REACTING to Cataclysm | World of Warcraft Cinematic Trailer | REACTION!

OG vanilla WoW trailer still makes me tear up a little, even to this day. I've played all of the expancions since 2005 but this one just hits differently…Blizzard was just magical back then!

The title says "REACTING to Cataclysm" but you are reacting from Vanilla AND cataclysm which is more than just cataclysm, you should change the title IMO (should have done all the cinematics in order tho) xD

Flash facts for WoW lore:
– Azeroth was built by the Titans.
– Titans were like, we need to build more worlds.
– Titans created the Dragon Aspects to help preserve Azeroth from various threats like the elemental lords, the old gods etc. and then left.
– One of the Dragon Aspects was assigned to guard the prison of one of those old gods.
– Said old gold whispered sweet things to him and he betrayed the rest of the Dragon Aspects.
– Meanwhile, The War of the Ancients is happening, which is basically the first attempt of The Burning Legion(the nasty demons) to invade Azeroth.
– Fast forward to the present and the Cataclysm cinematic.
Here we see the Dragon Aspect who betrayed the other ones, trying to stay still while his subordinates try to put on him armor that keeps his body from literally falling apart. He is overflowing with energy and his body can not handle it.

Played from the beginning until about halfway through Cataclysm. The game became far too casual for me.

I wasn't there on release in 2004, but I started playing around 2006 a few months before the first expansion came out, so when The Burning Crusade released my young teen self was through the roof with excitement.

14? That first cinematic is 20 years old! Imagine that cinematic quality in 2004! That was blizzard, that was quality, that was love.

I bought this game on release day and I have no regrets, still I was in highschool and now I have 5 kids loll this was some time ago 😛

As a 15 year WoW vet the original cinematic one something on release. almost nothing cinematic out at that time for gamers was so well crafted, and it blew us away. Even by todays standards it holds up very well.

There were 3 games with DLC before WoW warcraft 1-3. The dragon you saw was Deathwing and is actually a secondary antagonist in warcraft 2. What you just saw was his return 14 YEARS later after being defeated in the earlier games he healed and then caused huge disasters before attacking us directly. WoW had way of preparing you for the next expansion by having events take place before the next drop. Cataclysm did so by completely destroying the landscape of the world map in several places, Including the massive flooding of that tidal wave.

I was there when it released, I was 15 years old at the time and it was an epic journey. I spent a good 10 years on World of Warcraft played through the original game and 5 expansions. Made so many friends some I still have 10 years after I stopped playing, I even met my girlfriend in the game and we're still together. World of Warcraft is soon 20 years old. I don't like and enjoy the game anymore, but I don't think any other game will be more epic than it was at the time for me.

I am pretty sure, the dragon is responsible for creating that tidal wave, just by existing and moving around underground, he created an earthquake and reshaped the world.

The first cinematic is 20 years old.. watching that in that time cannot be described in words, specially if you knew the Lore from previous games/books and they show you that you can be in that world of legends as yourself and not only seeing it through the stories of the main characters, you can grow stronger, talk to those main characters and even fight them… now imagine you're a kid/teenager watching that.

ngl whenever i see the dwarf at the start of wows first cinematic and the music kicks in i get goosebumps for the time and hell even now it just amazes me. takes me back to the days when i used to play at my gfs house with her parents ( they got me into it as funny as that is). as much as there's controversy in wow today no one can say the art and cinematic team have missed a beat in the last 20 years.

I remember healing on that barrel-rolling bastard dragon's back fight 🙂🙃🙂

Heh battle with Deathwing was one of the greatest battle in size.

I didnt experience the trailer myself, since the first part since I was born in '01 soo… baby back then.
My parents however did and they said that for a trailer this realistic back then was something so unique that for a while they couldnt think of anything becoming better. They played until Wrath of the Lich King, I started to play in Legion

During the prelude to the Cataclysm expansion Deathwing would literally fly overhead randomly through the world. He changed the landscape when the trailer was released and if you were unlucky enough to be in the area at the time you would literally die without any idea what was going on.

