A look back at Warcraft pre-expansion events.

So tonight is the big night for WoW players.  World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria launches at midnight tonight. Lets take a moment and look back at the past expansions and their pre-release events.

Debated as one of, if not the best expansion that Blizzard ever released for WoW. This incarnation brought us the Burning Legion in full force. We took the fight to them after the pre-release event had the Burning Legion flooding through the Dark Portal in to Azeroth to attack everything.  Demons flooding in to major cities to reek destruction and havok. It was pretty epic to be there.  The fighting of demons at the Dark Portal itself, both horde and alliance fighting them off was a very big event. Even the "random" spawning of Highlord Kruul in spots around Azeroth was very menacing.  Then came the unforseeable.....servers crashing. The only real down part of those days was that doing big events of that nature were not really a "happens all the time" kind of thing.  Blizzard was still learning how to manage server loads for events like this and there were times that before the launch and even after the launch, servers would be down for hours, sometimes up to 24 hours. But over time things levels off and became more stable and we began to have even more fun with the new expansion.  Below are some videos of the pre-burning crusade events.

BC event 1
BC event 2
BC event 3
BC event 4

This expansion changed a lot of things in the game.  It gave us a new harbour for Storwind, which seemed to be the perfect place to have one of the major pre-wrath launch events. This pre-launch event was tons of fun for some, and a HUGE P.I.T.A. for others.  Ghouls would show up in random spots around the world and if you attacked them and waited long enough, you would become infected. After being infected for a certain amount of time, you would explode and become a ghoul yourself.  You could then go out and kill any npc or player you could and if you got in to a big group, you could even explode and infect everyone around you. This upset some people since you could kill vendors too and would just slow things down for them. I thought it was perfect. It was annoying, inconvienent and just a giant pain and gave you a real feeling for the pain that was coming. But once you relaxed and enjoyed the event, it was really pretty fun to get a group of friends together and go in to Lakeshire and infect every single thing there.....not that I did that or anything, lol. There were also accropolis attacks would the world that would cause you to have to fight badass ghouls in places like Tanaris and send the accropolis' packing. It all can down to massive scourge attacks in some of the major cities. I don't mean ghouls or zombies. But also contructs (like Patchwerk from Naxx), and Frostwryms, pretty epic indeed. The servers were far more stable for this event showing that Blizzard had infact learned from last time. All in all, a good event. Below are some videos of the pre-wrath of the lich king events.

WOTLK event 1
WOTLK event 2

Not much to really be said here.  Well, imho, this was a rather big let down. The pre-launch events were a series of quests that gave you a little bit of information about the fact that doom itself was coming to the world. Problem was that they were spread out over serveral days and each one only took a few mins to complete. Some random earthquakes and elemental attacks happening around the world from time to time and some odd objects appearing in major cities was really about all there was to the event before the "big showdown" happened. The earth would quake and elementals would spawn in different sections of the major cities and players had to clear them out within a certain amount of time to be able to open a 5-man boss portal to get some epic gear, which was nice. Problem was that if you were in a city that had portals that you wanted gear out of and most people didn't, you would never be able to kill enough elementals to be able to get the portal opened up. Soon people began to stop fighting off the elementals and the entire event kind of died. Servers were very stable most of the time, although there was some down time on some of the server. I still feel that it was a really big let down.  Below are some videos of the pre-cataclysm events.

CATACLYSM event 1
CATACLYSM event 2
CATACLYSM event 3
CATACLYSM event 4






And I won't go in to the pre-Mists of Pandaria events since...well....you all know them since you just did them, lol. If you played through the past events, you probably look back with good memories about them. If you didn't get a chance to be there....you missed out on one hell of a party!  Well, enjoy your time playing WoW:MoP and until next time....Game On!