If she is up for it, I also think it would be nice to look at and compare their story development from WC3,vanilla WoW’s questing experience, and then later Cataclysm’s revamped storyline.
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Warcraft Retrospective 36: Battle of the Edgelords
https://lintian.eu/2024/09/21/warcraft-retrospective-36/
Excerpt:
I’ll give credit to the three Azjol-Nerub missions: though short, back at release they enticed my imagination and made me want to see and know more of the great spider kingdom beneath Northrend. I hoped that if we ever returned to Northrend in a Warcraft game, we’d get to roam Azjol-Nerub as well. Imagine my disappointment when what we got was not even a single zone but rather just two dungeons, and when we finally got a nerubian kingdom as a zone, it was not Azjol-Nerub in Northrend, but a different and unrelated kingdom on the other side of the worldthat the writers just suddenly made up.
There are three posts left until the end of Volume 1: two will cover Rexxar’s campaign, and the last one will be an interlude tackling what it means for a story to “feel like Warcraft”.
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I just stumbled upon this blog series last week and read everything, I love it! Also I didn’t know there’s a nerubian zone in the new expansion, kinda curious to check that out now.
But I wanna say something about the first paragraph in the last blog post, the one about Sylvanas being evil in Warcraft 3.
I’m aware the RPG is no longer considered canon but I have the book (from 2005) right in front of me now and it says on p.371: “Of course, Sylvanas, the leader of the Forsaken, does little to put the living at ease, as she is inherently evil and her goals are dark.”
Not even morally grey, just straight up inherently evil.
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Thanks! I’m reading the RPG books now for future posts, though I’m reading the first edition, while your quote (seeing the 2005 date) is probably from the second edition, post-WoW.
The RPG books have some view of morality that haven’t aged well, for example, being particularly vicious against arcane magic, but I’d say it’s accurate in calling Sylvanas evil, though “inherently” is not the word I’d choose. (Being “inherently” evil implies no possibility of being non-evil, and Sylvanas is clearly capable of making moral choices.)
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Are you going to dip into other novels too? Admittedly, that would turn this into something much larger.
Well, I’ve already reviewed Of Blood and Honor, Day of the Dragon, Lord of the Clans, and The Last Guardian. I don’t think I’ll go into that level of detail for future novels, since most of them aren’t that important in the long run, but I’ll probably still mention them. For example, I plan to spend a single post on the entire War of the Ancients trilogy (which I haven’t read yet).
Larger than covering vanilla WOW?!
I’m going to look for these reviews!
Did you ever look at Warcraft Adventures?
I’m looking forward to you covering the Founding of Durotar! Especially with how it gave a bit of a teaser on how a Warcraft RPG might look like.
I do have a question though! Do you have any plans to include some coverage of the world editor before you end the warcraft 3 part?
I’m mainly asking because both of personal curiosity(I really like it) but how much of a success and impact WC3’s map editor had on gaming.
It wasn’t the first of its kind, but it was and probably still is, one of the best ones in my opinion, and WC3 would not have lasted for so many years without it I think. I’ve seen people make everything from full fledged RPG’s in it, to first person shooters. And a wide variety of games like DoTA, Footman Frenzy, Wizard Duels, various tower defense games, fishing simulators and etc.
It’s had a huge impact on gaming history over other map editors from other strategy games.
Even vanilla WoW was developed on an advanced version of it I believe? At least in its very early prototype stages.
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Very early prototype stages, yes. Vanilla WoW began as a rescripted modification of WC3, but the two codebases very quickly diverged.
I’m afraid covering the World Editor is beyond the scope of this blog, nor am I qualified to speak about it. I started a couple of maps back in the day, and scripted some cutscene, but I don’t have any completed projects under my belt.
Yep, though I haven’t played the leaked version and instead went by officially released materials only. It’s under “The Game that Never Was”.
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That is fine! It was more a curiosity 
It drew me in very early in Warcraft 3, alot thanks to Founding of Durotar and Blizzard’s bonus maps that were included in the durotar patch/download. (If you installed TfT from CD you only got the first part of Durotar and was told to go download the next patch for more content).
I believe the bonus maps were a tower defense, a 3rd person racing game and a easter egg hunt pvp minigame.
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A long time ago, I did a thing for Eversong and Ghostlands – essentially boiling the zones down to narratives and lore snippets. And that took a fair while, it’d take a /long/ time to do it for vanilla zones. Especially considering you’re bounced around them a lot.
