Imagine if Blizzard

Ok this is not a sh*tpost but a question of curiosity.

Imagine if Blizzard made a race for every species of unit in the World Of WarCraft Universe.

Like Orc, Troll, Tauren, Voidwalkers, Satyrs etc.

How many races would that be?

And what would the balance be like?

Would it be like a DOTA 2 game where you have 117 heroes? (Races in this case)
Would that mean limitless strategies and stuff?

Obviously not recommending this but curious.

2 Likes

that would be weird but for some reason it would also be awesome to play as whatever you want like AoE2

1 Like

i think it will go as max as 30 not exact but something like that give or less.

but in terms of playable well some races are soo small in lore you won’t really have any ideas as to what units to make for them.

but i mean if you say 30 races by some magic are made playable that’s bigger then dota 2 for sure like take 30 races each have 4 hero’s that’s 120 hero’s.

and you STILL have to consider all the unique units and buildings and such.

so basically it will be oversaturated and balance would be hard and hard to come up with cool ideas that are not repeated.

i was having worst idea
what if like the undead and night elves , the Horde “Orcs” and Alliance “Humans” races split to 6/7 races
like Humans Dwarves Gnomes(maybe gnomes stay with dwarves) High/Blood Elves Orcs Trolls Taurens have thier own race Units and Building
so online in PvP you with 2 of your friends can build the Horde or the Alliance because like we all know in TFT in Humans Campaign we play only with Blood elves and they have left the Alliance after the 3rd War so gameplay and Lore wise that can happen

but i will be just asking for Warcraft 4 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I will bring up the same point I bring out in any other “more playable races” thread:

The perfect solution is costum cosmetic skins. Gameplay wise, a lot of races are just bound to play nearly the same, with ridiculously niche and situational differences that will end up being a waste of time to even implement. So why not save yourself the trouble, and just apply cosmetic skins to existing factions that you can expect to play the same.

The most natural example would be the existing Human Alliance and Orcish Horde. They already consist of 3 races ingame, and the cosmetic skins would basically make them visually into a single race. Particularly for a Human only skin, we already have a lot of creep models in the form of rogue wizards and bandits for ranged units, and thanks to campaign assets we’re already 2/3rds toward an elf-only skin. All that’s left at that point is to redesign the dwarf units into something human/elvish.

Then there’s the gazillion flavours of Troll, which we can probably fit as a cosmetic skin over the existing Orc units, from Troll axe warriors instead of grunts to Mutated Trolls instead of Tauren. You can legit repurpose the axe-thrower unit as a melee unit, and maybe give it some more flavourful armour to distinguish the forest/jungle/dark/frost variations beyond a simple palette swap.

Then, there’d be more arguable examples. I thought a couple months back that the Undead faction would be a good basis to which to apply a Naga cosmetic skin. Ghouls become Mur’ghuls, Necromancers become Sirens, Gargoyles become Couatls, Abominations become either scalefiends or myrmidons, and “blight” becomes a form of swamp or shallow water.

All this does is allow the players to play as the race they want, without giving the designers unnecessary problems by messing with the existing balance, which if people are to be believed is already very, very fragile.

I have a question about the main post. Would you count sub-species as their own “race”? For instance, Black Dragons vs Red Dragons? Would Kodos be their own race? What about random neutral units like Riderless Horses or Bunnys?

I think it would be a case of ‘if everyone is special, no one is special’.

The 4 races we have are interesting because they are the ones chosen to be playable. We are presented a concept for individual units that are powerful in their own right, and together represent a faction that is equal in power to the others.

You can get a sense of that right now if you play the game and make your army out of mercenaries. It’s neat to have a troll healer or a mud golem in your army once and a while, but if you just go full mercenaries then you lose a strong sense of identity. There’s no binding theme, you just have a collection of units that happen to work together.

If it’s a full faction, like say Dark Iron Dwarves army with core hounds, golems, firewalkers and fire elementals, then yeah I could see that. But if you’re just talking about each race being playable, then you kind of already have that with Merc camps and Tavern heros.

There’s been plenty of custom maps with new races, and I didn’t feel like a lot of the single race-based concepts were very compelling. I’m not a fan of Tauren-only faction or Orc-only faction etc. I wouldn’t mind if it were a sub-theme for the existing Horde, but not to the point where they’re exclusive from a greater identity. Warlords Battlecry had this approach, and I was never a big fan of it.

1 Like