Don’t know your Pandaren Empire from your Paladin class when it comes to WoW? Fret not. Dark Horse is releasing a hardcover compendium covering the lore of Blizzard’s world-conquering MMO on March 15th. World of Warcraft: Chronicle Volume 1 not only looks beautiful, it should once and for all settle some of your very geekiest canonical questions about early-era WoW.
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“It attempts to codify, tighten up and clarify the history of Warcraft,” says Chris Metzen, SVP of story and franchise development at Blizzard, in the trailer below.
“The first volume of the Chronicle essentially goes from the creation of the Warcraft universe all the way up to the story of The Last Guardian, which is essentially the story of Warcraft 1.” In case there’s any confusion, that’s a reference to Jeff Grubb’s 2002 Warcraft novel, not a certain, much-delayed PS4 adventure.
You can already find a 21-page preview of the book – complete with some especially purdy PDFs – detailing the early days of Azeroth. It’s clear to see Chronicle’s visual style is oh so striking. “We wanted to create a very distinct look for this book,” adds Metzen. “We asked one of our artists, Peter Lee, if he would step up and do this thing. A lot of the imagery, especially the early parts of the history or prehistory of Warcraft are images of places and things we’ve never shown people before.”
“What’s really fun about doing the Chronicle project is trying to take that holistic audit of our first ideas all the way to the now. You can read through this thing and go, ‘oh, I get it. I get how this begat that, and this came from here, and this turn in history happened because of these three things. I never saw that before.”
All I know about WoW is that it contains hat-wearing pandas (who may or may not be of the kung-fu persuasion). I should probably check this book out, right?
Thanks, IGN.