Picking Apart the Warcraft Teaser Trailer

While the real theatrical trailer won't be premiering until Blizzcon on Friday, Legendary released a teaser trailer to whet our appetites. Because I am a giant nerd (see: write a WoW blog) I've been looking over the brief snippets in the trailer for anything that looks cool.

MMO-Champion has grabbed some of the relevant screenshots, so I'll be using those to talk about it.

This actually might be from the end of the film. We have Anduin Lothar holding his sword (Ashkandi?) up, standing next to someone who might be Taria Wrynn, Llane's wife and Varian's mother. It is possible, of course, that this is actually Adamant Wrynn's funeral - Llane's father who died during the war. Given that Stormwind doesn't really look like it's about to fall to the Horde, that seems possible. The man on the left of the screencap doesn't really look like Dominic Cooper, though, and you'd think that Llane would be there for his father's funeral. He could be out fighting Orcs, but if Anduin Lothar's there, you'd think Llane would be there as well.

If this is Llane's funeral, this might be at the end of the film. In that case, the elderly wizard on the right might actually be Khadgar, who has just been magically aged by Medivh. As to who the three people on the right are? Well, the kid could certainly be Varian. The other two? My crazier theory is that they could be Bolvar Fordragon and Lady Katrana Prestor - aka Onyxia. I had always assumed Bolvar and Varian to be about the same age, but it wouldn't be that strange to imagine a difference of about 10 years - Varian might have looked up to Bolvar as an older brother while Lothar was a surrogate father. Anyway, if these two were the people he grew up with (along with Arthas, who was actually about his age,) it would make sense that they'd run the kingdom in his absence.

Moving on to the reverse of that shot:

As you can see, this is a fairly big funeral. Also, the city doesn't seem to be in flames - but to be fair, I don't think it's quite that Llane dropped dead and the Horde immediately battered down the door. It was probably just demoralizing to lose their heroic king and that led Stormwind to fall.

But let's also get a closer look at some of those people in the front row. Yes! There are some High Elves on the right, and possibly some Dwarves on the left. These could just be delegations, of course. The First War was really just Stormwind versus the Horde, and the Dwarves, Elves, and Gnomes wouldn't get involved until the Second War (though the movies might fudge it to allow the "Alliance" to exist from the start - perhaps harkening back to the Troll Wars.)

This is clearly a shot of Westfall, due to the grain silo on the left and the Harvest Golem to the right (hooray!) Of the two central figures, the one on the left is almost certainly Orgrim Doomhammer, as you can see that he's holding his namesake. On the right is most likely Durotan with his wolf, presumably contemplating the destruction they've caused and wondering whether it's worth it.

So far we aren't seeing a ton of green orcs, though I wouldn't be surprised if it were some sort of plot-point in the movies where the orcs slowly change color as the war continues and Gul'dan's influence spreads.

And there's Lothar shooting a blunderbuss presumably from horseback. It's a nice little signal to those not familiar with Warcraft that it's not a typical fantasy setting.

Anyway, we'll get the full trailer at the end of the week. You can expect a lot more posts about that as well as about whatever they announce regarding Legion. For now it's just cool to see this world realized in live-action or at least near-photo-realistic CGI.