I just replayed the original Warcraft 3 again

Lore Story
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This just hurts.
I still have the original CDs, I managed to pick Warcraft 3 up at a local game shop 8 years ago. I still replay it from time to time, or I make my own custom maps with custom campaigns.

I can’t believe how much they changed and how they continue to MILK this beautiful fantasy.
I think, that vanilla did Warcraft 3 justice. It created a world that was alive. The world wasn’t build around the player like in retail nowadays, the world was build around a real world, adventures and journey.

I don’t know what to say. There’s so many concepts that they could’ve taken in another direction. I really, really wish that the Classic+ concept is real and that they hire a team, devoted to the works of Chris Metzen to continue the story of Warcraft, as it should’ve been.

No Draenei, no Blood Elves suddenly finding themselves on the Horde for no reason at all.
No Kael’thas suddenly going evil, aswell with Illidan and lady Vashj.
No stupid Vrykul, or the whole “almost every race is an ancestor of something!!”
No broken isles suddenly containing moose Tauren, or even worse, that Suramar somehow survived after all these centuries. Really took the magic away from me there.

They are just so lazy with all this writing. So according to the lore in Legion part of Suramar was kept above the water thanks to a magical shield created by the Nightborne. Gul’dan with his clan was there, and he didn’t notice a city surrounded by a magic sphere or something like that.
Dwarves were there, since in Ironforge museum there’s an astrolobe from Suramar. They didn’t see the city either. Next we have Maiev with her wardens visiting this place, who have millenia of experience in scouting and tracking, and they did not find it either (really?). Also how did they even have a jail on there since it was sunken twice?

Also Illidan and his Naga friends, same story. Or maybe they did find it we don’t know. But would they ignore it? Illidan, with his magic addiction, ignoring/not noticing a place with the equivalent of a Well of Eternity? Naga, who are basically praying to Azshara, ignoring the next best thing to her (Nightborne elves)?

This whole part of the lore is so gloriously stupid. So many dumb moves were made during the creation of WoW lore and story in order to keep making one add-on after another. I seriously can’t comprehend how people found Legion innovating or interesting at all.

The Demons are dealt with. The Burning Legion was made into a joke. Sargeras is contained, the Titan’s mystery is gone.
The Old Gods are all dead. Their mystery has died out aswell, and perhaps N’zoth was the most anti-climatic boss ever, not even Deathwing was as bad.

It hurts so damn much.

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To be honest, I would argue that it’s build around the idea of “what’s cool” without specifying who is the target audience that would decide if something ended up being “cool” or not.

For example, story panels during the last blizzcon did not take the player’s existence or interest into account at all.

The thing is, the person who pioneered things like addition of “high king” (insert arbitrary :leafy_green: smoking picture) or turning Garrosh into what he ended up being, one of biggest “rule of cool” proponents, is the same K. Metzen who worked on the world building for Warcraft 3.

My hypothesis is that sometimes creators outgrow their creation. It started with relatively “down to earth” story with understandable character motivations, etc., and went in a direction of chasing “cool” moments.

E.g. sure, adding Varian adds opportunities for “hype” moments centered around a single character, but in the game which originally was not about centering on a single character it IMO just cannibalized the rest of what made alliance actually the alliance.

What to do in such situation? I don’t really know. Would it be a better idea for the creator to leave the creation instead of warping it into something it was not meant to be? Or is “evolution” a good thing in such cases? I guess there might be no “1 answer fits all” here.

I am not sure if they’re lazy. To me it seems that they’re mostly disrespectful or high on hubris.

The way existing lore seemingly treated is “ok, we want to tell this story. What can we take to justify it? What are the characters in which we can shove in these ideas?” rather than looking at what there is and how it would make sense for those things to evolve accordingly to the current events.

E. g. there is this scourge problem that originated in Northrend. (Shadowlands pre-patch). And guess what - not even a hint of what’s going on with denizens on that continent was added into the game.
:man_shrugging:

Some people accept excuses like using Ashran for “capitals” or the absense of dranei intertwined with night elves since landing on Azuremyst on the elven story, as “reasonable” or believable. So, I guess, if the devs try hard enough with ignoring part of the audience and successfully create some sort of echo chamber for “kind of feedback” that might even not look too suspicious for the regular developers.

After WoD it was not too hard to make a good impression I guess. Also, in the later part of the expansion it was mechanically decent.

Some of them - sure.

