No doubt Arthas and the undead were able to move from location to location so fast because they knew someone would try to tell his story in 30 seconds at some point:
Jokes aside, even if you take into account the undead’s lack of need for rest and food, I doubt they’d be able to march as fast as they do between missions, but that’s a minor thing.
And good lord, that last holdout for the undead is one of the two missions that I could not do on Hard no matter how hard ( pun intended) I tried. The other one being the final Night Elf campaign mission. I just couldn’t do it.
Eternity’s End I managed to pull off by hunkering down at Thrall’s Base, making a goblin minefield and using a combination of Druids of the Claw roar bufffing and Hippogryph riders being super useful against demon unite. Didn’t even get to my base.
Huh if I ever replay that I ought to try. I admit, the last time I played that, I was not so good at microïng ( I still am not), nor at utilizing unit abilities to their fullest. So I always just tried holding on with combination of archers, huntresses and catapults, and hoping I could churn out a few moonwells. Didn’t work naturally
I love the orc campaign. The gameplay is fun, the characters have distinct personalities and well-foreshadowed flaws that become important to the plot, and there’s a tragedy to it that is very Warcraft. Thrall would rather live and let live, but orcish culture values glory in battle, dragging him into fights he’d rather avoid and reopening old hatreds between orcs and humans. Grom, meanwhile, struggles with his old demonic bloodlust like a former drug addict, and cares little for Thrall’s diplomatic ways. Because of this, he drags the orcs into conflict with the most powerful race in Kalimdor that could have been avoided had it been Thrall in his place.
There’s tragedy. There’s conflict. And that’s good! It’s conflict that follows organically from past events and from the personalities of the characters involved. All the writers had to do was put Thrall and Grom in a new environment and simply let them be themselves. It’s conflict that opens up new story threads, opportunities for character development, and makes the endings of both this campaign and the next one that much more poignant. And it’s very, very different from forcing conflict by writer fiat for marketing reasons.
Reading through this, I arrived at an unpleasant realisation. I think it might become even more pertinent with the second half of the campaign, but I think it applies even here.
Despite the common complaints about Horde navel-gazing and soul-searching, crisis of identity and the struggle to rein in its warmongering tendencies has been a core theme (maybe even the core theme) of the Horde ever since this point in the franchise, perhaps even earlier if people are willing to count Lord of the Clans.
Also, I was tempted to make a playful remark about nelfposting when I read the section about how the night elves are undermined as soon as they are introduced, but you’re not incorrect. The narrative speaks highly of them and their abilities, only for them to be subjected to the Worf Effect time and time again in this campaign and the next, to show how fearsome the Burning Legion is.
Nah. Nelfposting would be something like “This is ridiculous. Night elves were set up as super-badasses who defeated the Burning Legion in the past and had ten thousand years to prepare for its return, yet here they lose, on their own home turf, to a fraction of a remnant of a refugee race that just landed here and didn’t even know about their existence. This is further proof that Blizzard writers love orcs and have hated night elves ever since their inception.”
The difference is execution.
“I want to peacefully coexist with the humans, but my trigger-happy lieutenant is forcing my hand” is tragedy. “I just led a genocide on a crazy dead elf’s orders (despite previously wanting to rein in the Horde’s savage side) and it made me feel Very Sad” is farce.
And a theme that felt fresh the first time will eventually, if revisited again and again, bore the audience through sheer repetition.
It’s always a good day when there’s a new blog post, thank you
I wish they hadn’t hamstrung WC3 with forcing Reforged on people, I always get a hankering to replay WC3 when it gets mentioned, especially now.
I still probably wouldn’t be any good at it, mind you, but…
If it’s only single player you’re after, you can just download the classic version of WC3. This is what I did for these posts. (Since I own Reforged and used to own a classic WC3 CD way back in the day, I don’t consider it piracy.)
I recommend patch 1.31, the last version before Reforged, since it brought widescreen and 4K support.
I do, funnily enough, still have the CDs for both WC3 and TFT
And WC2, for that matter, but sadly it’s the Bnet edition battlechest one, and I’ve no idea where the CD key went. I still picked it up on GoG but, as this blog has so well highlighted, the older games haven’t aged as well mechanically, heh.
It also at one point starts to feel disingenuous.
In Warcraft 3, orcs were on a redemption arc from era when they got manipulated by demons and turned into bloodthirsty maniacs. They were moving from A to B and returning to what they always were before they got corrupted into being A.
But then we get Garrosh, who moves the Horde back into being A, however now without demon influence. However, this can still be good storytelling because it can explore the idea that, even if group as a whole is good, they can be lead into being evil by charismatic leader. Basically, while B is still natural state of the Horde (as shown by huge rebellion against Garrosh), it can still become A.
