After Arthas becomes the Lich King and sits on the Frozen Throne, he enters a meditative state where his personality and the Lich King’s fight for dominance over the being that the two have now become. The Scourge presence in the ruins of Lordaeron, now known as the Plaguelands, remains but is not as aggressive as it had once been. Like Sylvanas and her banshees, many of the undead were freed from the control of the Lich King and Arthas when his power weakened, and that control could not be reasserted. Sylvanas led this new faction of undead that had broken free from the Scourge and they would come to be known as the Forsaken; forsaken by their former brethren, as the humans viewed them as monsters and would not accept them.
The Forsaken had only one purpose in undeath and it was vengeance. They intended to kill Arthas Menethil, the Lich King, by any means necessary. The events of the Burning Legion’s eventual invasion of Kalimdor would set the stage for the modern Alliance and Horde factions to be formed. This is where World of Warcraft begins, and it will eventually lead to the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, which sees the Burning Legion once again threaten the world. Then, as the heroes of the Alliance and Horde return home from their campaign against the Legion, they find their cities beset by an old enemy. The Scourge.
The world would soon learn that the events of this cinematic took place sometime after the events of The Burning Crusade and led to World of Warcraft’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Arthas reawakened, having successfully suppressed both the consciousness of the original Lich King and his own humanity, and decided that the time had come for the Scourge to sweep across the entire globe—for all life to be snuffed out, consumed by the Scourge, and reanimated as another soldier in his unending army.
After repelling the initial Scourge invasions, both the Alliance and Horde sent multiple expeditionary forces to Northrend to wage war against the forces of undeath. Across Northrend, the champions of the Alliance and Horde—the players—assaulted various Scourge operations, bases, and commanders, pushing their footholds back further and further. The goal was to reach Icecrown, a region that occupied the entire northwestern corner of Northrend where Arthas’s stronghold, Icecrown Citadel, stood erected around the Frozen Throne to protect it from future assaults like Illidan’s. Directly south of Icecrown was a region known as Dragonblight, and therein was a rear gate that led directly into the heart of Icecrown Citadel. This gate was known as the Angrathar the Wrathgate, and the Alliance and Horde had established forward outposts to lay siege to the citadel and hopefully bring a swift end to Arthas.
The Alliance forces at the Wrathgate were led by Highlord Bolvar Fordragon, while the Horde’s were led by Warlord Dranosh Saurfang. As players arrive at their faction’s outpost, they are prompted to partake in The Battle of the Wrathgate, which is depicted as an in-engine cinematic. Please watch before continuing.
With Dranosh and Bolvar both dead, the assault on the Wrathgate was abandoned. The Forsaken who attacked from the ridge was a trusted lieutenant of Sylvanas, Apothecary Putress, who had gone rogue and staged a coup against not only the Horde, but also the Dark Lady herself. The Alliance and Horde would be briefly sidetracked, recovering the Forsaken capital city—the former Lordaeron capital city—from the traitors. The course of the expansion would see players sidetracked taking on several other threats, from Kel’Thuzad and his floating fortress, the necropolis Naxxramas, to the old god Yogg-Saron trapped within an ancient and high-tech titan facility known as Ulduar. Ultimately, however, the battle would be taken to Arthas himself, as The Argent Crusade—a faction of Silver Hand paladins determined to bring down the Scourge—laid siege to the gates of Icecrown Citadel.
The Argent Crusade was led by Tirion Fordring, a legendary paladin—one of the original five alongside Uther. He took up this fight much against Arthas and the Scourge well before the armies of the Crusade were in Northrend, specifically following a key battle that took place in the eastern Plaguelands of Lordaeron, namely at a holy site known as Light’s Hope Chapel. Arthas had an army of death knights waging war on a human faction known as the Scarlet Crusade, and once they successfully wiped out the Scarlet Crusade, he set his sights on Light’s Hope, as it was home to thousands of fallen Alliance heroes: perfect new members of the Scourge. The death knights marched on Light’s Hope; however they were repelled by the paladins who resided there.
Eventually Arthas himself appeared on the battlefield, and his appearance forced Tirion, who had been in hiding, to reveal himself as well. Tirion was able to repel Arthas, and through the events of the battle, Arthas’s control over the death knights was broken and they quickly took up arms against him under a new name—The Knights of the Ebon Blade. The siege on Icecrown Citadel was jointly led by the Argent Crusade and the Knights of the Ebon Blade, and together they formed a faction known as the Ashen Verdict. Players, with a great deal of assistance from the Verdict as well as their own faction’s expeditionary force, would fight through the horrors of Icecrown Citadel until they made their way to the same frozen spire that Arthas climbed all those years ago. Atop the citadel sat the Frozen Throne, where Arthas waited with a prisoner he had collected from the aftermath of the Battle of the Wrathgate: Bolvar Fordragon.
Players, alongside Fordring, charged into battle against Arthas. However, Arthas froze Fordring in a block of ice so he could focus on the players. Arthas utilizes everything in his arsenal to bring down the brave heroes who sought to overcome death itself. In a decisive moment, however, Arthas kills every single player with a single attack and reveals his master plan to the frozen Tirion. He had planned all of this. Every challenge the players had faced in Northrend, Arthas had intended for them to face; all to test and hone them. All so that when they finally arrived at the foot of his Frozen Throne, he would know that they truly were the world’s greatest champions. Then, he could kill them and raise them as true masters of the Scourge and with so many immensely powerful beings under his sway, nothing would be able to stop him or his Scourge from sweeping across the entire world. Fordring utters one final prayer to the Light from within his icy prison, breaks free of his prison, and strikes Frostmourne as Arthas is raising the players into undeath. Frostmourne is shattered, and all the souls trapped within are released. Immediately they lash out at Arthas in vengeance. The spirit of King Terenas resurrects all the dead heroes, and they rise and deliver the final blow to Arthas.
As Arthas is defeated, this cinematic plays and players can witness the end of one of the most tragic and iconic villains in fiction.
–Nico De Paolis