Imho the difference is quite clear…in Warcraft III: TFT he did not make that decision only for himself, but for the survival of his ENTIRE surviving people! In World of Warcraft it was clearly written so that he became power-hungry for selfish reasons, not because he wanted what was best for his people. But ofc you are free to disagree, I just see that in WoW Kael’thas was written completely mad for even going as far as summoning Kil’Jaeden into Azeroth, where in TFT he wasnt even close to being that mad.
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To make things black and white, BLZ made a split in a retcon - they created a new belf leader out of nowhere and his fix for the magic addiction was to read the bible and convert to the Light, hence Belf as a playable race in TBC and paladin available for horde; Kael, on the other hand, believed in Illidan who told him that there was NO fix, the only way was to follow him to Outland where they would have abundant mana to consume, and the result was that all of his people went all batsh!t crazy. Now as I look back over his lore, you guys are right, it does feel like it was written by some subpar fan-fiction writers. He raided the spaceships, built five big forges to harvest mana and fuel the spaceships with those mana. In the last patch, he overdosed to death and hatched a plan to summon Kil’jaeden from the Sunwell. They just stripped him of his previous W3 character by reducing him into a stoner.
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This one will jump around a bit, but bear with me.
Kael from frozen throne was a leader who tried to do everything in his power to save his people. He joined the Alliance as his father did, but they failed him and tried to kill him and his people. He fled with the Naga, the only allies he seemed to have left, to outland where he basically joined a society of outcast races: Blood Elves, Naga, and Draenei. His people were damned, but it wasn’t out of weak decision, it was the only foreseen option available. Also, when Illidan said there was no cure, everyone believed him because that was very much his character at the time as well. Yeah, he worked for Kil’jaeden, but it was a relationship between a dealer and an addict. They were all essentially drug addicts, but in a tragic interesting way as opposed to just being evil.
Yes, WoW ruined this character just as they ruined the relationship between Illidan and Akama, or brought Mal’ganis and Muradin back to life which ruined Arthas’ entire arch from WC3. They also do a similar thing with Sylvanas’ arch by making Balnazzar alive too. If anything, this stuff is what I don’t want them to change in terms of alining the lores. I hope the changes are only cosmetic, no altering of the classic story itself.
Also, in the case of WoW Blood Elves, they cure their addiction, but are still part of the Horde. This is another case where they make up one convoluted ex machina to contradict it with another convoluted ex machina. Why aren’t they just High Elves. Yeah, you can say it’s not that simple, but it makes more sense then Trolls and Elves fighting side by side within the Horde.
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Didn’t they simply seek protection? For these belfs left behind, it seems they didn’t have any other options too. At that point they were already enemy of the Draenei. They were no difference from Kael whose invasion forced the Draenei to flee and crash on a little island. They must’ve feared that Draenei and their new Alliance friends would hunt them down and wipe them out, so conveniently, through their existing connection that is Sylvanas, they joined the Horde and stayed there.
Funny how WOW cucks praise crappy legion/bfa lore but despise actually good vanilla/TBC/WOTLK lore which was built by original WC3 creators.
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Yeah, and when all those leftover contents from WC3 was used up, there came the Cataclysm, the milestone between the original wow and the retail wow. BLZ gave Azeroth a facelift, which literally ruined the old world, along with numerous conveniences. Many argued on the classic forum that since TBC there was a slippery slope that led up to BfA, but Cata was a huge slump.
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It’s easy to look at it in retrospect and point at one downpoint in history and now say ‘This is when they started to mess up the story/game, they changed the team’
But it’s the same team that made Vanilla, TBC and Wrath. If you look at Cataclysm as a whole, the story was hitting the exact same beats as previous expansions, covering stuff that was always established in lore. We saw more Naga. We saw Hyjal and the Ancients. We saw the Wildhammer and Dragonmaw. We saw Cho’gall and Deathwing. All of this was touched on in Warcraft 2 and 3 to some extent.
