Warcraft Retrospective: A Blog Post Series (latest issue: #37, 2024-09-29)

Argent Dawn
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This makes sense, really.

Unfortunately, the ludonarrative dissonance you mention is hard to fix without overhauling the entire campaign and adding advanced scripting capabilities to the engine. And if the designers did that, they’d have to decide what they consider more important: the story or the gameplay.

  • If the gameplay is more important and you want to keep the sense of grand scale with sieges and naval combat, then keep all the base-building missions, but frame them in a story that makes sense. For example, the campaign could be about the immediate surroundings of the Dark Portal on both sides. If you wanted to keep the artifact heist, you could make the story about establishing a presence around the Dark Portal and defending it while the artifacts are being collected elsewhere, or perhaps repelling a human invasion through the Dark Portal. If advanced scripting was possible, you could make a “survive for X minutes” mission in the style of Starcraft and Warcraft 3, defending Ner’zhul from invading human armies while he opens the portals.
  • If the story is more important, then a heist story should feel like one. Make most of the missions hero-centric, featuring infiltration and stealth. Even with the limited capabilities of the Warcraft 2 engine, I think there are ways to make the missions varied. They’ve already worked around the inability to place items on the maps by establishing in mission briefings that the items are held by particular units that you need to rescue or kill. You could, for example, make a mission about gathering four human traitors who can help you recover a MacGuffin, represented by peasant or mage units like in missions with Alterac, and the catch would be that they’re scattered across the map and your forces are very limited. Then the next mission briefing would establish that your human lackeys broke into a vault and retrieved the MacGuffin for you.

Make the story fit the gameplay, or make the gameplay fit the story. Either works.

The “Ner’zhul has read the script” problem is much much easier to fix and only requires some dialogue changes. Just establish that he got all the knowledge about the other artifacts by attuning to the Skull of Gul’dan, which you retrieve in the second mission of the campaign, — and that’s when he formulated the entire plan involving the artifact heist and the opening of the new portals. Bam, you have your campaign objective right away, you know where each artifact is, and the characters don’t have to rely on contrived super-senses to sniff them out.

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83

This does make sense for Warcraft 2. But I am still rather confused and unsure why eventually when we move forward in the timeline towards 3, Thrall still decided to call his people “The Horde”, which is even more confusing with the added lore at that point and later.

He grew up very differently. He is also shown to be very vocal against their past and a clear disdain for the demonic corruption and influence as well as the orcs being conquerors. So to still proudly wear the name of the Horde for his new step for his people was and is…very strange.

Plus the whole situation that also developed with him being very obsessed about bringing back their honor, which he seems to indicate being before they became warmongering conquerors back on Draenor, which would be before the Horde even formed.

I quite like the Orcs, but their story development between the games in the franchise has always been a little odd, even if some parts like you mentioned makes more sense.

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84

It’s the only word that the orcs know for a federation of clans that work together under one banner. Before the Horde, orcs simply never worked together on that scale. So when Orgrim Doomhammer declared Thrall his successor, I imagine that he didn’t have a better idea for what a union of the clans should be called, so he just rolled with it.

At least they make a distinction later on, by declaring that the Horde that fell at the end of the Second War was the “Old Horde.” But really, there’s nothing else that the Horde could’ve been called without borrowing from the human lexicon, which goes against the idea of returning to the old ways of their people.

To tie this into the conversation about the blog, Lintian, are you planning on covering the novels that were released before Warcraft 3 before you play the game, or are you planning on playing the game before you read them?
Each approach has merit, since Warcraft 3 is the first time when the franchise has lore that is heavily supported by external media. Without reading Lord of the Clans, it must seem as though Thrall just pops out of thin air to someone who plays Warcraft 3 directly after Warcraft 2.

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I played both Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne when they came out, so there’s nothing new for me to discover :slight_smile: I do, however, intend to cover the four books released between Warcraft 2 and 3, if not in as much detail as the games.

I intend to cover Warcraft media in release order, so my plan for the next few posts is:

  • Beyond the Dark Portal, the human campaign and closing thoughts
  • An intermission about the different background lore assumptions for warfare and adventure settings, and how it affects Warcraft
  • The Game That Never Was (Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans)
  • The four novels released between Warcraft 2 and 3: Of Blood and Honor, Day of the Dragon, Lord of the Clans, and The Last Guardian.

And then finally we’ll move to Warcraft 3, which I can’t wait to cover and which I absolutely have Things to say about, mostly positive.

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86

i quiver with excitement

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I eagerly await for when she gets to the comics and truly deep dive into the worst part of Warcraft’s lore.

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I’ve read the comics.

I have some choice words to say about them, especially about the Med’an arc.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Afraid and incredibly curious and sort of excited to see what can and will be said.

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I like how the project is growing. I can also see that your own input in the last post has become more… substantial? In that you tackle the problem of the Horde’s identity, which is a very interesting topic on its own, or how you utterly obliterate the story’s direction with quite sharp criticism.

I’m really curious to see your take of Lords of the Clans, because we see a lot of strange lore that would suffer retcons in DotD. And of course, I’m eager to see your posts about Warcraft 3 - I know, I know, I am boring like that. But hey that game holds a piece of my heart so I want to, regardless!

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91

-Gets the Comfy chair, and the snacks-

You’re treating us :grin:

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In order to make Aelruil suffer, I should point out that this one was technically released about six months after Warcraft 3. But honestly, I don’t think anyone would blame you if you read all four Warcraft Archive books together.

