and that does make me wonder could it be the case that a nara was actually an early fallen carrion one of a group known as the force warrant that we will meet when we actually venture into the shadow lands the double uther situation is a fairly interesting one many people thought that something had been retconned here so the uther that we see in icecrown citatel of course when we're there with jaina he talks about remembering the good arthas his virtuous properties he seems a lot less troubled and a lot more at peace with things than the uther that we see in afterlife's bastion that author is a hell of a lot more angry with his whole situation how does it make sense we have these two different uthers how is uther both an angry kirian and also a spirit that is floating around icecrown citadel offering us advice is this a massive ratcon well i would say look back to afterlife's bastion uther's soul is split the light bit of his soul perhaps the most dogmatic part of his character obviously went up to the shadowlands you then see the blue colored bit of his soul that that actually went into frostmourne now that's clearly the version of him that we meet in the halls of reflection and technically speaking this is a hard rat con from warcraft 3 where obviously uther soul was not split into when arthas killed him but it is actually fairly interesting because while it initially looked like a ratcon the split souls is actually well it's an explanation of what's going on so then we have to wonder what happened to the fragment of uther's soul that we interacted with in icecrown citadel his soul was obviously split as shown in afterlife so where did the blue part of his soul go whenever the sword was shattered will the split souls of uther actually be reunited and will that bring uther peace look afterlives revealed the split soul and likely for a reason so as you can see this recontextualizes the events of arthas's death you know when arthas died we did not think that a different uther from the one that we met in the halls of reflection was actually swooping down to him along with a carrying and that's what he meant when he said that all he sees is darkness that's definitely a re-contextualization of past events a new bit of information that shines light upon them but you can see how with that and with uterus death they've actually managed to work all of this back into the original lore as it was actually presented back in the day if you have seen our two-part special on the lich king and the scourge with the scourge one to follow well you'll have seen the length to which blizzard went to well bend the lore maybe fill in some gray areas i suppose take your pick there there are answers to questions such as who made frostmourne who controls the helm of domination and who well who made the plague of undeath that have all well you could say changed with shadowlands they have in many ways changed they've changed in a way that actually does still tell a cohesive story but it is one that does rely on for example part of chronicle vol 3 being reinterpreted as merely the lich king's perspective on his situation one that was given while he was still under the influence of the helm of domination which of course the jailer is the master of you know how does the dominated know that he is being dominated he doesn't right the free will is not there so the free world the lich king experienced that is actually talked about in chronicle vol 3 is obviously some form of illusion but now the law is a bit different the law is the naz regime built icecrown citadel in the image of torgast and obviously the nazim had a different uh different perspective to what we thought they did in warcraft iii and the naz regime actually didn't craft the helm of domination or frostmourne or anything like that that they actually smuggled them both out of the shadowlands these are well i mean some of that is actually just flat out raccoons from what was previously stated now we're not actually sure about how the plague of undeath actually got out originally it was said that ner'zhul crafted it but based off afterlives it actually seems like it leaked out of maldraxis right when the house of plagues fell because that is the actual source of the scourge so there's many changes there next next turn to bolvar so to cut a very long story short the jailer didn't exist during wrath of the lich king or warcraft 3. right it wasn't a concept the shadowlands had not been fleshed out but now of course shadowlands has confirmed that the jailer is indeed the master of the helm of domination you know the thing that actually makes the lich king the lich king that absolutely fundamentally changes our view of each of the past three lich kings and as you will see in our truth of the lich king video which is out right now that you can watch the implications of this are really quite massive indeed it does impact the agency of each lich king host personality uh the agency of the legion and well the true purpose of the lich king himself another example a fun one i think and i think this is one that is pretty much flat out of ratcom and that is the war of the spider so the war of the spider is an in-game book that details a war of the same name which is basically the scourge's encounter with the nerubians and according to it ner'zhul scourge fought a long war against the nerubians who while they were ultimately defeated did fight valiantly enough to catch the lich king's attention leading to the lich king actually basing his architecture off that of the nerubians now if that's the case then why are there max naxramus-like necropolises in maldraxis an eternal realm of the shadowlands that has existed for aeons i mean just compare maldraxis to the scourge of warcraft 3. they are the same blizzard have said that the scourge power was actually drawn forth from maldraxis and this actually does mean that we now have