Lore lol?

With Ulduar coming out, some of you may wonder why you’re going there in the first place.  You may have heard something about the Titans and know that Yogg-Saron is a bad guy you need to kill, but there’s a lot more to it than that.  The lore of Warcraft has always been a huge interest for me.  I love how every single mob and NPC in the game has some sort of lore behind it.  The lore of Ulduar is especially rich.  I’ll try to summarize what Ulduar is and why we’re going there in the first place.  I won’t go into a ton of detail because this post could be incredibly long.  I’ll sprinkle relevant links throughout in case you don’t know who someone is or if you want to find more detailed information.

In the beginning…

In the beginning, the Titans traveled the cosmos and created the world of Azeroth.  At some point, while they were creating the world, the Old Gods showed up and messed stuff up.  The Old Gods are really the mastermind behind almost everything bad that has happened in Azeroth.  They played a big part in the corruption of Neltharion, in the luring of the Burning Legion to Azeroth and in much of the world’s current troubles.  Somehow, the Old Gods managed to link themselves permanently to the world in a kind of symbiotic relationship.  Because of this, the Titans couldn’t just kill them without destroying the world, so they ended up imprisoning the Old Gods in various places under the earth’s surface.

Iron Council

Taking care of the local pests

Ulduar is a huge structure in Northrend that was built by the Titans during their war with the Old Gods.  The Halls of Lightning and the Halls of Stone are a part of Ulduar.  The whole purpose of Ulduar was to imprison and guard one of the old Gods, Yogg-Saron, the god of death.  To make sure Yogg-Saron never got out, the Titans left a number of guardians to protect Ulduar.  The guardians names were Thorim, Hodir, Freya, Mimiron, Tyr and Loken, the leader.  Loken oversaw all of Ulduar and was known as the “prime designate”.

Loken and crew

Everything was going fine until fairly recently, 10,000 years later.  Somehow, Yogg-Saron was able to infiltrate Loken’s mind and caused Loken to abandon everything he’d been doing for the last 10,000 years and side with the death god.  After some very complex scheming, double-crossing and brainwashing, Yogg-Saron used Loken to also turn all of the other guardians to the death god’s side (except Tyr, but no one knows what happened to him).  You get to see some of this scheming first-hand throughout your quests in Northrend.  Now Ulduar is without any guardians whatsoever and the death god is practically free to do what he wants in the world.  He’s sending out his brain waves and corrupting things and making people go crazy and generally being a bad guy.  It’ll only get worse if someone doesn’t go in there and do something about it.

To the Rescue!

So, the Kirin Tor, Alliance, and Horde get together to discuss what they’re going to do about it.  You can see this meeting in Blizzard’s cinematic.  Both the Alliance and Horde decide they’d rather see the death god kill their enemies than fight him themselves.  So, that leaves us as the last ones to stop Yogg-Saron from destroying the world and killing us all.

All of the bosses and mobs you fight in Ulduar were at one time focused on preventing Yogg-Saron from escaping.  Some of them are still doing their job, but most of them have now turned to the death god’s side.  Many of the bosses you fight are creations of Mimiron.

General Vesax

He really does feed on your tears.

The story doesn’t end there.  There’s one boss in Ulduar who hasn’t been corrupted at all:  Algalon the Observer.  The Titans left him on Azeroth for one purpose - to observe the world and let them know if things get out of hand.  Well, as you traipse around inside the sacred halls of Ulduar and fight the awakened Yogg-Saron, Algalon decides that Azeroth’s time is up.  Things have gotten too crazy, the Old Gods are running around, there’s this Lich King guy, and Azeroth just needs to be destroyed, or in his words “re-originated”.  His analysis:  “There is partial corruption in the planet’s life-support systems, as well as complete corruption in most of the planet’s defense mechanisms.”  And that’s bad.  He’s going to just get the Titans to destroy all of Azeroth and recreate it with the raw materials.  To do that, he has to send an e-mail through space and you have to stop him before he hits the send button.

After defeating the hardest of hard boss in Ulduar, Algalon decides we’re worth keeping around after all.  Rhonin makes a speech about free will vs. cold logic and everyone is happy.  So you see, we’re not just going into Ulduar for the epic loots.  We’re going there to save the world!  Don’t you feel like a hero?