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93

why would you do this

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Hmm.

Google told me it was released in December 2001 (before Warcraft 3), but now that I’ve done some frantic googling, it seems different sources disagree. Some sites (Goodreads, Thriftbooks, etc.) say December 2001, while others (Warcraft Wiki, Amazon, etc.) say December 2002, which would be after Warcraft 3.

I don’t know which is correct. I do know it was written with Warcraft 3 lore in mind, because it mentions the kaldorei.

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I went with the publication date cited by the Warcraft wiki, but honestly, I don’t think it matters that much. In your position, I’d just bundle them all together.

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I’m mostly interested in the Ashbringer and the Varian one! Hope you’ll also cover the Gilneas one with the Starlight Slasher!

As for the post about the orc campaign of Beyond the Dark Portal: Funnily enough, alot of the things that happened made alot more sense after the Beyond the Dark Portal novel was written by Christie Golden and Aaron Rosenberg.

It’s only a shame that you need to write an entire book first to have the lore of your game make even somewhat sense. But, it would seem that Blizzard’s “Rule of Cool” was already present from the start. And for the most we welcome it, since it is what we grew up on, but WC2 and Draenor truly needed the reworks.

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I’d also recommend the Dark Riders on that list, which is in my opinion perhaps the best Warcraft comic out there!

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Warcraft Retrospective 10: Nobody Expects the Alliance Expedition!

https://lintian.eu/2024/01/14/warcraft-retrospective-10/

Excerpt:

So Draenor is about to explode and we’re probably never going to see it again in any future Warcraft story. The good news, however, is that the Dark Portal, which was simply closed at the end of Tides of Darkness, is now super-duper-mega-closed and isn’t getting reopened, ever. The Alliance Expedition survives by leaving Draenor, and we’ll probably encounter it again on one of those wondrous, exciting unknown worlds out there that we’re yet to see.

The camera also ominously focuses on the Skull of Gul’dan as it falls to the ground. I sure wonder what will become of it.

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Fantastic as ever.

And the What Comes Next is a page of Warcraft history I never even knew existed, so very much looking forward to that being put under the microscope! :smiley:

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Warcraft Retrospective 11: Interlude: Warfare vs Adventure

https://lintian.eu/2024/01/20/warcraft-retrospective-11/

Excerpt:

It’s too early to talk about Warcraft 3 yet, but in hindsight it can be seen as a story constructed to turn the warfare setting of Warcraft 2 into the adventure setting of vanilla World of Warcraft. And then, of course, the expansions completely muddled the picture, because it seems someone on the development team had an inexplicable fondness for Warcraft 2 and tried to repeat its beats in a game ill-suited for it — resulting in the nations in the game oscillating between “small city-states on the brink of collapse if not for adventurers” and “global powers popping armies out of nowhere and plastering their flags all over the planet”, depending on the writer.

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I think you’ve actually struck something very important with this issue.

Upon reading it, it suddenly became clear to me that a significant chunk of the roleplaying community (at least on this server) bought into WoW as a warfare setting first and foremost, while there are others who prefer it as an adventure setting.

The issue is that even after all of these years, it remains somewhere in the middle and tends to swing back and forth between “warfare” and “adventure” depending on what sort of story Blizzard wants to tell for each expansion.

Vanilla World of Warcraft was clearly built around adventure first and foremost, at least according to your criteria, with weak nations, infested wilderness, strong multinational groups and so on. The Burning Crusade continues with this trend, I’d say.

Starting with Wrath of the Lich King and ramping up to a peak with Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft seems to become much more warfare-focused, with strong nations developing more sophisticated technology as they battle over what little unclaimed territory remains on Azeroth, with the player-characters who were once adventurers now serving as the elite vanguard of their respective nations.

This even continues with Warlords of Draenor, which still has a lot of big warfare themes. It’s the Alliance and Horde versus the Iron Horde, with the player-character serving as a commander. There’s a little bit of adventure here and there but for the most part, the story is built around the idea that you’re an agent of your nation deployed inside enemy territory in order to disrupt their war effort.

… And then there’s a sudden shift with Legion, where suddenly the strength of the Horde and Alliance is shattered and the player-characters become agents of multinational groups and the zones are less about claiming foreign territory or disrupting enemy nations, but exploring unchartered lands in search of ancient artifacts.

… And then there’s more whiplash with Battle for Azeroth, in which the Horde and Alliance are more powerful than ever, engaging in the biggest arms race yet, with almost all exploration framed as claiming resources for one’s faction or earning the favour of new allies. Everything revolves around total warfare between these two forces.
Until it suddenly doesn’t with 8.3 and all of a sudden, there’s even more whiplash as the warfare plot is resolved and the secondary plot which was very much in the backseat takes over. The Alliance and Horde cease to be relevant at all and suddenly, the story is all about the brave heroes of Azeroth saving the world from the corruption of the Old Gods.

I don’t even want to try and categorise what Shadowlands is, but it’s safe to say that with Dragonflight and the future expansions on the horizon, World of Warcraft seems to have mostly abandoned warfare in favour of adventure.

There’s always been elements of warfare and adventure in every expansion - there’s even a little warfare in Dragonflight, though the Horde and Alliance have nothing to do with it - but the game has always leaned towards one or the other. And when it comes to this balance, every player seems to have a personal preference.

Though I’d argue there’s also a third aspect of Warcraft’s storytelling, which is the “superhero story” that no one seems particularly fond of, but I’ll get into that later.

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