I am devouring those, damn it!
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Really loving these reads! From the perspective of someone who never touched a Warcraft game before WoW, it’s super interesting to delve into the “old version” of the world. To see how it’s grown and expanded and how much has been changed later on… It gives new points of view to WoW, that’s for sure.
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“Bald Zaphius isn’t real, he can’t hurt you.”
Bald Zaphius:
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Warcraft Retrospective 7: Reconquista
https://lintian.eu/2023/12/25/warcraft-retrospective-7/
Excerpt:
The orc and human campaigns seem to have had different designers, as they show different sensibilities. Most orc missions follow the “build a base on your island, then attack the enemy island by sea” formula. The orc map designer liked a single body of open water with islands strewn throughout. The human one, on the other hand, prefers maze-like designs built like puzzles, with space-filling paths and coasts with sheer cliffs that you sail along trying to find the one spot where you can actually land.
Overall I found the human campaign more fun. It’s refreshing enough that the campaigns aren’t exact mirror opposites. It’s doubly refreshing that the human campaign designer saw that the island formula was growing stale, and took steps to bring variety with exploration puzzles, a higher amount of navy-free maps, and non-standard mission objectives.
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Very entertaining read as usual!
I never knew the tidbit that Lordaeron uses Cyrillic, it’s interesting.
It’s also interesting to see the design philosophy from Blizzard in regards to new stuff was still a thing back then. As in, use it as much as possible to the point of potential annoyance. (In Warcraft’s 2 case, water). And in more modern Blizzard, usually whatever new mechanic is added to WoW & or the next game in another franchise. They really like gimmicks as new content, and likes to show them off.
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Warcraft Retrospective 8: Beyond the Dark Portal, the Manual
https://lintian.eu/2023/12/30/warcraft-retrospective-8/
Excerpt:
The topic of genocide by necessity raises its ugly head when a “monster race” serves as antagonists and is soundly defeated. What should the protagonists do with the remaining ones? The Lord of the Rings sidesteps this question entirely; all orcs encountered in the story are combatants who get killed in self-defense (or kill each other in feuds), and after Sauron’s defeat, the remainder of the story focuses on the protagonists and has little to say about about the fate of the remaining orcs, only mentioning that they scattered or slew themselves. Supplemental texts clarify that elves and their allies didn’t kill defenseless prisoners, even if they were orcs.
This post is relatively short (by this series’s standards) because the manual itself is short. The expansion campaigns will follow soon™, after which it’s The Game That Never Was.
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Again, good read!
Yet again, it’s also interesting to see how much was laid out with Draenor already compared to what we got today. But also very disappointing that they went the opposite route of Warcraft 1 and 2’s map of Azeroth. Instead of having the map just represent a small portion of the world which would slowly expand, they even decades later just decided that “Yep, this is it. This is the whole world” instead.
Just with some things changed around to make it even smaller.
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Always great to read, thank you ^^ There’s so much here, even as someone who played WC2 as a kid, that I missed/never knews!
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Didn’t they mention in WoD somewhere that there was still a continent where the ogres came from, before they landed on the one where the orcs live? Or Farahlon?
A second continent, the ogre homeland, was in the original design of WoD, but it was cut.
Chronicle 2 later depicted the continent seen in WoD as the only one.
Now that I’m thinking about WC2, I realize that it never elaborates why Orgrim attacked the north in the first place, since with Gul’dan and the Shadow Council gone, the Horde was no longer subject to their manipulation that drove them to conquest. The explanation of “evil conquest is in the orcs’ nature, so they’re going to evilly conquer everything they can reach” was probably presumed.
Then as Orgrim became a more sympathetic character, the writers wrote themselves into a corner trying to retroactively explain why he didn’t just give the orcs a home in the lands of Stormwind and wage a purely defensive war.
Chronicle 2 presents a really unconvincing handwave. I’ll get to it when I get to that book.
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Maps for the alternate Draenor feature an unnamed landmass southwest of Draenor’s main continent, described at BlizzCon 2013 as a “mysterious ogre continent” from which the Gorian Empire originated and where their main seat of power was still located, with their influence having spread to Draenor’s main continent over time. The existence of this continent appears to have been retconned, as Chronicle Volume 2 never makes mention of it and instead places the ogres’ original seat of power in the city of Goria in the center of Draenor’s main continent. However, the landmass can still be seen on in-game maps of Draenor.
