Considering the RPG year stamp is 2003, and WoW released in 2004, then yes you are absolutely right about Maraudon being a Titan Vault. However with the release of Cataclysm maybe they just couldn't figure out how to reinvigorate Desolace in regards to Titan lore? Honestly the Classic Desolace landscape leaves way more unanswered questions than answers with all the structures and the skeletons (though considering the tridents and the serpentine shape of their skulls one can only assume they were some sort of Naga-like creature).
To be honest I never "saw" that they removed those pillars and everything, it was just feeling kinda weird in Retail that the place was so empty. But ye I feel weirded out now by this, and it's just another piece of Blizz removing a ton of things from old world with Cata.
My biggest disappointment in Cata-Desolace is the abandoned plotline of the Centaur Phariah. With the Amulet of the Union containing the spirits of the ancient khans, he was supposed to unite the centaur clans. And what do we get in Cata? Nothing. The Centaur Phariah was removed from the game as if never existed.
It was still actually considered a titan vault/prison way back right before the cusp of Cataclysm launch during the pre patch event. and it wasn't until Chronicle that it was officially retconned out of existence for some reason. Cho'gall directly states it as such whenever you evesdrop as you are tasked with killing Theredras. Seemingly for good, as Therazane later in Deepholm talks about how we killed her only daughter.
Looking at the adventure guide, it says that Theredras was an elemental princess corrupted by the old gods- which actually seems like a prime candidate for being locked in a titan vault instead of put in the elemental plane of earth. It definitely seems like that was the official story even in cata (a minor titan vault), and Chronicle just decided to change it for shits and giggles.
I knew something was off about the entrance to Maraudon! The entrance leading up to Maraudon was one of my favourite memories from vanilla WoW. It just looked so cool and ancient the closer you got to the dungeon, I wanted to know more about those ruins. When I came back many years later I wondered why it was so empty and if what I remembered was just my imagination but now I know why.
I feel like I know everything about WoW and the lore but every time I watch your videos I learn new things. This might just be a theory but still learned new facts from this and your theories are not far fetched at all. Thanks for the videos!
old lore is so much better, why can't they leave things to be mysterious instead of having to remove things or completely reveal them? it must have been so satisfying to piece it together yourself, that kind of storytelling is awesome
Hi Jedi! Great hypothesis! I've been reading some reviews of the Warcraft RPG books. As much as they're held up as the pillar of alternative lore and how the franchise would have been infinitely better if it had developed along those lines, the reviews do a good job of painting the books in a pretty poor light. With a few exceptions, the lore we got in Frozen Throne and WoW was generally the superior option.
I love your deep dives into the lore of the world, they're always so interesting. This kind of mystery is so interesting because we're most likely never gonna get an answer to our questions. Thank you for the great work Jedi!
At this point I wouldn't even consider the RPG book non-canon, a good chunk of it is either still relevant or has been retroactively re-canonized, *especially* Titan-related lore. I could see the cataclysm being used to excuse the missing ruins by saying they were destroyed by earthquakes and removed by the centaurs. We've been uncovering vaults across Kalimdor for a while now, like Alcaz Island, the vault proper in Un'goro... I easily buy this theory.
This is awesome. I recently started casually leveling and exploring in Classic Vanilla because of these videos, and a renewed appreciation and nostalgia for when I first played the game back in 05. I had not noticed these changes. Thanks, and keep 'em coming!
Quite interesting. I've also always wondered why the undead found in the Valley of Bones in Decolace were classic humanoid skeletons on 2 legs and not 4-leged centaur skeletons (as I assumed it to be a centaur graveyard). Whose skeletons are those? Are they ancient dead Night Elves? Or did Blizzard just not have enough time to make centaur skeletons so they just used whatever? :]
I looked into this for ya! These Undead Ravagers are in the Valley on their own but can also be summoned by the Outcast Necromancers here. The necromancers summon them using an ability called "Summon Magram Ravager" referring to the Magram centaur clan, so I think they are intended to be centaur skeletons but just kept the base model. :)
Recently found your video, i find this super interesting because i was speculating in one of my videos on why one of the cracks in the war within cinematic forms over Desolace and one idea was titan facilities. This gives extra weight to that theory.
@@Jediwarlock I always loved Maraudon in vanilla, maybe we'll get a revamped version, with an alternate route to a newly discovered titan door deep within the caves that then leads us into a new titan wing of the dungeon. 😉
Just wanted to say, love your vids man! You never see people talk about the smaller details in the game, and it really brings light to how great the world of the game is.
This was a great deep dive. I think it's fair to allow the devs to recon things from very early Classic lore, but I always prefer it when they find a way to explain some of the janky old lore. So many good RU-vid lore speculation videos end up being moot because for the devs/writers, it's easier to just scrub it.