There is a scene in the Tomb of Sargeras trailer where Kil’Jaeden says that following the plan of Sargeras led them to failures. So, if you really want, you can say that there might be some super-sercret plans of Sargeras not disclosed to others.

In a sense how “out of nowhere” Argus was could fit this way of thinking rather well. Except it was too poorly developed and showcased to make this idea anything more than just a desire to follow “benefit of a doubt” approach.

Well, if you go outside the game (which is a terrible idea to begin with, but that’s how pre-Shadowlands lore was established), the things described in “A Thousand Years of War” surprisingly well fit the actions of the titans as well, not just of the Burning Legion.

Now, there is another question in “is it a good idea to taint everything with a “morally grey” plague, and not a high quality version of it on top”. The Pantheon might be another victim of it after the “wonderful” story of Sylvanas.

They are “outside of the cycle” whatever that means. So, it’s possible to say that they wanted to be somewhere else, not on Azeroth. At least for some time.

But once again, it was poorly presented. Which is a common thing even for the stories that could be good. But because of poor implementation - they are not.

Just enjoy good parts, and do not stick with the bad ones IMO. I saw a launcher after the latest update added a “feedback” button to say if something you liked or didn’t. Not sure if the devs will pay attention to any feedback other than the most convenient to them, but maybe it could be used.

gl hf

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I do share this sentiment. As much as I enjoyed playing through the entire Suramar campaign, in retrospect with W3 TFT Night Elf campaign it makes no sense whatsoever. I get it that they want to update things and seize any opportunity to tell a story that could have been told, but hell they could have treated their original universe as set by the RTS games a little better.

Part of me feels like I’m still playing wow after soon to be 17 years, simply because the kid in me is still waiting for that Warcraft 4 to come out.

I have a theory. Is it actually true that when Blizzard was first formed (under a different name too) were actually picked up to become the computer game side of Gamesworkshop, both Warhammer and 40k? But eventually the deals fell through and they were already developing stuff which they used to make their own worlds, ergo Warcraft and Starcraft. Again not sure if this true, just the kind of info I heard years ago and never managed to verify anywhere.

I feel like earlier warcraft instalments were much closer to the warhammer roots, just miserable war everywhere amongst everyone. But as the years went along they clearly got their own direction, they became very confident and wanted to be seen as something very different to Warhammer. And that’s how we’ve ended up with all these stale characters and ideas…

I’m going to echo Chronorabbit’s statement here dude, and simply say focus on whatever it is you’re enjoying in this game, you’re clearly still here so there must be something, not just Stockholm syndrome (that’s ok I think we all got it!). After all these years of playing multiple games, both single player and online ones, I just still enjoy raiding with my guild mates and making cool thematic tmogs for my different characters, so I just mostly focus on that. I still follow the lore closely even if it’s mostly stale morally over inflated philosophies surrounding two irrational factions and their apparently living planet.

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I dont appreciate your slander of the glorious draenei, which btw was a good retcon, the idea that sargeras would be corrupted by the eredar a mortal race was idiotic considering he was a titan.

Also blood elves were in wc3 so i dont know what your getting at there.

The only thing that has felt un warcraft like to me ironically is shadowlands.

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I feel exactly the same. I liked how simple Classic was. And I don’t like all these supernatural elements, like Sylvanas returning from the dead.
After Wrath, everything reminds me a bad Hollywood sequel, made just to milk fans. Companies don’t care about our “obsessions”.
Too bad, we have no alternatives. At least I couldn’t find one.

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I don’t understand why they are making a story that answers a few questions and gives a lot more. I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier for them to make a simple story instead of the “the Jailer is a bad guy because he doesn’t like how death is working and Sylvanas joined him to have controll over her fate” with a lot of mysteries.

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…they weren’t just some mortal race back then, but demons. The retcon made them mortals. So that was really not that different from Sargeras being pushed over the edge by Dreadlords.

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Maybe some of the devs think that a state of perpetual cliffhanger in the main story in good (or that having a “main” story is good to begin with) and can never cause exhaustion or apathy towards it.

I can’t say about the current team, but when Afrasiabi (and largely Metzen) were leading, the main considerations was what they considered to be “cool”. Given how frequently story-related discussions (from a more critical angle) include the idea that there is a serious disconnect between them and the playerbase, you can guess how well it was going. And maybe still is.

gl hf

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It seems to me they tried also the comic book formula during Metzens time. Or at least the more tropes of it.