If they messed up anything in Cataclysm, it was a lack of content. Cata was the expansion when I quit WoW, and it was the lack of raids and end-game content that really killed the expansion, not its story. I mean the story wasn’t perfect, but it was still pretty strong considering it followed the Lich King. We actually got to see a lot of the world that we wouldn’t have known about before.
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Damn straight, leave Warcraft 3 as it was back in 2002.
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Is a word you usually can use to automatically disqualify anyone’s post.
(Long post inc)
First, I agree wholeheartedly with the OP in pretty much every respect. WoW butchered the story WcIII had established in so many ways. No, OP you are not the only one who hates how so many of the characters from WcIII were thrown at us as raid fodder, regardless of the impact it had on the story.
Never?
Anub’arak(twice)? Kel’thuzad (sorta)? Kael’thas (twice, and IMO he never should have been a villain to begin with)? Vashj?
Those were all important characters and villains who we collectively as raids of angry, loot-hungry murder-hobo’s came and mobbed to death before going on with our merry ways like it was nothing.
And even with the even more prominent characters that we got help from other characters to kill, that still wasn’t good story telling.
In Warcraft III, the gameplay and storyline existed side by side with the gameplay acting as a medium for us to progress through a story made almost entirely for its own sake, and not just the other way around where the story was being used by the game for its own sake. Sure there were instances where near insignificant events in the game that were technically part of the story were used by the game to teach you how to play, but those were exceptions.
Now compare that to WoW where characters have been created and killed off solely to give players content, instead of using those characters to their full potential for the sake of the game’s storyline for players to enjoy. That is by its very nature poor storytelling. That is not what should have become of what Warcraft III gave us.
Do I think truly everything that has happened in WoW was bad for the story? No. Of course not. Vanilla WoW added plenty of good story, to the mix and expanded and refined the world the story takes place in without mucking up anything, and I loved how the blood elves were portrayed at the beginning of the burning crusade.
But the story definitely was NOT fine all the way up to Cataclysm. Burning Crusade was definitely when whoever was making and/or influencing story decisions, whether Metzen or whoever else, not only lost sight of what made Warcraft’s story so appealing, but also just basic story telling, character design, and continuity, seemingly just for the sake of game content.
Large, ugly, and obvious cracks had already formed that were compromising the structural integrity of the storyline by the time Cata hit.
That’s not really a retcon. That’s just the story progressing. By the time TBC happens, the blood elves started tapping into fel crystals, and using demon-like magic draining techniques they learned from Illidan via Rommath. This led to the fel-green eyes. This was a natural evolution from the events of WCIII, and actually the priests already had green light coming off their eyes in The Frozen Throne, which coupled with blood mages’ fiery green “verdant spheres” which looked uncannily like the fel fire coming off of infernals, just made it all make perfect sense.
They are already polarized.
You’re so incredibly wrong…
What’s canon changes. Not sure what the point was for you here.
People used to say Blizzard would never do a lot of things that have been done. You should take your head out of your keister.
Actually the movie, books, comics, and Warlords of Draenor have made it clear there already are alternate universes. Your case is lost before its inception.
I am part of the WoW playerbase, and I am more offended by the many idiotic retcons and bad attempts at character development than the idea of having an alternate reality for WC4 to take place in. Your narrow mindedness also offends me.
You mean muradin, and look I never found Sylvanas all that appealing, but you aren’t making sense to me. Sylv didn’t seem childish in wc3 to me, and what I saw in the cinematic didn’t seem all that conflicting with her character in wc3 to me either.
You do realize that WoW’s broken isles would make 0 sense in wc3 right? Maiev would have noticed the big-azz magic dome containing Suramar sitting within eye-shot of the temple of Sargeras, and would have surely commented on it…
To even begin to make it make sense, they’d have to throw out Maiev’s original voice-actress, who by all standards did a better job voicing Maiev than her current VA does (something that most Maiev fans in my experience tend to agree with me on, despite me not even liking maiev) and substitute with her current VA with totally new voice lines that most people won’t like, making idle, pointless commentary on something that would have no relevance to the plot but is being shoe-horned in for the sake of retcons… by all accounts, yourarthas is right to be worried about them retconning the broken isles because like you said… they are supposed to only change things to make sense… and changing the broken isles outside of a change to the look of the temple, would make no sense at all.