Ive always hated questing in Kalimdor. Ive been an EK guy through and through. Needing to go to Kalimdor was always an annoyance to me. I especially hated the barrens, Tanaris, Thousand Needles, and Desolace. But a while back on a private server, i made a troll hunter. Id played EK to death and knew too mamy quests by heart. I knew i needed a change, a new experience to keep me engaged. When i got to desolace, i was just there for a new scorpion. But i stuck around to skin the packs of hyenas. Eventually i made my way to the kodo graveyard, and found i could skin the kodos there. I stayed in Desolace from the entry level for the zone, until almost everything there was gray to me. Collecting leather from the kodos, kodo meat, and a rare feather drop from thr vultures. Leather for my craft, and the kodo meat and feathers for the AH. I made literally hundreds of gold there. My more autistic guildmate who farmed spots for gold asked me about it one day as i was going off in the guild chat. Desolace became his golden goose. Bro farmed kodo meat. Bro farmed those feathers, bro farmed the lobster traps and sold the rare fishing rods. Bro froze his exp to farm gold and by the time he was ready to start leveling again, he was the richest among us. ... Rokkaido man, you were a real one. Desolace went from a zone i absolutely hated, to a zone i couldnt stop going to lol
Amazing video! Love watching your vids and learning about WoW. You do such a professional job keeping it intelligent and interesting. Great quality thanks for sharing all the fascinating facts, keep up your great work!💫
This reminds me of the Ragefire Chasm troggs. Something about them just stood out to me. Most troggs you find are in the Eastern Kingdoms, many of them being released from Uldaman. But these troggs are in Kalimdor (there could be other troggs in Kalimdor I do not know about, but I am not sure). Also, they have a color model that consists of red lines that I do not see on other troggs. I do vaguely remember someone mentioning a possible titan vault around the area as an explanation for the troggs, but I'm not entirely sure about what the deal is with that group of Troggs.
Great idea, I will add it to my list of potential future ideas! The only other troggs to my knowledge spawn during a night elf quest in Darkshore (the Remtravel Excavation escort quest) but... I will have to investigate more ;)
A few things. There's another Titan facility located under Bael Modan, according to the RPG books. It's a place I've been fascinated with forever, especially with the weird things happening in the dwarven fortress. But also, it's important to remember that early WoW was a lot of ideas that were wild and didn't fit. A lot of people were responsible for a lot of work, and not all of it had the narrative oversight you would expect. This is more of an example of them realizing something never fit enough to their liking. A revision of a draft of the world. Like a draft of a novel that maybe released before the story was truly finished. Which is a sloppy metaphor, but when you consider Blizzard's "story second" edict, especially back then, it makes sense. Like the Draenei and Blood Elves, the stories before didn't all make sense in the vision of the game moving forward. It just happens.
Now to find the name of those assets… I like finding old assets. Prior to WoD, the naming of gobjects was a little mundane, which causes a lot of clutter. The famous teal colored broken bottle? Well, that’s just brokenbottle. The name of the unbroken healthy bottle? Bottle. There are a LOT of bottles in WoW. So searching for bottles will be almost impossible. In WoD and beyond, it’s the number of the expansion, then race or zone name, underscore, asset. Wmo is for buildings with interiors that might have music and a minimap. For example, 6or_orcclans_inn will be the name for the relatively rare orc tavern used by not-Iron-Horde orcs. So that’s the issue. Vanilla doesn’t have specific names for a lot of their assets unless if they’re very specific, like “kalidar” gobjects which are all the trees and plants specifically for Teldrassil, as it was originally called Kalidar. Since these only exist in Desolace, I imagine it’ll be a little bit easier to find and I could try terra pillar or marauder pillar, but I don’t know yet.
Started the video out thinking you'd be trying to convince me maraudon was and still is a titan vault but I totally agree that "it *was* meant to be that originally" but it didn't go through. With the total cata removal you can totally guess that in vanilla it was meant to be a place tied with the titans somehow but got scrapped in the end and instead of removing it altogether they kept the architecture ties while scrubbing any actual titan mentions. Makes sense with vanilla still being more testing ground-ish and unpolished with leftovers of scrapped stuff and stuff that would come out later. The entire zone of Azshara in classic wow is infamous for being a huge but totally unfinished zone with next to nothing in it. Same with classic Hyjal or the gated instance portal in stormwind originally being for player housing. It'd make sense that Maraudon was intended to be tied to titans and they didn't bother to get rid of the kinda out of place stuff all the way up until the expansion that was all about re-doing the world to be modernized and to fit the lore better where they went "it doesn't really make sense to have all these grand stone arches and pillars in a centaur place" Great video, always fun to see stuff from you I wouldn't see anywhere else!