Whenever this game came out I went nuts in my room after installing the game in 5 different CD's and getting to see that cinematic opening the game for the first time

SYLVANAS ! ❤❤❤

about the cataclysm trailer: this expansion in particular REALLY lives up to its name. Because there´s a bit more to it than just "new stuff". Do note, that i heavily simplify this aspect, and some inaccuracies may be part of it, but it´s easier to explain this way.

First of all, a bit of lore you need to know. In Azeroth, there exist multiple different "races" of dragons, with some of them inheriting an "aspect". They´re basically the leaders of the different dragon tribes, that inherited an "aspect" from the titans.
one of those aspects was Neltharion the earth-warder, who inherited the aspect of earth. However, he turned against the other aspects, abandoning his title in favor of becoming the aspect of death.
He was believed dead by many, but after the fall of the Lich King (which was from the previous expansion "Wrath of the Lich King", which trailer you already watched), he spectacularily emerged from the depths of Azeroth, leaving only devastation behind (as you can see in the trailer). As he has become the aspect of death, he changed his name to "Deathwing".

this also had massive consequences on the game's world. Former jungles turned into wastelands, the desert of "thousand needles" became flooded, and the entire area of the barrens got horizontally split in half. Ths also meant: basically all of the original maps got changed in at least some way (which Blizzard used to update them to a higher graphical standard at the time). So yeah, the emerging of deathwing literally resulted in a cataclyctic event that devastated basically the ENTIRE original map of Azeroth, and left almost no stone unturned.

About "how do you kill THAT thing": well, he is STILL a dragon aspect after all. Such a thing as "immortality" doesn´t exist. And we also already killed the Lich King, which is undead. But it took a LOT of effort for the players to kill him, including the former leader of the horde "Thrall", the "dragonsoul" (or rather, the demon soul, an artifact created by deathwing himself that can not only destroy, but also enslave dragons). our protagonists recovered it through the cavern of time, and used it to ultimately defeat deathwing in the final raid of the expansion.

But yeah, had the former shaman-leader of the horde, thrall, not recovered teh dragonsoul, it would have been game over for all of azeroth. fun-fact: Thrall used to be the the warlord (aka, the leader or "king" ) of the horde up until before cataclysm, but left the leadership to a successor in order to fulfill his duty as the "world shaman" (his profession is literally shaman even before he became the horde warlord). he gave leadership to garrosh hellscream, the son of one of his former allies grommash hellscream. So with the release of cataclysm, the horde players actually "lost" a beloved faction leader that never became warlord again. and grommash….. let´s say, he was not that likeable and peaceful as thrall has ever been.

about what happened in the cave: becoming the aspect of death, neltharion/deathwing suffered a big problem: his body was falling apart. the solution to this is what we see in the trailer: his body is LITERALLY kept together by his armor. remove the armor, he falls apart. and since he has become the aspect of death, well, he doesn´t care in the slightest about killing of anyone.

the tidal wave was one of the many consequences of deathwing literalyl breaking through the surface of azeroth. he has been underground for a long long time. imagine it as detonating a gigantic nuke, somewhere in the earth below the sea, and then a burning dragon emerges setting everythign on fire. it´s DEVASTATING.

It took all of the power of the 4 remaining dragon aspects (probably the most powerful entities in the world at the time) AND an entire raid-party (10/25 players) AND Thrall with the dragonsoul to take him down for good. that is lore-wise the most powerful beings you could imagine working together to take him down. and yet, the damage to the world was already done. the players were completely unable to prevent any damage, they could only stop him from completely destroying the entire world

Why all those disasters?
Ok, long story short:
-WoW dragons are divided in dragonflights, based on their color, and each dragonflight rules/watches over a certain aspect of reality
-the black dragonflight rules over earth/environment
-the black dragonflight gets corrupted and turns evil
-Deathwing is the lord of the black dragonflight
-when Deathwing is angy, so is the earth/environment, manifesting in natural disasters