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this is why tolkien didn’t want his family work altered and wasn’t a fan of lotr movies. People with no creativity take the work from someone else whoch is already done and then just tear and stitch it together in odd places and call it their own, it’s always garbage

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I let those two cinematic’s speak for themselves as to why WoW’s story is so much worse.

WC III the destruction of Dalaran.

VS. WoW Legion The Attack on Dalaran.

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Well… Except for butchering Night Elves and Theramore by pushing them into the Alliance.

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Haha never thought of comparing the two, it does look ridiculous. The whole Legion tech just seemed overall stupid to me tbh. Looks like a bad version of Necrons stuff from Warhammer 40k.

Generally a lot of things don’t quite line up anymore. In W3 there was all this effort towards creating a portal powerful enough to be able to summon major demons. The bigger the demon, the harder the ritual. In Legion it was like “pew pew pew teleport entire battalions with space ships pew pew”.

Sure I’m sure we could argue that the Legion has a R&D team that created improved tech for them (Mo’args, Eredars were very technologically advanced, etc) but this was never explicitly told properly. Even simple comments from Kadgar going all “last time we faced them they couldn’t move that fast, their new fel fuelled tech will be a massive problem”. Just a simple acknowledgment would have been a start.

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I had the exact same thought about the Legions ships. They operated in a rather different way then before.

Something I also didn’t like was how they changed the Mo’args from a technological race to simply brutes only. This was a strange thing for me.

I agree with your points. It felt very different.

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Suramar actually felt like a real city for me, a city where, most of the times I got lost. That’s the Suramar I envisioned when Maiev said “This was once the ancient city of Suramar!” (paraphrazing of course). It looks spectacular and I don’t think that Suramar in game, didn’t do justice to Maiev’s words.

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You are right in your premice but wrong in your interpretation.

Warcraft was indeed supposed to be a Warhammer Fantasy Battle at first, but because of licensing issues Blizz was unable to go through with it and had to do their own thing.

However I would disagree in saying that warcraft became bad when it distanced itself from Warhammer. If you look at very early warcraft lore, so WC1, it’s just extremely barebones. You have got a satanic horde of monsters invading a good christian kingdom, that’s a very 2 dimensonial story. It got better with WCII which added some context and additionnal lore but the core was still this very simple and cliché conflict.

It is in the WCIII to vanilla period that the lore was at it’s best for most, and it is when the license distanced itself from Warhammer and came into it’s own. The orcs and other races of the Horde weren’t just evil because they are evil. Free willed undeads were now a thing. WC3 is an anti Warhammer, there isn’t only war, the races are not destined to fight forever just because of racial reasons.

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Oh absolutely you’re right. I probably expressed this a bit wrong. There was definitely a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, where they did start doing their own thing and it was indeed more interesting than just “in the dark distant future there’s only war” or whatever the 40k moto is. It just all went a bit down the hill from a certain point onwards.

For me it things went a bit off from the end of WotLK onwards. Maybe because things were quite relatable to the core WC3 lore still by then?

Deathwing was wasted, “the bigger they are the harder they fall” literally I guess. MoP was interesting but again things went wrong. WoD was, well… lol… I do love me a good “what if” speculation but damn that went wrong.

Legion again picked my interest I guess because we fought an old established enemy, but it defo left a sour after taste… BfA, still suffering from ptsd so lets not get into that.

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Well it’s hard to say exactly when wow’s lore really started to decline since people have different opinion on what is good and what is bad.

Personnaly I don’t think there is a single point where wow died lorewise, things like this happen over a long period of time, some expansions did good things for the lore but also bad things depending on where you look at.

Personnaly I think the nosedive started from the end of cataclysm with a parenthesis of good during Legion. WC3 was so great because it truely established the world (of warcraft). People tend to misinterpret what world building is and think it’s just “adding more lore”, though it is necessary to an extent and it’s in essence what WC2 and Beyond the Dark Portal did by making the Horde more than just your B-serie fantasy baddies WCIII really putted the world together because it added themes.

Themes is what make a fictionnal world work, it’s not the number of gods or the backstories of kingdoms or the number of cool factions you can crame in. Themes are what gives a world an identity, a coherence, it turns the world from the simple scene on which the story is taking place into an active part of the story, like if it was an actual character.

It’s the bleak darkness of warhammer, the melancholy of the lord of the ring, the pragmatic nihilism of GOT, and with WCIII warcraft got its themes. It’s a story about a world that has to be shared between races, none of which are by essence the bad guys, despite the very valid reasons these races have to hate each other. It’s about acceptance, perspectives, hatred, sharing of an history. It’s about the differences between people and how sometimes they overcome them or they don’t. That’s something WCIII established and that’s something early wow understood.

