Please do not change the original Lore!

General Discussion
41

A very good point is raised by contemplating about differences between Warcraft III, and WOW lore! Indeed it would be a grievous mistake to alter Warcraft III lore in favour of WOW lore.

I can’t emphasis enough, that Warcraft III should be the leading cannon lore for the continuation of the RTS part of the franchise!

Of course WOW would deviate from the brilliant telling’s of War III, you are after all a mere warrior amongst heroes in a larger universe. Alterations in the WOW telling’s were necessary and thus understandable for the emersion of the players. Whoever they do ‘break’ from predating Warcraft III lore, or change the nature and background from characters. They start to act differently than they would have in Warcraft III. The same goes for the overarching story line and happenings in the Universe.

As such: Please keep Warcraft III cannon, and review all future happenings for Reforged, only from the light of the original story!

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42

I agreed with most of what Mephistroth is saying and also what you are saying.
Im sorry if I came of as hostile, this was childish of me. But I have been reading alot of posts, and alot of people are really negative, in destructive way.

We are finally getting a WC3R and this opens the possibility for WC4 if this goes well. And of course everybody should voice their opinions, that is what are on these forums for.
But some peoples opinion is pure complaining and undermining
(not Mephistroth opinion, he had alot of valuable points ) the game that is in “Pre Beta”, it isnt even 1/3 finished yet.

I would rather see, feedback rather than complaining and threats, that was all I was trying to say.
“If you do this , then i will not buy the game”, That is what triggered my “hostile” reply. This is of course his own choice to buy or not to buy the game. But a poor bargaining chip to make the game better and so on.

And it IS blizzards game and IP and they CAN do whatever they want with it, even though we as fans love it and have made it very much our own story also.

Do you think they respond better to feedback and fact about the feedback, or people talking shiee T about the game, threats, complaining and so on.

We should not accept everything that is done to the game, that is not what I am saying, but we need to deliver the message in a grown manner.
Yes I myself also can act like a child on the internett sometimes, we all do , that is why we need to try and police eachother and help eachother make intelligent and valuable feedback. Instead of bickering amongst ourselves. Now you did police my hostility in this post which is good, but if you continue to read, me and Meph are agreeing on alot of points.

We all want the same ting, a great game!

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43

Hopefully that won’t happen. Of course I have nothing against something like extra little side quests or optional missions, but the core of the story MUST remain unchanged. These are the sole reasons of what I am hoping from Reforged: same story + modern graphics; nothing else.

The story and the action in the game was the reason why it was a success to begin with. When everything was pulled into the MMO version of the game Blizzard started doing the most harebrained decisions I’ve ever seen in writing. From pulling heroes out of the grave (denying them a meaningful/tragic end) to fully re-writing a character that was an excellent antagonist, went crazy/died/disappeared in novels. These sort of things are the reason why I dropped WoW after I killed Arthas in WOTLK, because for me and many others that was where the story ended and when Blizzard started yanking presumed dead old antagonists out of the grave instead of making or creating new threats that were more… lore friendly.

Even if the game does belong to Blizzard this doesn’t exactly mean they can butcher it. Taking out the unique things out of the game is what made people angry and Blizzard refused to acknowledge that fact. For example in WoW you got to pick Alliance or Horde; if you went to the Alliance you got to play as a Paladin class, if you went to the Horde you got to play as a Shaman class. That was gone, that thing that made the factions unique and made the player consider his choice was gone.

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44

I will say one thing though, Ashbringer was a pretty well written retcon that brought inclusion of the horde into the Argent Dawn and justified Varimathras’ reasons for joining Sylvanas. Probably the only retcon worth keeping if you ask me personally but people are free to disagree. As a dreadlord fan though I can’t help but be pleased to see Balnazzar return but even if Balnazzar stays dead in Warcraft 3, I’m just happy to have Varimathras still alive.

I don’t just say that because of my personal preferance though, Ashbringer brought a lot of closure to the fate of the Alliance after Legacy Of The Damned, all we knew was that they were scattered, Arthas even said “The alliance is finished”, we didn’t even know if any humans actually survived after Garithos and his men were slaughtered, it could have been total genocide for all we knew.

Regardless, Ashbringer didn’t ever imply that the Forsaken were with the horde, all it did was establish two independent factions to replace the failed alliance/silver hand, the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn, one side. To me, this is what Blizzard should have done, add new factions instead of messing with the currently established factions.

My issue is that ALL the Dreadlords are dead now (at least the known ones, not counting Lothraxion since his existence is absurd in literally every concievable way. Holy Dreadlord? SMH).

Regardless I would rather have Warcraft 3 not have any retcons whatsoever, it doesn’t need them. I think they should make it a completely separate canon.

Ashbringer reinforces this if you ask me because it was clearly written post WOW release and as such the writer clearly looked at WOW for inspiration for the story, not Warcraft 3 so as much as I enjoyed that retcon personally, I would argue that it would be in everybody’s interest that they decided not to bother putting that retcon in if they make a Warcraft 4.

