WTF Does Warcraft Mean?

Lore Story Forum
41

Don’t forget Derek “Champion of the Pallid Lady” Proudmoore.
I cringed more at that then Calia’s self-given title.
Why are you even with the Forsaken, Derek?
How are you a “Champion”?
Cause the only thing I see on your resume is nautical experience and flammability.

I’ve come to accept Calia’s existence on the council. Funnily enough, it’s Voss who sticks out to me. I don’t know what role she actually plays in Forsaken society.
Made worse because all her development is implied but never shown.

And lastly, I would have at least loved a quick mention that the rest of the Council was sitting at a table in the back, bored out of their gourds.
Calia is absolutely the “face” of the council, but the Short Story doesn’t do much to abate the fear that she’ll become the defacto representation.

2 Likes
42

When people talk about bringing the WAR back in WARcraft and they talk about WC3, what I remember most from that game was how cool it was when the NE, Orcs, and Humans all teamed up against the Burning Legion and the Scourge. I enjoyed Thrall working with Jaina to stop Grom, Humans and Orcs working together. I remember the trailer cinematic where a Human Footsoldier and an Orc Grunt stop fighting each other to fight an infernal.

And other than that, WoW to me is about a slapdash goulash of a fantasy setting with all sorts of stereotypical but slightly different takes on races and themes. It’s about being in a world I’ve been in for half my life by this point and giving myself over to that world and leaving this one.

I will say that Zereth Mortis and Shadowlands was not WoW to me. It didn’t feel like it meaningfully added to the canon of the game world, and if anything it detracted from it. If Shadowlands felt like WoW in the vaguest sense, Zereth Mortis felt like a bunch of new devs trying to make something completely new out of WoW and extracting all soul from it until it is no longer the thing it is meant to be. Absolutely, utterly terrible.

3 Likes
43

“This doesn’t feel like Warcraft” is often the go-to phrase for those who are burnt out or no longer able to get the same endorphins from playing as they used to, chasing a high they can never achieve again.

But if we’re examining from a story perspective, at this point everyone has a different view on what Warcraft is because of how old the franchise is now. Someone who cut their teeth on WC3 and then played all the way through Vanilla, TBC, and Wrath would view Warcraft as those themes, for example. On the flip side, someone who started in MoP is now a ten year veteran of the franchise, and might view Warcraft as being through that lens.

Barring extreme examples, I generally consider it meaningless. And I figure we can all guess which extreme example I’m referring to here.

44

It was pretty obvious to me there we were missing a whole storyline that was presumably in that abandoned SL patch. Sindane seems to know who Calia and Voss are. And Benedictus Voss’s inclusion in the Maw without any interaction with Lilian seems bizarre. Granted I’m not exactly upset we’re missing that storyline given the quality of SL.

The Forsaken certainly aren’t in the best spot right now. It does irk me somehow Elves got the new undead customization options and classes. And Tirisfal itself is a hack job. It’s an exercise in frustration trying to set anything there RP wise as in addition to having to complete a fairly time consuming quest on every individual character, the zone itself is awkwardly stapled onto both the Cata and BFA zones. So trying to get multiple players in the same phase is difficult as you might warp through time if you’re not all on a specific part of the road.

The rushed nature of the whole project is best encapsulated by Austil de Mon, the Warrior trainer in Brill. He’s stuck in the same animation loop as the generic Forsaken Laborer NPCs but being a Warrior Trainer is just whacking scaffolding with his sword. Which is the exact opposite of construction.

But on the whole storywise I think this is a relatively okay place for the Forsaken to be. At least I know my beautiful darling deaders aren’t getting mummified in that unforgiving Durotar sun. And pausing things there until they figure out WTF the story direction even is at this point seems good enough for the time being.

As for Calia she remains puzzling. If she’s supposed to be in anyway representative of the Forsaken she needs a makeover yesterday. I’ve said before that face of her reminds me of a porcelain theater masks, and thosw things are pretty prone to cracking now aren’t they? And then she’d look an awful lot like the Icon of Torment which would be pretty convenient. From there I’d crib the rest of her aesthetic off the Raven Queen from D&D.

But if she’s just meant to be an aspect of the Forsaken serving functionally as their face and themematically as this sort of bridge between Lordaeron’s past and presence then she’s fine.