Even up to the start and middle of cataclysm this is still the case, the leveling quests in cata Kalimdor is an example of good faction conflict. Both sides have a point, both sides have actual reasons to fight. Just compare NE vs Orc then vs now.

Cata: Orcs live in a barren wasteland and need resources. They go to war with the Night Elves for said resources. Who is in the right ? The Orcs are the aggressors, so surely they aren’t. But one could reply the Alliance control the resources and is hostile to the orcs, so they were forced to attack because alliance economic control and heavy presence in Kalimdor threatens them. But then one could reply to that saying the Alliance has good reasons not to trade and trusts the orcs considering past events. There is a back and forth here, you can see why a grunt would go and fight the NE in that context and think he is the right. From his point of view the Alliance is refusing to let them exist in this world, and the huntress on the other side of the conflict sees a people with an history of aggression being the attacker again. Both have a point.

Contrast this to post cata: the Horde is starved for resources but can somehow maintain a massive war machine of flying airships and aircraft carriers, they start invade the NE and rampage through their territory, culminating by the genocide of the race. At what point are we supposed to believe the average grunt can follow through with that and still be considered morally good or at least neutral ?

This shift happened because Blizz lost sight of what made the lore so great: it’s themes, all his left his cool moments and aesthetics. The Horde is rugged and barbarian-like so they attack people and shout Loktar ogar, because that’s what the Horde does, they got spikes and stuff. That’s why Sadfang story about “muh honor” sounded so hollow, because it was the most surface level thing ever. Orcs are honorable, so Sadfang is concerned about “muh honor”. But it just doesn’t work because unlike with WC3 the themes are not there. Orc honor was part of their story in WCIII and it worked there because it was much deeper with the conflicts between Grom and Thrall, it meant something. The orcs cared about their honor to prove to the world and themselves they were better than just legion pawns, creating a contrast with the then new Scourge faction of mindless zombies. This is Grom’s story, he takes the demon blood once more to defeat a divine like creature, thinking it’s his only way to do so, the only way for him and his people to be strong. And he ends by overcoming the bloodlust and defeating a god like creature by virtue of his strength alone.

This is a story with themes, and this is what wow has been lacking for a while.

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Well friend you’ve left me a bit speechless, I’m just going to go with yes all round!

I guess there’s also the problem of the inherit game mechanic of the faction split, that prevents the lore and world building to mature further. Every time they come close, uniting against a greater evil, they start bickering straight after. Rinse and repeat and it becomes quite tiresome. Even blizz themselves made that self-aware cinematic with Thrall going “what’s different this time?” or what not

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IMO WotLK planted some sad seeds. In game-play (dramatic revision of dungeon role, late patches with a ton of modes and gearing model that invalidates all the previous content, LFG without any counter balance to reinforce the local communities and more minor thngs) and story (focus on characters over the world, starting to retire the original “world is the main character” approach to push “heroes” and hype moments, and hope that the side media will explain it all, and other minor at the time things).

edit: I have a feeling that at some point Metzen himself, and maybe other people around him, outgrew their creation. And I have no right answer to what to do in that situation.

I can only say that the current state is on a trajectory to downfall with the devs seemingly using the game story to validate personal views rather than to continue and respect what made the game what it was in the more praised moments.

IMO you would need quite a bit of suspension of disbelieve power in WoW. For example, taurens are a part of Cenarion Circle. So, did they try to approach elves to fix Barrens and other deforested places?

Also, there was some trading between the factions prior to Cata. We have no info about how money work, how “contracts” work, how they resolve legal tension within and outside factions. And list goes on and on IMO.

I agree that the approach to the world and it’s elements of the W3 - early WoW era are left behind and currently just used as a tool when convenient, sometimes outright contradicting parts of the story.

I do not really think that is the problem. Not as much as the devs who tries to fill the old / known characters and world elements with their preferred themes, sometimes alien to the community and the former stories.

IMO the failure of the faction narrative is that they are not allowed to be a source of something good. And the devs, while enjoy kicking the concept of factions, forgot that it needs to be reinforced too. The factions should not be “core” when Ion talks about it in a yet another interview, the story also needs to tell a story about why it is a good thing to preserve them. Which is possible, but not with the devs who wants to have a cheap villain for their favourite “heroes” to overcome.

gl hf