Speak for yourself. This may not be JUST about bringing dead characters back to life, but I very much do want a few characters that were killed off unjustifiably brought back and done justice.
Speak.For.Your.SELF!
That game was part of my childhood and I have wanted it remade ever since they announced sc remastered.
Oh boy… another one of the people who try to compare the retcons done to the first two WC’s to the ones done to WCIII in wow…
Wc3 won awards for its narrative and cinematics. Pete Stillwell himself states Wc3 is one of the best video game stories ever told. The first two warcraft games were wonderful fun games that helped give birth to their genre, with quirky writing, but they never won any awards, and rightfully so. After all the first game didn’t really have one true storyline.
Please don’t compare trivial retcons to what was only providing the essence for what was to come, to failures to maintain well done narrative works. Chris Metzen himself referred to what he did with the Draenei and Eredar as a trainwreck. You don’t mind all the bad writing because you think what was done before was the same. That seems rather ignorant, clumsy, and blind for you to not be able to notice the distinctions and differences, that being said you are right about how the bronze are a valid method with which to switch the story around for any possible future RTS.
… How is wc3 and wow even remotely as inseparable as that? Do you just want that to be the case or is there some basis for your thinking? Not sure who made you Blizzard’s PR expert either…
… I take it you never played an arcane mage. Or knew that Kael wasn’t even an Arcane Mage in WoW…
NO! NONONONONO!!! YOU SHUT YOUR WAR MOUTH! IT’S BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY BUTCHERED IT IN TBC. NO RUINING KAEL IN REFORGED TOO!
You have a terrible invalid opinion and should have kept it to yourself.
THIS IS WHAT I’M SAYIN’!
That seems to be the majority consensus.
I honestly don’t feel the blood elves joining the horde was truly that hard to understand. There was no freakin way they were going to join the Alliance, and barring creating an entirely new faction, the horde was the only option. They used Sylvanas as a good bridging character.
… you’re certainly entitled to your idiotic, senseless opinion.
… he openly requested to die in place of the rest of his people that Garithos had sentenced to death. There is literally nothing more honorable he could have done. But Garithos refused and caged them up awaiting an execution among humans that looked down on them. That would have been an incredibly dishonorable death for not only him, but all his people with him.
This isn’t about subjective opinions. Your opinions are provably invalid. I suspect you are just a troll at this point.
First of all, keep it civil on the forums or get out. Second, not sure where you are getting this that all WoW players mostly hate vanilla->wotlk but love legion and bfa…
To my knowledge the team for wc3 was not the exact same as the one for TBC. I know for a fact that they lost at least one member going into TBC. Legion’s lore was fun. Not well written but fun. I don’t expect well written lore anymore. It’s been poorly written ever since TBC. Christie Golden has only made it worse.
She turned kael into a borderline pedo that seems to be desperate to hit on every blond he finds and somehow gets turned down as a prince by a ranger general. Fcking sylvanas and jaina fan-service writing hack.
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Well, MMOs ain’t supposed to be storytelling games at all, they’re sandbox, in one way or another. Blizzard are trying to make the game more ‘narrative’ since cata and it just doesn’t work, it’s cheesy and retarded. Everything since then is crap, including Legion. They should tell the story outside the game, and give players the world of warcraft. Which it was supposed to be from the beginning - the same world we saw in WC3, but from a ‘common character’ perspective.
Anyway, Kael was killed way more often by a gang of random fel orcs during my TFT campaign playthrough. He wasn’t invulnerable. Why should I care about WOW ‘adventurers’ killing him. It’s better than current plot-armored WOW characters.