However, with Sylvanas, Horde just happily waltzed into being A again and barely anyone wished to stay as B until the e-girl said she never liked them and ran away with the bathwater money. The story then returning into Horde saying how they are totally B just doesn´t feel right because for years now, Alliance has been B, while Horde has been A. So, naturally, Horde suddenly returning to B after so many years (with some pauses, although I think I´ve seen comments akin to the “Red Alliance” in WoD too, so even those short pauses seemed to have made Horde fans feel similar as they do now) will make Horde fans feel like the identity is being stripped away, even if the Horde might now be closer to the Warcraft 3 Horde than it has been during Cata-MoP or Legion-BfA.
The orcish campaign, before I played the game, was the one I was least interested in.
But as I played through the campaign, it really grew on me. When I finished the game it was easily one of the more memorable campaigns I ever played. There was so much flavour to, well, everything. Glad we have reached this bit!
This is a big beef I have with WoWs writing, and why I think, on average, the Horde has actually got the worst end of the stick for overall faction writing for years now (This walks side by side with criticism/inconsistent quality between Racial level writing)
We’ve had SoO twice now. We’ve had ‘Muh Honour’ and Horde being used as the villain bat twice, which is simply inconsistent with both WC3s campaign arc and how they were portrayed initially. And it’s massively frustrating. It’s probably the main reason I dislike BFA (as an overall) as much as I do; the potential for great things were there, and they fluffed it in favour of ground that’s already been trodden flat a few times over now.
For a faction that’s supposedly meant to be misunderstood & wanting to move on from their bad past, they have been pretty consistently written to be perfectly happy with going on murder sprees with very little prompting.
I mean, I do specifically say “how fearsome the Burning Legion is,” because when the night elves bring their full strength to bear against the Warsong Clan in the very next mission, they don’t stand a chance and are forced to turn to the blood of Mannaroth in order to stand a chance against the forces of Cenarius.
So while the orcs are able to fight off the night elves in the mission that first introduces them, that mission doesn’t really present the night elves at their best. The next one does though, and it’s only the machinations of the Burning Legion that allow the orcs to triumph over them.
I think you raise another interesting point; re: the Orc introspection being a lot deeper rooted than common WoW complaints give it credit for.
I think others have made a good point that, having been trod, re-trod and then trod to death, it’s kinda soured over time, sadly
Ah, now we come to one of my favourite parts of the campaign. I always did like the orcs campaign and I was glad to see Thrall again and actually get to play with Grom.
The second kodo-escort mission is pure, living hell on the highest difficulty and it’s a miracle if you can keep enough units alive because, as you said Lintian, unlike the human and undead campaign, this time you don’t have a healing spell on your hero. I tried to mitigate it by using Thrall’s spirit wolves and Thrall himself to tank most of the centaurs before sending in the rest of the units. And indeed, exploring feels punishing in this mission, because those centaurs do love attacking the kodos.
Mission four is one I very much liked, and I often dealt with the open base near goldmine by building tons of towers around it , with some peons nearby to repair so that I didn’t constantly have to go back to defend my base. I feel this mission allows for two playstyles. If you just take it easy and just fend off the night elves with a little bit of exploring, it’s indeed possible to make it to 15.000 lumber just like that. But I seem to recall there being a side-objective of destroying all the Trees of Life, which means you do have to contend with the large bases to the north if you want to do that. I found it’s then very much possible to stay below 15k if you just keep pumping units and researching upgrades. Overall, a very fun and versatile mission imho.
It’s also nice that you pointed out how the Horde keeps seeming to flipflop between genocidal maniacs and trying to just move on from that. In WC3 it felt natural, Garrosh was still somewhat excusable, but then the Iron Horde and BfA Sylvanas just made you feel like Mace Windu shouting “He is too dangerous to be left alive!”.
Grom Hellscream shines in his role as a foil to Thrall. Is his storyline cheesy? Absolutely. Have we seen these story beats before? Yes, a million times. If it was a standalone story, it wouldn’t work, but it does work in the larger context of Warcraft 3 and the orc backstory established in Warcraft 1, 2, and Lord of the Clans. The conflict between Thrall and Grom is really a conflict between two different visions of the Horde’s future. Will the orcs peacefully coexist with other cultures and find new allies, fighting when they have to, or will they turn into blood-crazed savages who fight for the sake of fighting? For now, Thrall’s vision has prevailed.
His story also plays into a theme running through all of Warcraft 3: willingly embracing corruption to beat a seemingly unbeatable enemy. Or, translating fantasy terms into real-world terms, willingly crossing a moral threshold and committing atrocities for the sake of greater goals, because, of course, the ends justify the means.
It’s always a good day when we get a Retrospective post
You also perfectly give words to my own gripes with Warcraft storytelling, though you’ve also better picked up on stuff I missed when I played, way back when
As for WoW, well. That is gonna be interesting haha.
