Blizzard announces new Battle for Azeroth animated series: Warbringers

It’s happening — Battle for Azeroth is just around the corner, and Blizzard is releasing a new set of animated shorts for the next expansion. A new trailer has just been released to announce the Warbringers series, and while it’s only a brief 30 seconds, there’s a lot going on in those 30 seconds. Players have been looking at that artwork of the burning of Teldrassil for months now, and it appears the artwork is actually part of the animated shorts. And it looks like the upcoming 2019 World of Warcraft calendar features some artwork for the series as well.

We’ll be getting three different shorts this time around, with focuses on three important faces in the next expansion. Sylvanas’ short looks like it’s going to touch on her past, and also involve the fateful events we’ll be playing through over the lead up to Battle for Azeroth. Jaina looks a little bit like she’ll be dealing with her past as well. There are a few of what looks like references to the death of her father — something she had a hand in orchestrating, however well-intentioned she was about it, after the Third War. And it looks like Arthas will be making an appearance as well.

And then we have Azshara. From the brief glimpses shown, it looks like we’re finally going to see exactly what happened to Azshara after the War of the Ancients. Frankly, I’m really excited to have anything at all related to Azshara — I was hoping she’d show up in Legion, but it looks like Battle for Azeroth is her time to shine. Given the expansion’s nautical theme, it’s only appropriate.

The tagline for the series is “War did not break them, it made them,” which again, is only appropriate for what we’ll be seeing in Battle for Azeroth. And while we don’t have a release date for the shorts — only an infuriating “coming soon” — I can’t image we’ll be waiting too long. After all, we’ve only got five weeks until we’re traversing the shores of Kul Tiras and Zandalar ourselves. I’m just excited that we’re getting some animated shorts to help tide us over until then.