If I remember well, the removal of these structures was linked to them not being mapped for flying (i.e. you could fly through and fall off the world). given these structures don't show up a lot, I suppose they couldn't be bothered, which kind of shows given how little attention the south west of Kalimdor got during Cataclysm.
I really prefer the old version of Desolace. With Maraudon being the only remnant of the once lush landscape. The big jungle in the middle of the zone introduced in Cataclysm feels so out of place, because Desolace used to be a grasland, not a forest.
Hi. First of all, thank you for keeping up with lore theory. This kind of content is common on Zelda, Elden Ring, Star Wars or The Witcher, is rare for WoW. Moreover, a lot of WoW-lore content creators just repeat themselves (sometimes it is a litteral translation for laguage A to B lol), sometimes wish to make false hype (so I automatically despice them). Moreover, the amount of retcon in WoW is unbearable and some tries to give a sense to that. I remember well about the morally-fushia Sylvanas comment storm in all social media. It is too rare to see a content creator of WoW that make its own theories and I wish to bring credit and appreciation for that, especially because you verify your own sources. I really enjoy your content. About retcons : my thought is that they are too convenient. It is not a simple correction on two NCP relationship or on a NPC name, retcons are impactful and the writers should explain them. As for me, I accept no retcon on WoW lore so in my view Maraudon should have stayed connected to Elven ruins or to the Titans. Thank you for your video !
Thank you for the thoughtful comment! I agree about the retcons... whenever possible, if the devs actually care about the lore they should try to incorporate the existing lore into a new framework. I'm glad you enjoy my vids :)
I wonder if this was the original place where you where going to find the Plates of Uldum to open an unreleased Uldum instance, this would make sense why they removed the titans ruins in Cata, now that Uldum was a zone it didn't need the plates and they also removed the Uldum Pedestal in Tanaris
I wonder, does Myzrael, in Arathi, have a similar story and demeanor as Theradras? She's also very unfriendly, and when you mentioned Theradras calling out to the tauren, it reminded me of the quest chain involving Myzrael.
My friend and I would explore unusual ruins around the world and try to work out whether it was Titan, Old god or Troll/Queldorei in origin. There was ruins in unusual locations such as EPL
@@Jediwarlock Gosh it'd been a long time since Ive explored these places. This was like in TBC. I quite found the quel'dorei ruins about EPL and Hinterlands or some of the interesting places in Kalimdore and how they related to the Silithid and Cthun or whether they were Kaldorei or Titan in origin. It was a lot of fun. Desolace was deffinately one of our stops as well as Ferelas with the ruins around Dire maul. Even if our head cannons weren't accurate we also took note of things like pillars with markings on them that reoccurred in other locations around the world.
Bliz and its lack of good institutional memory as to what was planned in the beginning and losing staff and never documenting things internally well probably means there's a good 50 or more pieces that were left incomplete in the Classic version of the game, some of which do not appear in the current "re-created" emulation of Vanilla that we have now. Remember that, always, what is in 'classic' and 'classic hard core' are emuations (along with the heavily modified 'SoD') and that they are not complete Vanilla versions.
@@Jediwarlock Hey, I sent you an email (mentioned my name ("RunsWithBears") in the title. Have you received it? I'm concerned that it might end up in your spam folder. :x
Classic has so much of this, so much that was intended but never finished... Uldum, or rather the gates to Uldum (and a quest from Ulduman leading to the gate of Uldum) are in classic wow, a portal which cannot be accessed because the area was never completed. I completed the whole quest WAY WAY back when and I was always disappointed that the storyline never went anywhere, even kept the useless disks as a memento hoping that maybe one day Blizzard would revisit the storyline and finish it. You can say they did when they finally implemented Uldum... but it wasn't even connected to this long-lost portal or the questline... What about the Sunken Temple, that storyline also dead ends never to be picked up again... So many interesting plot threads just left hanging... despite more than 20 years of wow...
Great points! The Uldum questline NEEDS to be finished! As for Sunken Temple/Eranikus, technically there was an end to the quest during the Scepter of the Shifting Sands when Eranikus was freed from the dream, but without that knowledge the unfinished essence quest does seem rather unfinished! :)
@@Jediwarlock Wasn't aware of any connection to the Sunken Temple storyline in the Scepter quest, but then my guild was late to Silithis, we missed the opening of the gates all together and never did the sceptre questline.
That waterfall area you see at 5:40, a scene with *sky* visible. Where the hell is this in Maraudon? I measured it out relative to the entrance once inside, then repeated outside. I came up with a spot a ways off the coast of that Troll fishing village. Of course, there are no big cracks in the surface of Maraudon if you go looking for such.