two competing explanations for the same thing why the scourge look and feel the way that they do wasn't ruby an architecture or was it ganked from maldraxis well usually when things like this happen what we have to do is take the most modern lore as the number one in terms of precedence and that does mean two things either sorry nerubians you're less important now or could there be more to the nerubians did they have access to the shadowlands after all they were deeply mysterious and tied to the old gods so maybe what appears to be a ratcon now could be expanded upon in an interesting and novel way in the future sylvanas first interacted with the jailer's forces in the 2011 short story edge of night of course when that short story was written we have to wonder if blizzard knew about the shadowlands expansion in the way that it currently exists in 2011 i would say almost certainly not especially with how many parts of sylvanas's story since then do need to be reinterpreted to make the modern story actually make sense i mean as well just think about how much of the lore has changed since 2011. there's no way they knew shadowlands was the thing at that stage now this does lead us on to what i would say is a bit of a recon of sylvanas's ambitions you see in cataclysm she was presented through and through as being fiercely pro-forsaken and she very much seemed to care about carving out a place for her and her people in the world or so we thought we thought that was purely just her intent and that perhaps one of the reasons why she wanted to do that was because she was very afraid of death given what she experienced in edge of night but modern lore reinterprets these things it sort of suggests that really from that point onwards sylvanas was on her journey on her way to ultimately working for the jailer and serving the grand ambitions of death which of course is to wipe out azeroth and consume the world soul you see previously all sylvanas storytelling was just about her wanting to avoid death mainly using her valkyr and to secure her stability and her power to secure a foothold now that she was in a situation where her original purpose of killing arthas had been fulfilled it was no longer a thing modern lord does tell us though that much of this was in service to that very different goal one of course that she advanced during the battle for azeroth expansion and little parts of legion so have sylvanas motivations being retconned here right did she actually always want to do what she did in bfa i think that's up to the reader personally i do believe they have been changed over the last four years i do not believe the original intent of edge of night or her cataclysm era storytelling were what's happened now i don't think she was working towards that whenever blizzard were writing those stories but i do think those stories have been retroactively sort of mashed into this modern direction for sylvanas i mean certainly from a player's point of view sylvanas's flip was not established right so yes i actually do take this to be a change in direction and to be a humongous re-contextualization of past lore and i have to wonder what you think about that certainly sylvanas has been one of the most dramatic characters one of the most controversial characters in terms of direction and i think that's because it's probably one of the areas where some of those pivots and changes have really stuck out to people the role of the emerald dream has changed you see we used to think that when a wild god died in azeroth they would go there to the emerald dream they would regenerate and then they would come back shadowlands has changed that process and in a way that i think could be quite interesting because now of course when a wild god dies it goes to arden wield and it's slowly regenerated over time as a wild seed with anima now the thing is that if you're clued into the shadowlands lore then this might be confusing to you right you'd think that by being part of the primal force of life that these wild gods would go to the plane of life when they die you know the emerald dream well we are told that the shadowlands are for mortals so how does it make sense that ursoc goes to the shadow lands well let's have a little think about this let's think about the lore originally what was ursoc he was a bear yazara she was a dragon they were mortal animals and that means they naturally belong in the shadow lands now those characters were uplifted into a new form a new existence by the force of life likely of course via anar and via freya but then you do have to wonder well why do they not go to the plane of life and that's where i think that what's happened is that there's been some sort of bargain struck between life and the pantheon of death and i think that is a bargain that has resulted in the wild gods who are when we think about it agents of life on the mortal plane i think that's why they actually are regenerated in the shadow lands and then returned to the emerald dream fundamentally they are mortal beings so they have to go to the shadow lines when they die but then it's been set up that the anima goes into their wild seeds and then they go back to the emerald dream i actually think and especially given how the winter queen seems to be an extremely powerful and extremely mysterious character that some sort of bargain has been made either way this is a major change in what we believed when it came to the life cycle of characters like ursoc and cenarius and do remember while it said that cenarius is the son of elune that is the night elf like belief system of course there's a different belief system for the tauren and i would say likely it's not that and that's why he would also of course go to arden wheels but anyway no matter what it changes our perspective on that and i think what will matter to the big sort of scope of the lore is less about what happens to