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In my understanding (and some-one can correct if im wrong with this), but aside from few key persons that also worked with World of Warcraft, most of Warcraft III team focused their attention to Starcraft II afterwards…WoW’s team was for large part entirely seperate team and many of that team would after vanilla then break even from Blizzard entirely and create Guild Wars and so on. Would atleast make sense to me since first of all WoW was being developed alongside Warcraft III and it would be only natural that those who worked with RTS game, would then move to create Blizzard’s next RTS games…
Otherwise great post btw, agreed on most of what you said 
I just wish more WoW lore fans would see also that its storytelling utterly pales in comparison to Warcraft III, but there are so many of them who became lore fans only through WoW and have never even played Warcraft III, and many of them are simply not interested because of the simple fact that WoW is their “life and love” and they are not interested in RTS games, period. Ofc this does not go for ALL the WoW lore “nerds”, but all of us know there are many WoW players who dont give a crap about the lore in the first place, they play the MMO for entirely different reasons and then there are those who do care, but are only interested what happens in their beloved MMO, not so much what happened before it or what would happen in another WC RTS game.
This would only confuse people (like me) which never played WoW…
That’s a strange wish, considering that you don’t know enough about the WOW lore and its purpose.
I personally came to WOW through WC3 and wasn’t disappointed until cata.
The main thing to me was to enjoy and explore the warcraft world in more detail, as a roleplaying sandbox. To walk in a snowy dwarven village, visit a tavern with those washstands and giant brew kegs, that frost between stones in the basement. To grow from a ‘peasant’ to ‘knight’. Who gives a f about the ‘storytelling’ when you have this.
I didn’t know at the time how exactly Kael became completely evil and insane and I didn’t care, I just believed that there is a reason we common scrubs don’t know, we were just ordered to go there and attack. And to raid him was a serious time- and skill-demanding task which I never accomplished.
THAT world was incredibly immersive and felt like home.
Now WOW’s trying to be too epic, large-scaled and narrative-driven like strategy games were, and fails.
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I do and I don’t care. The story has evolved. Live with it.
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Maiev and her sentinels don’t need a huge travel hub and share it with the horde. It was just one stop on her journey to hunt down Illidan.
Not necessarily, because in-game scale isn’t true, the world is supposed to be much larger.
But yeah, broken isles in legion suck
Green eyes is retcon because War3 showed no change in eye color when using fel magic. You might say they it was a lack of technology but they all changed from high elf clotging to red blood elf clotging so they could have also added green eyes. Also Orcs were shown in the story to change to red after drinking mannoroths blood, signifying that they will change the art to support that lore.
Green eyes was a decision made after War3.
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Of course not, green was always related to fel magic, even then, I think the manuals and other material clearly stated that the Blood Elves eye color changed after intensive use of demonic magic to sate their magic addiction, Imo, after the events of TFT, it’s sort of a gradual change, just like the orcs skin gradually changed to GREEN after intensive use of fel magic. So, if they keep faithful to their lore, even after Wc3, the blood elves eyes on Reforged shouldn’t be deep green, maybe show some hints of it after they join Illidan and start taping on fel magic, but not before.
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No, there are no alternate universes. There is only one. The Draenor in WoD was created out of thin air by that Bronze dragon using that shard. You don’t know your lore, lol.
It’s basically confirmed that Blizzard hate alternate universes. And they’re right, they generate zero hype. WoD was not built on alternate universes, it was built on Draenor.
–Where will this Draenor exist? How will we get there?
–Don’t worry about that, Timmy, the important thing is we’re going to Draenor!
But they are. If we use your logic, we should also disregard everything Americans say, because the only remaining people playing and respecting WC3 are Chinese, Koreans and Russians.
Guess what, we don’t disregard Americans. Similarly, we should take into account what the entire Warcraft playerbase thinks about Warcraft.
Kael’thas was an Arcane Mage the first time he appeared in WoW Trading Card Game. TCG was not announced as non-canon until after 2010. Only in a later addition he got a second card relabelling him to “Fire Mage”.
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Prince_Kael'thas_Sunstrider
I don’t know about you, but I would adore seeing the hints of his going the dark path. Kael’thas’ arc is not that bad in TBC. I like to consider him the Azerothian Hitler, while Lady Liadrin is the successful Stauffenberg, and this conflict threw the Blood Elven society into a civil war.