I do think the Council could work well in that capacity. As you have Calia turn up for when it’s time to place nice with the Alliance. Lilian as the general Forsaken representative for most matters. Belmont for when it’s time to massacre anything that poses a threat to our new order. And Faranell for when it’s time for;

As for Derek. I’m genuinely not sure how they made an undead sea captain so boring. Seeing as his only personality trairs thus far are he likes his sister and the pretty Priestess who was nice to him I figure we can just say he got more Barbossay in the intervening years.

C’mon Blizz. Undead Pirates. This isn’t hard;

1 Like
45

Warcraft to me I think will always be a nostalgia trip that one can never truly replicate. Its a bushy eyed kid who rolled an orc hunter on his neighbors computer in 2008 and was swept away by the fact there was a game so massive that it would take a literal day to only travel from one end of the world to the other. Watching him go raid Sunwell and then hop into AV to grind out some honor and just beat out everyone as a ret pali. Unfortunately, he was Alliance :pensive:

But to that end, Warcraft is the world and setting that was developed from WC3-Wrath/Cata. To me its the exploration, adventure, and curiosity of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. It is an orc, troll, or tauren stumbling upon Ashenvale for the first time and getting lost in its canopy, trying to figure out where you’re at, after questing in expansive, flat, bare, land for the past 20 levels. Its the poor Forsaken who went to the Bulwark instead of Silverpine, just to be mauled by a lv 40 bear.

It is this unique and, for the time, relative progressive take on the fantasy genre that turned many tropes on their head. It isn’t so much the larger narrative arch rather than the isolated zones and stories that are told within them.

Its being introduced to this quite troubled, but trying, society you find yourself apart of that makes you feel as if you’re the good guy in your own story - or at least not the mustached villain. The bad things you do are an unfortunate need for your people to survive, or maybe you should give a deeper look into why you’re killing a whole bunch of red bandana wearing union strikers for a king? Maybe some of these folks had a point. Its grounded.

So when I hear this “doesn’t feel like Warcraft” from folks I hear “it no longer gives me a curiosity that connects me to my character, world, or friends.” At least thats the optimistic view of it. That one does not feel connected to the setting, their character, or people they chose to play with when they started. That this poor stick and mud orc who was just killing some boars in the desert, looking for this mans poor wife, getting lost in Ashenvale, and being apart of this months long campaign to unlock and assault an Old God fortress with your faction’s champion and hundreds of other players, in the finest armor one could find, is now on this stainless steel magic space ship beating a demon 10x their size to death with a couple rolling pins wearing a plate-kini cause this other horned half demon elf thing wanted to go on a magic school bus trip, or god forbid facing off against robo-devil.

The more pessimistic side is that this game no longer caters to their old school delusions that this is somehow a grim dark 40k game where they can simultaneously can act out their worst Dark Eldar fantasies while going Deus Vult and yelling slurs into Vent cause the 11 year old hunter in their 2nd raid stood in the fire for half a second when they themselves haven’t kicked a single spell they needed to and doomed the group from the start while being bottom in damage.

2 Likes
46

I got WoW with a few months of play time in a Nebraskan Best Buy in what must’ve been summer of 2005. It was a reward for being on my best behavior for what was an unspeakably boring family reunion. I tell ya they’re called flyover states for a reason. I’d played Runescape and Star Wars Galaxies beforehand and had heard good things about WoW from G4’s XPlay. It’d beat out the SWG expansion in their 2004 game awards. So I figured I’d give it a try. I had played WC3 a fair bit was more an Age of Mythology boy so I had no particular obsession with it.

I still vividly remember flipping through the instruction booklet in the airport lobby. Wondering what character I might make. I wound up deciding to roll a Shaman as Ghost Wolf sounded pretty cool and my first ever character was fittingly enough a Tauren Shaman. I had a fondness for a hero character I think named Darkstorm in the TBS fantasy game Heroes Of Might & Magic 3, who was a lighgning shooting minotaur.

Couldn’t quite get into the vibe of Mulgore though so I got to Bloodhoof Village then decided to roll another character. I don’t know if there was anything between then and my first undead, a Warlock named Manticore, but it was love at first sight.

1 Like