One thing that I like about the orc campaign is that it’s still relevant to the overarching story of Warcraft, even today. The player’s journey is clearly that of Orgrim Doomhammer, who plays a pivotal role in future installments and in the lives of characters who are still relevant to this very day.
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Great continuation! Cant wait for you to dive into the headaches of Garonas lore.
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I’m afraid this will probably have to wait for a long time until we get to…
(gulps)
(sighs)
(siiiiiighs)
…WoW the Comic Book. You know, the one with Med’an.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Yup. The player character of the WC1 orc campaign is not named, but in the light of later installments, he’s clearly Orgrim. Very little about this campaign has been outright retconned (except for him taking orders from the Shadow Council after killing Blackhand), as much as some things (like the human town of Sunnyglade) are simply not mentioned.
The human campaign wasn’t so lucky.
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I quite like the theory that Sunnyglade is Raven Hill, as it´s the only town in modern territory of Stormwind that isn´t mentioned in Warcraft 1, while Sunnyglade is the only town from Warcraft 1 that does not appear on modern map.
And, with Grand Hamlet being confirmed to be Darkshire, it would make sense that the other town in former Brightwood would have been renamed too.
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I take solace in him practically evaporating from the established canon.
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with the return of metzen, perhaps we will also see the blessed return of our lord and saviour med’an
excellent work as always lintian. always a good read
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Warcraft Retrospective 4: Warcraft 1, the Human Campaign and Closing Thoughts
https://lintian.eu/2023/12/02/warcraft-retrospective-4/
Excerpt:
Sure, it might sound like pointless hair-splitting to argue about the meanings of the words “regent”, “slave”, and “treacherous”, or to complain that the king waits for Lothar for twenty months before sending a rescue mission. But constraints are supposed to breed creativity, and there wasn’t much text for the writer to write; they could at least give us the courtesy of making the intent clear. It might not seem like a big deal. This didn’t bother me. This can be handwaved away. This is explained in later lore. But we wouldn’t have to smooth the story with headcanon if the writer was more diligent, and the existence of sequels (which wasn’t at all guaranteed when Warcraft 1 was being made) doesn’t excuse sloppiness here and now.
All the problems with the mission briefings could have been fixed with just slight rewording, if anyone cared to do so. This is all the more baffling considering the manual is pretty well-written in comparison. Sadly, this will be a recurring pattern with Warcraft game writing going forward.
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Very enjoyable read!
The writing between the two campaigns seems so differently and very obvious that there was such a lack of care between one and the other.
Even that aside though, I do find it interesting that they, whether intended to or not, fleshed out the “bad guys” more and even had them in more of a protagonist situation because of it. It’s even more interesting in hindsight on how the lore developed.
It was not very common at all to have the evil baddies “win” or even have more development than the good guys/humans.
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While most of the human campaign isn’t relevant to the future of the Warcraft franchise, I would argue that it does contain some of the DNA for future developments, such as the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion for Warcraft II.
That bit about “divining a way to end the threat of another invasion forever” sure seems like a seed that would later grow into the Alliance Expedition and its adventures on Draenor.
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Indeed!
Writer 1: “So in one of the endings, the orcs conquer the human kingdom, and in the other, the humans push the orcs back to their world. Which of these endings do we make a sequel to?”
Writer 2:
https://d1w82usnq70pt2.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Road-to-El-Dorado-Both-is-Good.jpg
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Excited for the next chapter!
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Warcraft Retrospective 5: Tides of Darkness, the Manual
https://lintian.eu/2023/12/10/warcraft-retrospective-5/
Excerpt:
If this was modern WoW, I would balk at the workings of the afterlife being revealed so casually. However, this story is told to us from the point of view of Gul’dan, a megalomaniac obsessed with power and a very unreliable narrator. If later writers wanted, they could easily say he was mistaken or lying, perhaps to justify his own ambitions to himself and others. Perhaps the spirits of the ancestors were in fact at peace, but he called it torment so he could justify binding them to walking corpses as a way of “freeing” them from this torment. The point is that the device of the unreliable narrator is clearly telegraphed here, instead of being contrived by the writers retroactively.
