So today I was snacking on a caesar salad after work when it suddenly hit me why High Elves are so important to the story of warcraft, and why they should be playable. Note, this turned out really long, so just skip if that bothers you.
They should be playable simply because they represent something that at least some portion of the playerbase or potential playerbase honestly connects with and identifies as, and for more reasons I’ll detail later.
I played WC3 when I was I don’t know 14 or something and I remember thinking, well it’s a brutal story but I guess it kinda makes sense. Arthas is a perversion of Arthur like King Arthur from Arthurian Legend and Uther of course would be literally like Uther Pendragon. But in the end, Arthas destroys everything whereas Arthur of course basically saves everything.
I think that kinda makes sense if you imagine Arthas as like an Anglo Saxon King instead of Brittonic or Celtic leader, because the Anglo Saxons did sort of invade britain and basically displace/conquer the isles (the inhabitants of which, would sort of be, Tolkien’s immoral Elves in ages ago history Middle Earth).
However, what happened since in the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe was wildly destructive, almost from the get go, once formerly independent cultures that were either under the reletatively benign rule of Rome began to go in flux between leaders, mostly germanic warlords oftentimes friendly to Rome but oftentimes not, hence leading to the conflicts with Byzantium and others. If you had a choice of being born in 200 AD in Londinium or 600 AD there was no contest, because there hardly for all we know was even a standing structure of any kind in London in 600 AD, because of all the war.
What’s interesting to me, if you go back to pre Roman times but also spasmodically to post Roman times, is the eternal conflict between East and West. Oftentimes, Huns or Mongols, sometimes the Tatars, any number of groups, suddenly pushing west, overcoming eastern Europe and Germany, but then the kind of “alliance” which would be something like Rome, Gaul, Britain, perhaps Scotland (although not really, but hey in Warcraft their the Dwarves so yes Scotland) would fight the Battle of Catalaunian Plains or something equivalent, and the endless domino effect of east pushing west into the sea would stop.
Then, and I take one Historian’s perspective on the Hunnic invasions, which is that that coalition of Visigoths, Armoricans, Alains, Romans, etc, would, at Orleans or somewhere thereabouts force the Huns/Mongols and also Ostrogoths or the Germans on the other side back. Then, the Germanic peoples, realizing the potential for freedom, would fight vigorously for freedom and you have the Battle of Nedao where the true power of the Huns is broken.
This fits perfectly into Warcraft, the Horde is a warrior culture, or to put it more bluntly, the germanic side, the Alliance, not so much, but provided they aren’t fighting Arthas, a once in a lifetime supreme warrior, that alliance of Elves, Dwarves, Humans, can actually beat the Horde back, and then the Horde, realizing their mortality, is motivated to fight the heavy metal, extreme war against again the Huns or pick your villain of choice, there was so much war to go around in the ancient world.
But the High Elves are a critical military reason for why the the whole process works. In fact, in the Battle of Catalaunian Plains, it was a relatively close battle in many ways even for the Roman Legions that remained but it was actually Armorican archers (again, kind of pretending them to be sort of high elves) that really turned the battle. Without them, Rome might of collapsed earlier, and then Germany runs rampant, which to be fair is bad but also good at times, and the balance is lost.
It’s telling to me that when Caesar came across the the tribes of northern Europe, the balance was already there, the only people with fighting experience were really the Belgians, the Germanic tribes apparently could never even get past them, let alone deep into France or England.
At some point, that all changed, and WC3 is a reflection of that in some way, but for the sake of the story running on perpetual gaming energy (that is to say, we get someone new to fight, everyone gets to feel attached to their identity, etc etc) High Elves should return.
Blood Elves, to contradict Blizzard, are not High Elves, I mean historically speaking the High Elves seemed to have fought to the last or left Middle Earth or whatever, they either don’t care or don’t seem bothered. Giving into the lust, the vampiric desires that is synonymous with Horde values fits the Blood Elves, of course, but not High Elves.
High Elves, and Humans, and Dwarves, Night Elves, etc, don’t fight for the joy of battle, they fight out of necessity. It just so happens that High Elves maybe love battle the most, while nonetheless maintaining a general desire for peace.
That’s a cool thing for me, because I like challenges in games, I don’t 1CC Neo Geo games per se but I actually have a Neo Geo collection where I try and beat fighting games or shmups as easily as I can. I like FPS but actually kinda preferred the original Unreal Tournament FPS games for playing fast and hard.
So that’s why I played a Blood Elf, the fighting spirit is cool, dark and metal things are cool, but at the same time, I play big comfortable RPGs like Final Fantasy, games that aren’t really considered hard at all like Final Fantasy IX or something like that, so in spirit I like the alliance. And that’s why I played a Night Elf in Vanilla.
But now we know just how weak the Night Elves can be in a fight, and how horrible the feelings are to play one given you know your home will be completely destroyed one day. And then Blood Elves, well, your isolationist and you basically don’t care, and you do what the big boss man says outside of Lor’Themar flipping the table in Mists of Pandaria, neither one is satisfying now.
But I think that’s basically all there is to the High Elves, they’re kinda like a warrior culture on par with the Orcs, but they have the values of the Alliance.
So moving away from my historical rambling, if the Horde can accept valiantly plunging into the Alliance with all it has and coming just short, so that they can realize the greater enemy and then marshalling all their strength to fight those battles (not necessarily against the Alliance), and the Alliance can accept that they fight only when necessary, we can have faction war and balance and also larger enemy greater threat war and balance at the same time.
As is, some third party or divine intervention usually bails out the Alliance, if at all, and the Horde ends up not caring either way.
Well, except for Thrall, which is nice, I guess. I guess he’s more Visigoth than Ostrogoth.
On a separate note, I think WoW’s continued existence has always depended on the level of storytelling. I could be playing Veilguard or any Obsidian Game or whatever and get better gameplay, but I don’t know, I’m a millennial and I grew up with Hollywood and so narrative is important. We’re at a point where the game has never been in a worse state, IMO, so it’s really important that the story be as compelling as possible to draw players in.
In terms of the population of High Elves, well, yes, they’ve basically all been converted to Blood Elves or killed, but well, not all of them. If I’m not mistaken, it’s been around 20 years since the third war, which means that it’s almost a generation for the remaining high elves to have at least one generation of children, and as time goes on, that number can grow.
Not only that, there was always, in my mind, anyway, room for the idea of High Elves who simply weren’t linked to Silvermoon, either because they live in some other floating sky city or another undiscovered continent (Ireland?) or whatever it might of been, somehow other high elves could exist or be born.
So that’s the reason to add high elves, because people want a race/group/whatever that reflects their values and interests in some way or another, not because they look pretty.
That said, I mean, hey, I’d prefer they look good but they could all look more like Kul Tirans for no reason and I’d still play one.
So that in long, is why Blizzard should add High Elves, in the spirit of how I described.
And definitely not Peter Jackson’s High Elves, who are this well lets say 14 year old boys version of what a cool action person should be, I mean, everything with Legolas is so cringe now. Or any of them, Thrandruil, Galadriel, just played like epic American Hollywood action icons.
PS: And really, please try and make the game more interesting, Tim Cain has a youtube channel all about RPGs and literally everything he says is on point IMO. A WC with the on point story and something remotely resembling just a Black Isle game from the early 2000s would be incredible IMO and possibly bring WoW back to prominence (and give Microsoft the hit they’ve been wanting forever).