World of Warcraft's Dragonflight pre patch will be live on October 25th. Blizzard will also be debuting a series of animated shorts to get us all ready for the launch of the full expansion on November 28th. Called Dragonflight: Legacies, there's a trailer for the first episode and more of what to know.
The Dragonflight expansion is built on the fact that the dragonflights of Azeroth have returned. This trailer for the series follows Nozdormu, an Aspect of the Bronze dragonflight. He talks about the return of a difficult ancient enemy, and what's at stake, based on the past and its lessons for the future, along with conflict to come. This series of shorts looks to be setting up everything we need to know about Dragonflight before the expansion is out.
Animation as a storytelling medium isn’t new, but it has been used very effectively for game promotions and lore exploration. This holds true when the content is outside the released game and expands upon its lore or history as an additional source. In these cases, creative teams have to be sure that any player that didn’t watch the animation can still have all the info they need in game without it, so there can be some limits.
Recently, Cyberpunk 2077 and Netflix collaborated on a new anime, Edgerunners, based in the game's universe. Many credit as having boosted Cyberpunk 2077’s player numbers to over a million on consecutive days since the series came out.
With Dragonflight: Legacies, Blizzard hasn’t said how many episodes there will be, and is notably releasing them on YouTube, so they’ll be easily accessible. With Dragonflight on the way, and the pre-patch going live on the day the first episode is out, there will already be some changes to explore and dive into even before the full launch.
See the announcement of Dragonflight: Legacies over at World of Warcraft.