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45

The biggest changes that will actually affect WC3R from WoW are mostly graphical changes to locales that were better fleshed out in the MMO. Other than that the story line changes to WoW mostly occur after WC3 with a few exceptions.

For instance, originally the Eredar were demons who along with the Nathrezim corrupted Sargeras. But when WoW decided to add the Draenei (the Eredars original form supposedly) it was confusing because how could they be corrupted and turned into demons by Sargeras when it was Sargeras who was corrupted by them. Metzen admitted her forgot completely about their backstory since it was written only for the game manual and did not think of that when developing the WoW expansion. So now that will have to be managed along with the whole “Broken ones” for the Frozen Throne storyline.

And obviously the Forsaken’s inability to speak common from WoW will be overlooked as that was only changed for gameplay balance and not meant to be totally taken seriously.

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ummm how was it retcon that the tauren helped cange thralls mind. It was always that.
TFT ends with the Forsaken not being in the Horde, and Vanilla has quests to show that Tauren empathized with them.
Thats not a retcon, thats the story.

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Ehm the original idea for World of Warcraft was Night Elves and Orcs teaming up as the Horde, while the Forsaken and Stormwind Alliance teaming up into the Grand Alliance.

But Metzen said that would be bad idea gameplay bad choice, because Kalimdor would have been fully Horde continent while Eastern Kingdom would have been fully Alliance continent. The players of both factions won’t confront each other often enough. So they made Orcs teaming up undeads, meanwhile Night Elves teamed up with the Humans. Funny enough, those friendship are so forced, even today, you can clearly see the Orcs hate towards Forsaken. While Night Elves caring too much about Human’s crap.

So no, WoW’s lore is a huge mistake, a lot of lore compromises has been made to keep the “blue shirt versus red shirt” lore ongoing.

Warcraft 3 had no focus on blue shirts versus red shirt. It was game with many complicated stories, a lot was going on. Thrall, Taurens, Illidan, Arthas, Malfurion, Grom, Legion. This is nothing like WoW’s lore, which is completely build for the “Blue shirts vs Red shirts” lore.

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48

If they ever make Warcraft 4 they need to start from the beginning of WoW and end it with Wotlk and Arthas death.

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49

Sure you can argue that there was zero lore (aside from cycle of hatred and Ashbringer, both written post WOW) but the explanation made in WOW is no different from any of the retcons. They made a last minute change in an attempt to justify something regardless of when they happened. How are we supposed to accept such a change? Plus how in the hell did the Tauren know about the forsaken, let alone the horde? They are literally miles away from each other, you didn’t have telephones in the Warcraft era, you had to cross the great sea to be in contact with them. As such the whole idea of them joining the horde is completely and utterly absurd.

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50

According to the book “Arthas” written by Christie Golden, Sylvanas could definitely feel Arthas becoming Lich King and also apparently when Arthas/Lich King “woke” from his slumber, so there was definitely some sort of connection there…Im not sure if it was ever explained in WoW why Arthas could not control anymore Sylvanas and her Forsaken, once Lich King was again, but I quess its some unexplained reason that Sylvanas managed to find some way of making sure that they would not be controlled again.

Anyhow I fully agree that Warcraft IV that never happened (or that still could happen) would have (had) so much potential in the conflict and special interests of different races, rather than having just 2 different factions with Horde and Alliance…and while ofc there has been inner conflicts in Horde especially in World of Warcraft, having factions breaking completely is out of the question because of MMO’s sturcture and also because it would split the playerbase who have always stuck together in 1 faction…

So ye, its quite clear where much of WoW’s lore/storytelling problems come from and its all thanks to the structure of MMO where design always hinders the storytelling, no matter what Blizzard would try to do with it. So here is hoping that Warcraft IV, one way or another continues where TFT ended and we would get the kind of storyline that Warcraft would really deserve.

What is worrying however is that how Chris Metzen and all those other key figures behind Warcraft III are no longer working at Blizzard, so I can only hope that should we ever get more campaings for Warcraft III or WC IV, that the lore writers for it would understand the potential they would have in re-writing the story and lore for WC IV, the possibilities would be limitless if they really wanted to tell much more complex and detailed story.

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51

Yeah I can’t see there ever being a Warcraft 4 for this reason, with metzen gone, the central pillar of the story has crumbled.

For this reason I have always argued that the best thing they could do with a new Warcraft game is something similar to the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms games, have it follow the story of Warcraft 1,2 and 3 but also have an additional sandbox option.

That way the players will be able to make the choices.

The closest thing we will ever get to that is the Azeroth Wars mod but that mod is very micro-intensive and not exactly accessible for the average player. It’s one thing to have micromanagement play a part in a melee game but in a grand strategy game, probably not.

So yeah, a Warcraft grand strategy game would be perfect. Instead of having multiple campaign missions, have one massive campaign that would be the only campaign where players can choose a faction and a faction leader then have the choice of either following Warcraft’s story up until the end of Frozen Throne or a sandbox mode where anything goes and you have to manage an entire kingdom and all the territory it occupies instead of just a few buildings.

