Originally Posted by Marthen

I didn't know that Andorhal, Theramore, Southshore, Hillsbrad, or Gilneas were night elven. And that is not counting the RTS games. Well, we learn something new every day.

Originally Posted by ARM3481

It's admittedly hardly limited to WoW, but there's this weird "thing" in fantasy that's often taken me out of the story where for some reason a violent and larcenous criminal can declare himself as such and bizarrely be tolerated by everyone if he just calls himself an adventurer at the same time. As if being a violent felon is somehow endearing and cute. Such character archetypes in fantasy will often outright introduce themselves to prospective allies and heroes by identifying as a thief or assassin who preys on society at large and nobody's response is "then why the hell are we recruiting this guy and not arresting him and sparing everyone from being murdered and/or robbed by him? Consequently the idea of the "rogue" just feels wholly game-based on a level that other classes don't, so whenever a character addresses the player as as rogue, it comes across as artificial and fourth-wall-breaking to me.

Originally Posted by ARM3481

I'm not sure it's meant to be a "defanging of the night elves," per se. It feels more like a symptom of the game bleeding into the story. The Alliance excerpt has all the hallmarks of trying to appeal to the fanservice sensibilities of people who play the game. Thus we have rogues who aren't just really skilled; the methodology of how they're portrayed makes them effectively inserts for "the player" as we exist in the game, effortlessly chopping apart a bunch of nameless soldiers before vanishing unscathed, then bumping off the enemy's poorly defended hierarchy of officers as they're in the midst of their own armies.

Why? Not because the night elves are specifically meant to appear weak or inept, but because it's representative of how these things work when the player is doing them in the game. It comes across like an outright transplant of how we defeat enemy armies via quests. The only thing missing was the blood elf rogue being shown grabbing a dozen of something scattered around the night elf camp and dousing a half-dozen braziers of some sort between killing Sentinels.

Which is a problem in and of itself, albeit a different problem. And I can't help thinking it might be intentional. Marketing-wise Blizzard may well think it's great to lace stories with blatant reminders of the meta-game regardless of how it can adversely affect the flow and feel of the stories themselves.

Originally Posted by C9H20

and so the warlocks control demons and never the other way around. The fantasy is that you dabble with the most powerful and corrupting of magics but you are strong enough to remain in control.

Originally Posted by BaronGrackle

WC: O&H warlocks are the bestest WC warlocks. They were the chessmasters and puppeteers. Heroes for their people.

Roleplayed warlocks should be WC1 warlocks.

Originally Posted by Marthen

Grackle, my man. At least somehow who gets it. It sometimes gets a bit stale being surrounded by all that Warcraft III glorification and people who hold its lore as "the original one", especially on Discord.

Originally Posted by BaronGrackle

In fairness, roleplayed shaman should be WC3 shaman. Roleplayed juggernaught crewmen should be WC2 juggernaught crewmen.

Originally Posted by Marthen

Meh, we both know that elementalism should be reserved to mages and shaman should be spiritual to necromantic.

Originally Posted by Cacofonix

Did WC3 make anything better? I mean, I can't say the Alliance became more respectable when every important member was Arthas, some other villain (and not a respectable one), doomed to failure for not doing what a magical homeless man says, a cowardly Paladin, or a traitor.

Originally Posted by BaronGrackle

Some of the unit/building descriptions in the WC3 manual are groundbreaking. (And some are travesties.)

If I want to get a feel for Thrall's innovation in transforming the Horde, I go straight to the descriptions for Burrow, War Mill, Altar of Storms, Blademaster, Catapult, Grunt, and parts of Raider. It helps if you read the thing with a tone of pro-Thrallic propaganda, of course.

Take that over Golden, even LotC.

Originally Posted by Kyalin V. Raintree

I've had a bit of a question over this sort of thing, actually.

I have read complaints that in Warcraft III, the orcs abandoned more industrial themes. Do you believe this is because of Thrall taking the Horde in a different direction, or is merely a reflection of their state of being post Second war migrants lacking a country of their own?

Originally Posted by Marthen

Depends what lore are we talking about. Warcraft III to Chronicle? It was a straight up retcon, the orcs did not have any industrial themes under Thrall because they never had them. There was even a tidbit saying that Orgrimmar was built only thanks to gobline engineers and was the first orcish city on Azeroth, an absurd notion to any Warcraft II fan.

Post Chronicle V. 2/WoD? The industrial themes are back, but they are almost exlusively tied to the Blackrock Clan. Because of that, an argument could be made the reason why the Horde of the First and the Second War was more industrial is that it was headed by the Blackrocks back then, while this clan was not even part of Thrall's Horde bar a small number of individuals.

Originally Posted by Kyalin V. Raintree

I've had a bit of a question over this sort of thing, actually.

I have read complaints that in Warcraft III, the orcs abandoned more industrial themes. Do you believe this is because of Thrall taking the Horde in a different direction, or is merely a reflection of their state of being post Second war migrants lacking a country of their own?

Originally Posted by Unhappy Anchovy

One thing I quite like about Warcraft II's visual design is the sharply defined aesthetic differences between Alliance and Horde buildings. You've seen a lot of Alliance buildings above: they're all neat and artificial-looking, based on clear geometric shapes. The town hall is built out of cubes. The elven lumber mill is a neat rectangle with a triangular roof. The barracks is made up of linked squares and circles.

Orc buildings, on the other hand, are very naturalistic. The troll lumber mill is hollowed out of a giant, fallen tree. You can't see it quite as clearly with the snow on it, but the orc farm is also built in the base of a tree. (You can see it better on the forest tileset.) The orc great hall and barracks are both decorated with horns and animal bones, and on the whole have a much more flowing, organic feel.

Warcraft III and to an extent World of Warcraft embraced the idea of the orcs as close to nature. While I think the orcs' relationship with the natural world is more complicated than that - after all, in pretty much every Warcraft game the orcs despoil the natural environment on a truly horrific scale - I do think that even at this early stage, in Warcraft II, you can see how the orcs have this primitive, natural aesthetic. There is, I think, a reasonable level on which you can see the conflict between the Alliance and the Horde as a conflict between civilisation and barbarism, or civilisation and nature.

That conflict ends up undermined a bit later on, particularly in World of Warcraft, where the night elves are clearly on the side of nature and the blood elves are equally clearly on the side of civilisation, but in Warcraft II it's quite a strong difference. I've only looked at the early buildings and units so far, but later on you'll see it even more vividly. The Alliance uses steam-powered submarines; the orcs ride on the backs of giant turtles. Human mages train at artificial, sculpted stone towers; orc death knights train inside buildings made from the skeletons of ancient giants. Alliance gryphon riders are recruited at stone aeries carved to resemble the beasts they ride; Horde dragons are recruited at a 'building' that is literally a dragon chained to the ground. (I will talk about dragons when we get to them, because there's lots of interesting stuff to say about them.) The human oil tanker is made of wood and metal and is nice and smooth; the orc oil tanker is made from the bones of some huge sea creature. I don't know, orcs really like bones in this game.