this is my main problem with Orgrimmar.
it doesn’t feel like an actual City.
it is written in lore/novels/etc. as if it is a major metropolis and center of trade/industry for the Horde.
but I flat out cannot imagine anyone regular living there. like a regular degular Orc with a regular job, a wife and some kids.
It feels more like a Military Base than a City.
There’s a good likelihood a lot of the orcs just live in Durotar instead, like Razor Hill.
That being said, other races like goblins 100% live in Orgrimmar.
The part leading up to the Drag, with the orphanage and shops, feels like the ‘residental area’ to me.
The Suburban Orc
sounds like a lifestyle magazine
Cosmorcpolitan
I believe this is because quite frankly the developers responsible, the Horde fans at Blizzard were not interested in crafting that kind of world. They were very focused on a certain vibe, on that RTS feel of purpose-built for the actual uses while the people who did Stormwind, many Alliance cities clearly gave a little thought at least to the idea that “hey this is a living world we’re crafting, there should be a few representations of places where people live”.
Horde is all vibes over substance, vibes and providing the player with the services they need. Alliance and whoever crafted those locations clearly cared a bit more about the detail-work. I mean just look at the spike obsession. I’d bet some of those spike adornments cost a house model for the horde in dev time.
I’ve noticed this in things like the Horde and Alliance garrisons. The Alliance garrison while located in a much more hospitable land it must be said even outside of that just feels more homey, more of a place you can be. The seats in the Alliance inn all work and face correctly or most of them do. Meanwhile the seats in the Horde inn do not all work and many don’t face correctly. It’s a small detail but it’s worth noting. Much as it’s worth noting the alliance barracks doesn’t have two working prison cell doors despite having two cells while the horde barracks has 3 working prison cell doors and cells.
And we must recall Garrisons were according to some at Blizzard their stab at housing. Yet the Horde Garrison despite being located in an inhospitable land of ice with some lava at the back fails to feel like anything but a rough war-camp. There aren’t near enough fires located throughout it to keep warm nor are most of the structures built that well to keep out the cold if you think about it even a little (compare to the keep in Borean Tundra with its designs to keep the cold out of the lower levels, furnaces, big fires, etc even that was better). It doesn’t feel like a cozy place in the middle of the tundra as you might see in some fantasy fiction like GoT. The Alliance garrison meanwhile doesn’t have that problem yet just the same if you transplanted it into the frozen tundra of Frostfire it would feel cozier due to the alliance designs, the main hall even has a big fireplace while the horde hall has some braziers.
It’s not just horde design though, they’ve done good design with Silvermoon, with Suramar (though that may not have been strictly seen as Horde at the time), it’s design for the more fantasy, bestial races like orcs, trolls, etc that seems to suffer from a lack of imagination. Take the Horde BFA city, it’s design is iconic of Horde design. Big things, big imposing structures with wide entrances, big open spaces inside them, large areas between them. And contrast it to Boralus or Stormwind or even Ironforge. Boralus and Stormwind both have a real city feel, streets are not excessively wide, there is pressure from development to not have these wide avenues and they don’t have these grand entrances, these huge halls and huge open cavernous spaces. Even Ironforge which itself is one huge open cavernous space and hall doesn’t fall to be quite the same in design. It has a big wide avenue around it yes but the structures within it are all cozy, compact, clustered together and don’t within them have these big spaces.
It’s like someone decided because the Horde has large races like Orcs and Tauren that they need these overly huge entrances and interior spaces while the Alliance is designed without a thought for the draenei whose own structures and city do actually kind of mirror this kind of horde open big spaces design.
There are practical considerations too. Cramming a bunch of boxy housing next to boxy shops is pretty easy in design when they’re all part of one big structure and you’re just crafting a facade. Cramming in a bunch of free-standing huts not touching other huts that serve no purpose is a bit more troublesome. This could have been remedied by having more multi-story huts with an appearance of windows and living quarters existing in them true.
They sleep where they work.
When their guards arent looking that is.
Back to work!
Zug zug.
They bury themselves in the ground, up to the neck and under the cacti, so they can make cactus apple surprise ever once in a while. They can often be seen in the wild as just a head sticking up from the ground with a wide brim hat to hide from predators and give them shade.
Another one? Always with the corpses around here… picks up with a shovel and throws in a shallow hole “Was that fellow dead dead, or did I just chuck another Forsaken in a grave?”
No spoilers, but the buildings in Undermine actually do seem more like houses and businesses than most places we’ve gotten since Boralus and Valdrakken.
Maybe they are like the Orcs in the LOTR movies… they just get dug out of the ground. Or maybe they are a fungus like in 40k. Ogrimmar exists because Orcs beleive its what an Orc city shoud look like. In 40,000 years Azeroth is doomed to exterminadus when discovered by the rest of mankind, tis the will of the god-emperor.
Stop poking meeeee!
pokes more “Elves…they’re like jello, y’know? The more ya poke em the more they wobble wobble wobble.”
The pig pens.
They live in orgrimmar, the city is canonically humongous bigger compared to ingame.
Aftr MOP and WOD blizzard made sure to remove as much orc npcs as possible to make orgrimmar look like some sort of multiculturalism center, having far more other races included for “diversity” sake, we may have more orc npcs, but i sure doubt, and im not in the mood to count
Im an old school guy, i loved how orgrimmar was divided in cata with each race having their spot but being mostly of orcs, this is the case for other racial capitals as well, it had more of the native race, and some other races doing business/visiting
But now, meh, its lame immersion
I’ve long said that they should bulldoze a new canyon from where the Drag is towards the sea and put in more housing/civilian areas there along with some proper docks. You cannot tell me that the mighty Horde navy is run out of that one little pier outside of town, that’s just silly.
I heard orcs like to have sleepovers in draenei barns after their nocturnal activities…
The problem with Org is that there’s a disconnect between the OG orc theme and the whole Noble Savage theme. WC1 and 2 portrayed orcs as huge, monstrous, scary BAMFs who ate a lot of bacon and could crush your skull with a slap to the face, but were also generally pretty stupid and simple, living in mud pits alongside their pigs. Most of their basic grunt work was done by peons who were even dumber than the warriors. One of your first quests as an orc is to go slap around lazy peons. They sleep in caves and structures barely qualifying as barns to “civilized” peoples. And that was fine for WC1 and 2.
WC3 suddenly had more refined orcs. And it wasn’t the whole culture that was stupid with a fraction of them as intelligentsia warlocks and necrolytes and warbosses running the show, it was big, tough guys who were TRICKED into being stupid. Every orc had the potential of being a smarty smart Noble Savage.
But despite retcon after retcon of culture and history, the theme never changed. It always stayed as pig farms and mud huts. And now we’re so far down the rabbit hole there’s no fixing it. Either we assume the vast majority of orcs are homeless street people, or they forgot how to build houses and plant caggabes after they drank fel blood.
With humans it was easy, because people were always people. Retcons with the Alliance are easy to overlook. The Horde, not so much. The horde needed a LOT more attention than it got. Now it will suffer for that lack forever.
Also I’m a dwarf and I’ve had a lot of whiskey tonight.
Thats because orcs are not real world humans.
We always project our stuff into others, but its more due to we not living like then or knowing their reality, in this case the difference is even bigger cause they are other species, with a total different value and culture
Orcs are heavy militarised, this is their culture, based around tribe/clan and a kratokracy
From the moment of WoW’s inception, Blizzard has overwhelmingly spent more time, care, love, and attention on the Alliance things.
It’s almost like they spend 20 years or however old Thrall is supposed to be, all sitting around in human camps getting browbeaten into following human ways.