Draenei was pretty late choice. I heard they went through many ideas. What were they?
I only ever heard about pandas being an early choice before being scrapped for eredar
It was the Draenei, since the expansion was going back into Outlands (back from warcraft 3). The Draenei having had that history with the Orcs would never side with the Horde, nor would the Blood Elves side with the alliance or humans after what third war.
You’re forgetting that Legolas and Aragorn were best friends and the Elves helped defend Helm’s Deep.
Naw Draenei was a retcon and decided pretty late into dev.
You’re confusing WoW lore for Diablo lore again
Starcraft!
Draeneis were already retconned earlier. And into the Rise of the Horde book which was released in December 2006, but it began to be written earlier.
Funny enough, this was also the start of the high elves lingering around the alliance especially with Allerian Stronghold still standing.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Allerian_Stronghold#:~:text=Allerian%20Stronghold%20is%20an%20Alliance,blacksmith%20are%20in%20the%20stronghold.
…which is also funny as the alliance has the iconic Windrunner family and (kinda) Valeera now.
edit: Not saying the blood elves were meant to be alliance, there are even some dwarves and gnomes among the horde in vanilla but they’re not a horde race.
Honestly can we just ditch the factions entirely. Horde and Alliance can war against each other all they want. I just want to dungeon crawl with friends.
Valeera has been operating more within the Horde in the last years, although she has stated she wouldn’t take sides in political affairs anymore.
And you forget that the horde had Sylvanas before the alliance could even get in touch with Veressa right, who was isolated within Dalaran until Wrath of the Lich King.
It was literally the Pandaren.
They got pretty far into development, even having a model made for them:
ANd for those who doubt Pandaren were meant for BC, here’s Metzen himself stating it:
I honestly do wonder at times how different this game would be if Blood elves went Alliance instead of Horde and Horde got… anything else.
Before anyone says anything the Blood elves had beef with the Alliance of Lordaeron, not the Alliance of Stormwind. Garithos was a Lordaeron soldier before being eaten by zombies.
Damn them being alliance would have been a disgrace. But use that model for furbolg sure! Surprised they did that m uch effort on their model and we didn’t even get any npcs of the,.
Especially after Chen helped Rexxar during the whole Proudmoore incident.
exactly. Gazlowe also helped with building orgrimmar. So pandas and gobbos horde made sense. Furbolg for alliance tho
Similar to the Jania approach in early wow.
I would assume Veressa should’ve been more caring to the blood elves concerning what Dalaran did to them. Not too sure how that will alter history if she helps the horde…
That still raises some questions if the Forsaken were former members of Garithos or if Sylvanas knew what Garithos did.
Chances are a lot of Garithos’s men didn’t survive and if they were raised it was probably in the early days when the Lich King was still active and Sylvanas was stealing away the scraps. As for knowing what he did, probably not and even if she did, would she care at that point?
Alliance get high elves and horde get ogres… They wanted a pretty race for the horde instead so…
Pandaren’s the one everyone knows about and got fairly far until the combo of China and ‘okay why are the Pandaren in the expansion about Outland’ things came up
The other ‘vague idea’ one they had were some sort of robots or something built by gnomes, but that one was also scrapped as well