the wild gods and more fundamentally what it means in these agents of life who are beings of mortality because that's you know their base realm because they were just regular old animals i think the fact that they have some sort of process going on between the plane of death the plane of life and the mortal plane i think that will be expanded upon in the future [Music] and finally on the nature of the shadow lands and the afterlifes that characters experience we've always known about the shadow lands right but it was this nebulous place that souls went and that was about it the only way we really experienced it was limited things like the death knight starter zone and as a grey filter whenever our characters died further back in warcraft's lore though there were references to souls going to the twisting nether and even references to heaven and hell in the rts games but there is no hell there is no heaven and only demons go to the twisting nether in the warcraft universe so overall it is a major change that we now know basically that the afterlife does exist and that it is relevant and important and that the afterlife is something that if it goes wrong well it could spell doom for well i guess life itself right that's a pretty major change to things and it just does go to show that we're not really just a bunch of dudes in westfall fighting bandits now we are part of this grand cosmic sort of cycle and that is a massive change to how we viewed our place in the universe and even the place of those who are dead in the universe it really does change how you think about warcraft okay so there you have it shadowlands ratcons are less about saying x event didn't happen and they're far more about massaging the old to fit the new and to expand the new and you know some of these things are ratcons they're retroactive continuity in various different forms some of them are recontextualizations that maybe went against our understanding of events at the time and i will say i'm not sure that all of these are for the best but i do think that many of these changes are being made with a good sort of place in mind they're being made for pragmatic reasons for the health of the game and i do think that many of these will pay dividends for years to come as we explore the more expanded and wacky cosmos of warcraft and i know that when you click on a ratcon's video you're expecting me to say oh x event from the past didn't happen bad or whatever but no it's less about that and this video is more about just being like wow here's all these ways that stuff is different to how it was presented to us in the past and i think as you look forward to the future world of warcraft expansions i mean let's just say in six years time come back and watch this video and i think you'll really see how many of the changes alluded to here will have mattered for the future of the game of course though for me the challenge is keeping it all grounded i don't know about you but you know i'm not above killing bandits and baking pie and westfall those are the things i did initially in world of warcraft and i know that when i go through this video and i know that when i look at the analytics and the retention graph in this video that when it gets into the big sort of timely why me academic oh let's bring out the cosmic chart that's not going to emotionally resonate with viewers and i do know that if you're actually sticking around and you're hearing my voice right now that you're a pretty hardcore lore person like me a lot of the people who are really just there for having a fun mmo fun rpg with their friends killing some bandits killing the bad guys baking some pie that a lot of this will when i say go over their head i don't mean that in a sort of a cruel way or anything like that i mean that it won't matter to them emotionally so they won't really care that much and that's why i think the whole thing here is it's all about making players care and about making these changes and these very grand scale things actually be grounded and matter to people on a personal emotional level shadowlands as an expansion has as you can see in this video painstakingly taken hundreds of minor references to the afterlife and it's brought them all together into one thing it's taken sylvanas's experiences in edge of night and it's used that as a starting point you know it's taking the lich king lore and putting a malign ageless intelligence behind the whole thing it's making minor death deities like musala right who's just some dude on a tablet in zolf iraq back in classic and it's made him an integ an integral player right part of the jailer's plan i mean that really does recontextualize how we thought about so many of these things so there you go times are changing chronicle is a titan account and a lot more things are open to question i've got to wonder what are they going to change next and what's that going to mean for the lore certainly it's going to be exciting to keep up with and uh hopefully we don't burn our brains out trying to work out what blizzard are actually trying to do that's it for me let me know what you think in that description or comments whatever down below be a bit worried if you had access to the video description because that would mean that you would have hacked my account anyway you get the point thanks for watching see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Bellular Warcraft

Views: 290,907

Keywords: world of warcraft, warcraft, wow, bellular, bellulargaming, bellular news, shadowlands lore, shadowlands retcons, shadowlands beta, wow retcons, shadowlands sylvanas, shadowlands lich king, wow lore, lich king retcon, jailer retcon, shadowlands retcon, nathrezim retcon, dreadlords retcon, shadowlands covenant lore, titan plus plus, titan++, future warcraft lore, wow future, wow lore retcons

Id: HxKZsMyYc9U

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020