@@Bramandin Not where in Maraudon is that, *where in Desolace* is that? Since you can look up and see *sky* that means there *should* be a corresponding spot, *outside of the instance*, outside, that corresponds. A gash in the earth, with trees and a river or lake, where you can look down and see some of the instance. Yeah, Bliz would have had to put an invisible wall around or over it, to keep players from jumping in. Bliz has demonstrated that they had at least a few devs capable of syncing stuff like that. That giant pair of doors at the end of Deadmines matches up with that giant pair of doors you see if running/swimming up the coast on the outside.
Yeah, it's not scaled properly with the outer environment (like a lot of instances), but canonically it would probably be a fissure in the mountain range behind the Valley of Spears/Maraudon. :) I like how you brought up the Deadmines Doors as those are probably the best example of syncing between the dungeon and the external map. Another that comes to mind is the Caer Darrow overlook in Scholomance or perhaps even the throne patio of Blackrock Spire! (you can see the castle lookout from the ground of Burning Steppes if you look closely) ;)
@@Jediwarlock I once tried to 'backdoor' Scholomance by flying over to, and landing on, that balcony. Bad move - wasn't actually connected from there, and the railing was too high for that toon -- think I used a feral? -- to jump over. That bit has since been removed -- that was back in WoLK days, when you had to pull a semi-hidden lever to open that treasure chest past the library area.
It has NEVER made sense why the Titans merely imprisoned the Old Gods. Ripped them out being off the table, I understand. But why not squish them then? Crush them. The only reason I could think of being logical is that the Titanic facilities were draining and utilizing the power of the Old Gods, or that they knew that killing them merely sent them back to the Void, just like with Demons and the Twisting Nether.
On the topic of naming conventions, how did the name of a Russian fast food chain (Теремок) that features *Russian* food wind up in Maraudon? Of course WOW used to do well in Russia before sanctions and a drop in like that is quite possible
@@pavelkrusstev8461 the elemental lords can only be truly defeated in there elemental plan that why rag is dead and Thunderaan is alive But Theradras wasn't she wasn't killed in the elemental plan of earth just a cave she shouldn't be dead dead and she wasn't she comes back in the cataclysm pre patch but hasn't been seen or heard of since
You know this brought to my attention some weird inconsistency. Maybe I'm missing something though, idk. Basically, the elements are portrayed as this peaceful, harmonic force revered by shamanistic cultures, and yet at the same time, they're also servants of chaos? Although, nature can be pretty chaotic so frankly a yin and yang type of thing does make sense, yet the tauren and orcs seem to regard them as being mostly positive.
You bring up a good point! I think ideally the elements are more on the tranquil side and can be used in harmony by the mortal races, but the more aggressive Elemental Lords allying with the Old Gods have thrown things out of wack. Additionally, the physical environment can affect the elementals and if the earth is disturbed then sometimes they can become hostile. It's not explained well in Classic, but my hypothesis is that there are some competing factions to the elementals behind the scenes that could explain why things are very yin and yang, as you say. For example, Duke Hydraxis and his water elementals ally with mortals to take down Ragnaros, and yet just one zone away in Winterspring, Princess Tempestria and her watery forces invade the zone and plan on destroying the mortals there. We then see isolated elementals like those summoned in Shaman questlines that seem pretty far removed from any of the "politics" of the elements. So, elementals can have a variety of motivations in my opinion and interact differently depending on which group they belong to, if any. :) Just my random thoughts but hopefully that makes a bit of sense?
Agreed. I did not enjoy the Cata. We lost the amazing Dwarven Heads Dam and the entire second island by Feathermoon Feralas, the fire elevator at Thousand Needles, and the Barrens were ruined.
Aye we must remember that the old plan for wow was content updates not expansions making it easy to build on the bones of vanilla, but with expacs you lose the world building part to mainly focus on the expac content. For me wow lore is split în 6 categories: 1 the OG bedrock Blizzard Classic/TBC/Wotlk , even though tbc used some macguffin bs to happen, it was still cool to see what happened to the chars you played în wc3. 2 the ,lets try something new while activito is eating us, Cata. Still some good lore bits. 3 the 'time for some China money' Panda, remember that joke character în wc3? Well now he îs a continent mf! 4 the 'we have lost a ton of subs let,s trick them into thinking thst we are going back' WoD. 5 the ,welp, this is our last known big bad and he îs a fart clowd, Legion. 6 the , i don't give a shit man just buy some store mounts and fluk off. Bfa-now.
How can the centaur be able to make highly detailed statues and "giant monster," but not some stairs and some walls??? Maybe that "style" is just the style they learned. Its not like square, dark stone work is limited to JUST titans. Maybe they removed those assets because they just didnt belong there. This game was made by hundreds of people. Over decades. Some stuff isnt going to make sense. At the end of the day, its a game. Not history.
