Dear Blizzard,
I happen to be a roleplayer on Argent Dawn EU. I’ve been reflecting on why there isn’t much of a Horde RP scene, and I think it has a lot to do with Orgrimmar and how it’s designed. Put simply, it’s not a relaxing or aesthetically pleasant to be.
It’s a very bleak, dry, largely monochrome, and poorly connected environment.
The Warsong Hold aesthetic that was used to define the place (steel, thick stone, chains and spikes) made sense in the original Northrend context it appeared. Limited access to timber, keeping heat and hostile Scourge out, etc. However, it makes less sense in a hot desert or as somewhere people live. Tough as the Orcs are, they’re not immune to injury. It has the overrall effect of giving the city a dark, oppressive, industrial feel which while cool looking by itself, grows depressing after a while…
By contrast the original Orgrimmar’s architectural style was largely typified by natural materials; leather, tusks, earthen tiles, adobe, hand-worked stone. These are appropriate for a desert, being cool during the day and retaining heat at night. While still a warrior city, it leaned more towards ‘barbarian’ than ‘military’, there was a sense of pragmatism to it.
Suggestions on the Redesign
I think what I’d do is redesign the place. It’d still be made to -feel- Orcish of course, but more, established. Just a touch less war-like. ‘Survival’ over ‘Isengard’. It’d need to feel like a place people actually live because they want to live there.
Like, the Horde now has several city-dwelling cultures, in contrast to the more nomadic and tribal cultures of the original Warcraft 3 Horde’s society; the Blood Elves, Nightborne and Zandalari as part of them, so it’d be interesting to see their architectural style evolve and become more sophisticated, similar to how former steppe cultures in our world urbanized themselves.
I’d want to give the place a feel like something ou tof a Conan novel, Mos Eisley, or a Dark Sun D&D campaign. Sort of exotic, bustling and sensual, yet also rough and with a lot of course, masculine physicality. This is a city of Orcs, after all.
One idea I have is lots of big bridge-linked towers with teeming, incense fogged bazaars deep in the canyons beneath them, shady and filled with coloured lights - from magical flames or lanterns, or blankets, furs, hides and fabrics covering the canyon ceiling.
I’d lean more into the original vanilla-style architecture of natural materials - stone, adobe, bones and tusks. Yet there’d also be more established architecture leaning more Cata-style the higher up you go, iron rooftops, a sense of purposeful design, aesthetic motifs of wolves and boars and so on - and these’d be surrounded by hanging gardens, filled with palms, cacti, and desert flowers.
To add visual interest, there could be windmills drawing water up from deep undergorund, stone aqueducts carrying water everywhere, and large cliff-hewn statues of past heroes of the Horde carved into the cliffsides, think the Bamiyan buddhas.
A good inspiration for htis would be The Citadel from Mad Max: Fury Road. The War Boys are a desert dwelling, warrior culture, their city is a -rough- place to live, but they’ve tried to squeeze as much beauty as they can out of what little they have. Everything they can turn into art, they can make into art.
Being in Orgrimmar should feel exciting, it should intoxicate the senses.
This art from Chronicle might be a good place to start:
Alternately, imagine something close to a blend of this:
But with Orcish rooftops and motifs - skulls, bones, leather, and gleaming steel. It should feel like an island of densely compact civilization surrounded by Kalimdor’s harsh and unforgiving wilderness. A bustling refuge for the myriad races and clans of the Horde. It should feel like a place of excess and abundant life.
Thank you for reading my feedback.