As such I think in a future Warcraft game it would be better to ditch the “real time” aspect and make it more of a turn based strategy game or synchronized time like Superhot where the game moves as the player moves… unless you want to make Azeroth Wars 2, good luck trying to make money from that though since that game isn’t exactly the most accessible out there.

You know what would be even better? A Mount And Blade style Warcraft game, that would kill 2 birds with one stone, it would have all the RPG elements of WOW with the strategy elements of Warcraft 3 with a bit of action thrown in there.

Sadly any attempts to mod Warcraft into Mount And Blade never managed to see the light of day.

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I fear it will be Wow-level quality of story-telling. That is, entirely focused on characters instead of story-telling.

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53

I doubt they’d replace Metzen as Thrall’s voice, so hopefully they are humble enough to include his advice in the story as well. But yeah, a big loss for the community.

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54

I really agree with you. Especially when they’ve said that they find Sylvannas’lore minor. Why change Warcraft 3 (a game with a script and a coherent lore) to adapt its lore to WoW (a game with no script and retcon everywhere with no coherent story) ? Good lore in WoW was really introduced since Legion not before.

Also, as much as i apreciate Christie Golden work (Before the Storm is amazing) I don’t want to see the changes she has done to Ner’Zhul (one of the best character of Warcraft 3 in my opinion) in Warcraft 3 Reforged. I don’t want him to be turn into a joke like in the book “Arthas”.

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To be fair to Christie Golden, the source material she has to work with is dreadful. Blizzard want her to write retcons so she writes retcons. The issue is that WOW is an MMO and as such they did the whole “red vs blue” dynamic which ruined the story as they shoehorned everyone into either red or blue, like what Warsong said, there’s nothing you can really do when the story is so strictly limiting for gameplay reasons.

That being said, Arthas Rise Of The Lich King is one of her worst books if you ask me since there are tonnes of things mentioned in that book which do not make sense, it feels more like an alternate universe than actual canon lore. Plus the entire book felt unneeded, who needs to read more about Arthas when Warcraft 3 covers him well enough already?

Regardless though, Christie Golden has made some really great books like Rise Of The Horde and Lord Of The Clans… unlike a certain Dragonlance writer who can only write bad Warcraft fan fiction and call it lore…

Also you have to remember that Christie Golden wrote the Beyond The Dark Portal novel and she portrayed Ner’zhul pretty well in that if you ask me.

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56

Correct me if I’m wrong, because I’ve only read it once (did not want to do so again), but don’t Jaina and Arthas have a snowball fight in that book? And Anub’Arak does not even feature?

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Agreed - leave Warcraft 3’s story as is. If you want to add more missions to it, then get the original writers back.

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Honestly probably going to be refunding my prepurchase if changes to the story are made. I loved Warcraft III, I don’t love what Christie “Retcon” Golden has done to the Warcraft lore.

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Ye there is lot of bacgkround story in that book about Arthas and Jaina relationship…which imho its ok, where I see that her writing was really lazy was that like 2/3rd of the book is almost exact word to word what happens in Warcraft III: RoC and TFT from Arthas perspective and it really doesnt add anything of value to his story in that aspect. Also I completely agree that the whole story about Invicible, his beloved horse was perhaps bit too much in center of Arthas motivation to not fail his people, as if just the burden of being Prince of Lordaeron and protector of his people werent reasons enough for him to lose the sight of things. from the 3 books that Ive read from her (Rise of the Horde, Lord of the Clans and Arthas), this was definitely her weakest book of that I agree…cause even the first part of Arthas story, its just jumps from one part of his life to another, its just feels in so many way “forced” trying to add something more to the bacgkround story of Arthas. The main good thing about it was how it dived into the relationship of Arthas and Jaina bit more, but for example it portrays Kael’thas in completely different light (extremely jealous douchebag) than he was in Warcraft III TFT…I quess this was also due to his changed personality in TBC…

Anyhow the book did have Anub’arak, although it also didnt add anything to his character…just little bit of extra dialogue about his fallen kingdom if I remember correctly, but overall it was rather dull reading experience. The worst of all was how it indeed made Ner’zhul seem like complete pushover and it pretty much destroyed the ending of Warcraft III: TFT about two souls becoming one…wont reveal more than that if you have not read it, but I really dont understand what the heck Christie was thinking when she wrote that. It also doesnt make any sense when you think about what happens at the end of Wrath of the Lich King if you ask me.

But ye I just hope that I wont have to cringe to any of that additional dialogue they add in and as said countless times already I hope that we are able to see the original dialogue/voice-acting combined with the updated graphics/visuals if we prefer that.

Edit: **** now that I think of I cant bare to think if they change the ending of Warcraft III: TFT based on what Christie wrote about Arthas and Ner’zhul in her book…I can say Im going to rage if they do that.

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I think I know what ending you mean, and it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one who dislikes the book - my thoughts about Arthas’ motivations should come from being a prince, not cause his horsie died.
Anyway, I agree, also about Kael’thas!

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