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A really good analysis of the early Warcraft 2 and its manual, what is probably the initial heartbeat of the Warcraft that drew in almost everyone who still plays today and remains some people’s favourite iteration of Warcraft.
It’s an interesting look at the shift in perspective overall across the game industry as well, having went from the 90’s and early 2000’s in which any particularly passionate intern or workman who had a big dream for the franchise could build their way up the corporate ladder very quickly to become a producer, designer or narrative leader to the more modern, rigid, shareholder-bound corporate structures. Metzen’s passion for worldbuilding made him synonymous with Warcraft from that moment onward, and as you say Lintian, he’s the type of person you absolutely want to be writing down the big picture and vision for the franchise, because he has that particular strength and he’s able to keep a team (relatively, minus the Forsaken conundrums) unified towards that one vision.
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Fantastic work! Thank you for brightening an otherwise super dull work shift 
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Including me.
I’ll mention that in the next article, but my own journey into Warcraft began with playing Warcraft 2 on a friend’s computer as a kid in early school.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this back then. That was the time when software was copied between computers on floppy disks. I played a gimped version without music (or maybe the computer simply didn’t support MIDI?), and the friend copied it from someone who copied it from someone who may or may not have had the paper manual, but probably not.
So I played the game without knowing anything about the worldbuilding effort put into it. It wasn’t until Warcraft 3, which put more of the lore in-game, that I actually learned any of it.
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Another great chapter!
It’s crazy to think how much of Warcraft(atleast in rough versions) is already established with Warcraft 2. I was aware of some of the stuff, but I hadn’t even considered that Draenei(at-least as name for a species, as in WC3 Eredar and Draenei were different things completely) was already a thing at this point.
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Warcraft Retrospective 6: Doomhammer Goes North
https://lintian.eu/2023/12/18/warcraft-retrospective-6/
Excerpt:
The addition of naval units gives Warcraft 2 a lot more strategic depth than Warcraft 1, but it also comes with problems. This is an early example of how Blizzard often gets excited with a new gameplay mechanic and goes overboard with it, putting it absolutely everywhere they can touch until everyone is tired of it.
To wit: most of the orc campaign takes place on islands-type maps (there are only three missions that don’t, two of them being the very first two). You usually start on a different island than your opponent, so you have to bring your army to them on transport ships. And to construct just one transport ship, you have to…
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Great continuation!
I find it quite funny how some stuff from the orcish campaign and its victories, did come to occur eventually, sort of. But in a different manner entirely. Namely things like the destruction of Lordaeron and such.
Also question! Will you be covering/side-stepping to check out the bits from the cancelled “Lord of the clans” adventure game at all before you move on after Warcraft 2?
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Indeed!
I’ll touch on this when I get to WC3, but it was a clever way of upping the stakes: the writers had the Scourge succeed at exactly the things Doomhammer’s Horde canonically failed to do, namely conquering Quel’Thalas, Dalaran, and Capital City. WC3 is full of very deliberate story decisions like that.
I gave it some thought!
I still have the WC2 human campaign and the two expansion campaigns to go through, but after that… logically the next game to cover would be Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, but it was never officially released and is only available as a leak.
So for now, I think I’ll review promotional materials with official screenshots, link to a gameplay video on YouTube for the curious, make a post about the in-between books (including Lord of the Clans, a novel adaptation of the game that never was), then proceed to WC3.
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God, even now the Warcraft 2 music slaps so hard. Possibly harder than it had any right to.
But that was a golden age of music, honestly; Warcraft 2, Command and Conquer and Red Alert (Hell March intensifies) and certainly not forgetting Age of Empires 1 and 2.
Edit: Fab write up, as ever! ^^
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