This reminded me of something altogether seperate.
I realise something modern WoW somewhat misses when it comes to tone and style.
One thing with early WoW, and/or Warcraft 3 is the world itself often feels like a character in that tells much of its story without any dialogue at all. People might remember: “This whole city must be purged.” or “I have freed myself”. But crucially, Warcraft 3 had very sparse dialogue. Characters showed who they were and how they felt through what they, and crucially the player, did. Its storytelling was largely visual and audio than text or deep background.
Less Lord of the Rings, more Spaghetti Western.
The tone is different. Look at how detailed the soundscapes are for these menu screens. The natural elements of the world are brought to the foreground. Crackling flame, distant thunder, the song of birds. The colours are dark and light, with redolent yet muddy colours and that convey a kind of if not sensual, then highly rugged physicality in the characters. It’s the wild landscape of the American southwest turned into a fantasy world. There’s an unspoken strain of Americana to its fantasy that’s absent even from other Tolkien-derived settings such as Forgotten Realms.
The buildings, when they appear, are as exagerrated and chunky in the style of an 80’s muscle car, partly as a way of getting around early 2000s polygon limitations, but also as a storytelling device. You infer almost everything from what you’re looking at because purpose always informs form.
The world it presented was a beautiful but dangerous one, red in tooth and claw, ravaged by harsh elements, where everyone, including the women, are big, muscular, swaggering and heavily armed. Notice the exagerration of a swordtip, the glow of a bowstring or prepared spell.
There’s purpose and intention to every shape. It’s an art-style derived from the Bronze Age of comic books. Vibrant colours, exagerration, it’s slightly grotesque because it wants to make any 10-year-old reading it make it feel like they’re reading something slightly provocative or dangerous.
There is also, dare I say, two other aesthetic currents that are purely speculatory and hypothetical on my part. The art style of Warhammer is obviously a huge influence, but there are others that inform the tone.
The first is the Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, that both Samwise Didier and Chris Metzen doubtlessly saw as kids -
The second is Iron Maiden’s album covers. It’s dark, but in a slightly tongue in cheek way. I don’t think there’s a coincidence Evil Dead keeps being referenced in Warcraft 3’s NPC dialogue.
The fourth (and this is purely me) is Yoshinori Kitase’s art style for Final Fantasy 7, which released and was extremely popular around the time of Warcraft 3’s development. Note how form is always inspired by function.
What’s missing (though certainly I think, returning) from modern WoW’s storyline is that slight touch of- psychedelia, a harsh colourful, hardscrabble physical world where everything is exagerrated, where the sky threatens to swallow you. Combined with a natural world that feels like it’s alive and always trying to kill you. The animals and monsters are as sweat-laced and dangerous looking as the people. It should feel heavy metal. It should feel like something your 80’s Republican parent disapproves of you playing.
I think the problem is, both Blizzard itself and its player base have started looking for a style of story that they’ve never really been that good at as a studio.
The narrative in earlier Warcraft and WoW was all context for the gameplay, and while there was lore, it was mostly impressionistic brushstrokes that allowed the audience to project their own stories on to the visually (and crucially, audiably) conveyed world.
If you want proof of what they were going for, try this trailer narrated by Optimus Prime -
Warcraft, at its core, has always been a cheesy comic book that pretends to be a serious piece of fantasy. The emphasis is on pathos. It relies on conjuring emotions and ideals already present in the audience. The depth is implicit, rather than explicit.
Think of the music of The Barrens. Compared with the bombast of Cataclysm, the original was sparse, slightly melancholy.
It’s this subtlety, and somberness, I feel like WoW’s lost over time. It wears its emotions on the inside, never entirely sure of them. It’s expressed through weight, through action.
The central character isn’t Thrall, Arthas, or Anduin, it’s the world, and those struggling to live their lives within it.