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To be fair, and to temper your expectation, I went into an extreme amount of detail for WC3 (seeing how it became the foundation of Warcraft lore as we know it), and I’m unlikely to spend such a large number of posts on a single game (even counting RoC and TFT as separate games).
My preliminary plan is:
- Finish Volume 1 “The Shaping of the World” (3 posts left)
Volume 2 “The Golden Age of WoW”:
- The RPG (1 post for all six books)
- The War of the Ancients trilogy (1 post)
- Vanilla WoW: an introduction (development history and gameplay basics)
- The Warcraft Encyclopedia
- Vanilla WoW (4 posts for zones, 1 for dungeons, 1 for raids, for 6 total)
- TBC and Wrath (5 posts each)
- Novels released between vanilla, TBC, and Wrath
- WoW the Comic Book, the Varian arc and the (siiigh) Med’an arc
The current plan is that this will be followed by Volume 3 “The Garrosh Saga” (Cataclysm, MoP, WoD) and Volume 4 “For Want of Metzen” (Legion, BfA, Shadowlands), and maybe a single post on Dragonflight as the overall afterword. Then I will completely run out of things to say.
I can’t guarantee I’ll ever actually write this. For all I know, I might stop at Volume 1. Writing a complete retrospective of everything up to and including Shadowlands would be an insane time investment. It has taken me almost a year to do just WC1–3 and the interim novels, and I put other creative projects on the backburner for it. I don’t want to be stuck writing nothing but this series for years to come.
We’ll see.
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If it comes to that, I think we’re all grateful for the work you’ve put into everything so far and it is completely fair!
It’s been great reading so far, but it should feel like something you want to do as your own creative and fun experience, not a chore or second job!
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You know, I genuinely think, from what I’ve seen, that this is publishable. Either in an informal Patreon form, or, actually, as some sort of ebook. Dare I say it, even in print.
I say this because I definitely think the work has value, and I’d actually love to read you going as deep as you’d wish into every facet of Warcraft, hah.
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From a technical perspective, publishing an ebook would be easy. The website’s source code is in Markdown, so it’s a simple matter to convert it to any format, including epub.
My primary concerns are ethical. I’m a believer in open source values, and the website is published under the same license as Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA, or more informally, “you can freely copy or modify this text, but you must republish it under the same license, also you can’t add DRM”). I don’t want to compromise my values for earnings that (if any at all) would be minuscule compared to what I earn through my job.
Making Volume 1 available as an ebook is an interesting idea, but I’ll need to decide whether I’ll want it available for free or for a price, and if it’s the latter, I’ll need a shop that doesn’t add DRM to ebooks (which precludes Amazon, Google, and the like). Ideally I want a platform that would let users download an .epub file and do whatever they want with it. Gumroad looks promising in that regard.
I’m also not sure how publishable, copyright-wise, is an ebook that consists of reviews of copyrighted content, and which features so many screenshots of Blizzard games (though I might trim the screenshot-to-text ratio for the ebook version).
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If you want to not compromise ideals and be fair, you could always make it a free download with an option to pay a donation for those who wish to do so.
If you aren’t concerned at all with income it is a way to let people enjoy it while also allowing those who wish to thank you for the work to give a little something.
The ideals are not about price, they’re about freedom to share. I have no ethical problem with making the ebook paid, my only concern is that it might not sell.
Gumroad has a “pay what you want” option, with a minimum price (which can be 0) and a suggested price. It might be worth looking into. This way, people can buy the book to support me.
I could also add a link to my Ko-fi page to the blog (I originally created it at the suggestion of people who wanted to support Chaos Archives with donations).
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Yes, apologies! That is what I meant 
I understand that it’s about the freedom to share information.
I do think either of those is something that could work if it is something you honestly want to do.
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I understand! To be as clear as I can, my thought was not to keep the project out of the reach of people who won’t pay, rather to facilitate some monetary reward for you and all the hours you’ve put into this project so far, and, obviously, given your to-do list, into the future, as well!
Pay What You Want seems like a really good way to go about this.
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Warcraft Retrospective 37: And Now for Something Completely Different
https://lintian.eu/2024/09/29/warcraft-retrospective-37/
Excerpt:
I love frontier settings. The border between wilderness and civilization is prime breeding ground for all kinds of adventure stories and practically the perfect setting for an RPG, whether tabletop or a video game: the authorities exist, but their power is weak and they need the help of able-bodied independent agents for hire, like typical RPG protagonists, to keep civilization functioning and clear all those wandering monsters in the wilderness — which, coincidentally, can contain any exciting dungeons and ancient ruins the game designers want.
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