Before the coming of the Scourge, Silvermoon City was the heart and the capital of Quel'Thalas, the high elves' magic kingdom. Quel'Thalas was an idyllic sanctuary in where the high elves could pursue their arcane studies. For close to seven millennia, the elven kingdom and its capital Silvermoon stood, and the homeland of the high elves flourished. But all this changed when the Scourge came to claim the most sacred and precious possession of the High Elven nation ��?the arcane energies of the Sunwell, located at the heart of Silvermoon. By the time Arthas and his army of the dead turned southward, no one remained in Quel'Thalas ��?at least no one living.

With the design of Silvermoon City, the dev team sought to capture this pivotal event in blood elf history. In a way, Silvermoon also serves as a look into the psyche of the blood elves as a whole, and as we'll see, not everything is quite right in the newly rebuilt capital.What does elven architecture look like? In previous Warcraft games, players could only catch brief glimpses of the magnificent and otherworldly wow power leveling constructions of Azeroth's high elves. As players led their armies through the forests of Quel'Thalas or whittled down the high elves' defenses in Warcraft III, they caught brief peeks at elven structures. In World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, players will be able to take a much more detailed look at the blood elf way of life.