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Welp, I stand corrected.
Atleast I can still have the belief in the Flowerpicker Clan as being these terrible boogeymen that all the other orcs are afraid of. ( I loved that joke in WoD).
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They make a cameo in the Orc Heritage quest! If you go behind the barracks, you get reverse pickpocketed with an NPC whispering “You saw nothing.” and a flower is deposited in your inventory with a flavour text:
“The legends are true.”
This references the mysterious flower event you were supposed to find in WoD, but was cut from beta.
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Oh darn I missed that.
Big sadge 
Same, don’t worry 
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To let people linked to the blog from elsewhere have a place to comment other than this thread, I’ve now added an on-site comment form below each blog post!
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Very nice initiative, and excited for another read!
Warcraft Retrospective 9: Grand Theft Artifact
https://lintian.eu/2024/01/07/warcraft-retrospective-9/
This is the single longest article in the series so far, and it will probably remain the single longest article devoted to the Warcraft RTS trilogy. My intent was to cover each Warcraft 2 campaign in a single article, since the exact lore of its missions is not that important to the setting in the long run, but I went into Beyond the Dark Portal blind, only knowing its lore in broad strokes, and didn’t expect this sheer amount of stupid in a single campaign.
This mission’s premise defies belief. You’re not trying to conquer the human lands. That’s not why you’re here. You were pushing out of the Dark Portal and gathering allies for an unknown purpose that now, midway through the campaign, turned out to be stealing artifacts for Ner’zhul. The grand total of your business on the northern continent, right now, is one single magic book.
Your forces, as far as I can tell, consist of just the Shadowmoon, Shattered Hand and Warsong clans, the remnants of the Bleeding Hollow clan, Teron Gorefiend’s death knights, and Deathwing’s dragons. You have massacred two orc clans back on Draenor for daring to disobey you, one of them your former ally. You have no real forward bases in the human world, no entrenched power base, no dominion over the southern continent, and now you’re asked to destroy an island kingdom with the mightiest navy in the known world for the sake of retrieving a single magic book. I ask again: you and what army?
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For all the grief and faults many of us have given towards Blizzard’s later writing in the latter parts of WoW, the Horde Campaign you described there is really mind-boggling.
It’s not just retcons or bad understanding of their own setting, it’s just bad writing period. And very confusing.
What happened?
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Regarding the Horde identity, I can understand why the Monster Horde would evolve into the War Machine Horde.
The “hordes” of Warcraft 1 are held together by the machinations of a mysterious Shadow Council that pulls the string from behind the scenes and seems to content to just use the orcs as weapons that it can point at its enemies, backed up with dark magic and demonic allies.
Warcraft 2 goes on to reveal that the Shadow Council is comprised of these warlocks and necromancers responsible for the dark magic aspect of the Horde, so when Orgrim decides to execute them all, that leaves the Horde unable and maybe a little unwilling to rely on dark magic, though Orgrim still compels Gul’dan to provide some magical support in the form of death knights.
So, to me, it makes sense that the Horde would turn to industry and other races as a way of remaining strong after gutting its magic potential with the execution of the Shadow Council.
But the rest of the story is awful, that much is true. I see this expansion as emblematic of Blizzard’s teething pains as it struggled to transition from just making games with a little story as a backdrop to creating character-centric stories that are just as important as the gameplay, since it’s apparent that Beyond the Dark Portal wanted to be a story about a roster of heroes/villains for the Alliance and Horde, but the RTS gameplay about building bases and armies held it back and they hadn’t figured a way around it yet.
It might be worth thinking of Starcraft as a Warcraft 2.5 in this regard, where they managed to blend RTS gameplay and a character-focused story without stumbling into the same problems, before Warcraft 3 came out and they managed to make an RTS that revolved around a cast of main characters in terms of story and gameplay alike.
At the same time however, I suspect Cyberlore Studios might have been a part of the problem. Maybe they just decided to throw together some basic RTS missions that worked for Tides of Darkness, without realising the ludonarrative dissonance that they would run into with Beyond the Dark Portal’s story.
I’m pretty convinced that most of the story comes from Blizzard though, since it does make sense as their first foray into character-focused stories, which they develop further and further with their next couple of games.
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