Warcraft

One of the most popular stories you'll hear from the earliest World of Warcraft players is how Alterac Valley battleground matches could last many hours, with players leaving for meals or classes and then returning to find the same match going.

With the arrival of the final Shadowlands patch, World of Warcraft has officially entered its pre-expansion lull, and while the Dragonflight alpha is chugging along, many players tend to farm old expansions during the downtime, looking to pick up collectibles and transmogs they may have missed the first time around.

There are various characters who have been important to Warcraft as a whole, and World of Warcraft in particular, that we haven't seen for a while.

The latest alpha build for World of Warcraft's forthcoming expansion Dragonflight included a new feature coded as "Soft Targeting." An alternative to the standard tab target or click-to-interact that WoW players have been using for years, the soft target feature will automatically target an NPC or enemy within medium range that your camera is centered on -- you don't have to get right in their face, thankfully, but casters and hunters will find it hard to start combat from maximum range with this feature.

I used to heavily modify my WoW when I was raiding.

I feel like it's fair to say that by the end of Shadowlands (if you’ve been playing this whole time), you are running around with a fair amount of currency.

Wrath of the Lich introduced World of Warcraft's first Hero class: the fearsome Death Knight.

In a rare inside look at how the Warcraft team puts together WoW's timeline, Lead Narrative Designer Steve Danuser not only put WoW's history on a timeline -- he also stated, in no uncertain terms, we'd be having a bit of a time skip between the end of Shadowlands and the start of Dragonflight.

World of Warcraft players are all experts on keeping track of complicated timelines.

I'm generally pretty down for storylines in my games that swing the focus as wide and cinematic as it can get. Legion, for example, was a story I really enjoyed -- the invasion of Azeroth by a vast, world-spanning host of demons which led to a showdown on a planet seething with fel corruption between a Pantheon of beings on the scale of gods and their fallen former champion, who sought to potentially destroy our whole world.