Warcraft III – In Search of the Pre-History of WoW

My relationship with Blizzard and its games is odd in that Warcraft has never been all that interesting to me.

Well, I suppose that, in and of itself isn’t odd.  Warcraft doesn’t interest a lot of people I am sure.

But that fact that World of Warcraft has ended up being my MMORPG of choice for most of the last decade is what makes it strange.  It means that I haven’t really felt as connected to the game through its lore as I have in other similar games.

I certainly care about the lore in Lord of the Rings Online.  As many interesting little features as Turbine has in LOTRO, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have played it a tenth as much as I have if it wasn’t grounded in the works of Tolkien.

I also came to care about the lore in EverQuest.  While it was something new, the games connection to TorilMUD (itself rooted in Forgotten Realms, which gives me a lore erection just saying the name), along with its newness and nature at launch, set my expectations and ideas about Norrath.  I have a pretty solid notion of what Norrath should be like based on that, something that has not always served me well.  Part of my problem with EverQuest II early on was the movement away from the lore of the original in the first couple of expansions.  And the whole crazy mounts thing irks to this day in EQII in a way that doesn’t bother me at all in WoW.

The setup to a “frog in a blender” joke

Hover disks in Norrath annoy me because that isn’t 1999.  In Azeroth they don’t even register because didn’t they always have stupid techno gadgets in their games?

Basically, in WoW, in Azeroth, my take on the lore is pretty much whatever has been handed to me piecemeal over the years, without me having ever managed to get invested in it.

Which brings us back to strange.

Strange because I have actually owned all of the Warcraft RTS games, the source of the lore for WoW.

I have just never gone through the single player campaigns on any of them.  Ever.

This was because I never had any enthusiasm for them other than as games to play with friends.  To my mind they were in the RTS genre to be played against other people, not single player games to be explored.  And even then, of Blizzard games, StarCraft and the Diablo games were far more popular in my group of friends.  I only picked up the Warcraft games over the years because they were the game of the moment for people at the office.  I think Warcraft II may have literally only been installed at the office and not at home.

So, before WoW, I played the Warcraft series for a few minor moments in between Total Annihilation, StarCraft, and Age of Empires (I and II, but not III).  Somehow that little bit inoculated me against caring about the lore.

Not that I haven’t had my moments with the lore in Azeroth now and again.  I was involved with the story surrounding Wrath of the Lich King, and have played through as much of Mists of Pandaria as I have in part to finish stories.  In fact, the return to the end of WotLK got me thinking about story and lore and what came before WoW, so I decided to dig out my Warcraft III CD.

Well, my Warcraft III CD case.  I have no idea where the actual CD is at this point.  But the case had the serial number on it, which was enough to activate it in Battle.net so I could download the game.  So I was set to get myself updated on some Warcraft lore.

Time to play the Warcraft III campaign!

How that played out after the cut where, if you played through and remember well the Warcraft III single player campaign, the punchline you are probably expecting, given what I have said above, does arrive.  We ask that you please hold your “Well, duh!” moments until the end of the performance.

So there I was.

Warcraft III actually started up and I was pleased to find that the current patch version appeared to support my screen resolution.  That has been one of the annoyances about going back to play StarCraft, which is hard coded to be 640×480, or Diablo II, capped out at 800×600.  Those resolutions, standard for the mid and late 1990s respectively, don’t really come across well on a 1600×1200 screen.  And I have to imagine that a 16:9 ratio screen, so common today, would make things even worse.

The campaign starts with a tutorial featuring Thrall and Grom Hellscream, Garrosh’s dad if I have the lineage straight. (And we’ve seen how the son turns out.)

Grom and Thrall talking

Thrall has a visitation from a druid who tells him to head to Kalimdor.  There is a bit of running about, saving Grom, and getting packed up and on the road, at which point the tutorial ends and the first campaign becomes available.

The first campaign features Arthas, who is sent off by Uther the Lightbringer to investigate strange things in Lordaeron.

Arthas and Uther

The campaign follows a course through the map of a fairly familiar region.

Following the Campaign Path

Along the way we ran into Jaina Proudmoore, who starts off in a cut-scene in the city of Dalaran, still in its original location.  The join up and move through the map, slaying the occasional orc, bandit, or murloc and interacting with the locals.

Arthas and Jaina and dead murlocs

And then the whole thing started in on undead and the scourge and Kel’Thuzad and plague tainted grain and I was suddenly very aware that I had already been through this storyline.

Yes, dammit, it’s the goddam grain!

This was pretty much the lead-in for Wrath of the Lich King, which was told in pretty fine detail through cut scenes, flash backs, and Chromie sending us all back to relive the story via the Caverns of Time.

My exploration of the lore seemed to be, for the moment at least, a summing up of events already pretty well covered during the one WoW expansion where I was really paying attention to the lore.

Ah well.

So I turned my focus to the jump between Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.  There was an assertion the other day, in a post players being upset about games changing genre, that the move from RTS to MMORPG didn’t seem to cause much of a fuss when it came to the Warcraft franchise.

And while my mental image of an RTS… which tends to default to StarCraft or Age of Empires… is much different than my mental image of an MMORPG… cue EverQuest and World of Warcraft… those baselines seem to exaggerate the change that actually happened between Warcraft III and WoW.

With hindsight fully in place, the Warcraft III campaign seems to be just baby steps from WoW.  It is practically a low polygon version of WoW in many regards.  I don’t think anybody playing WoW would be confused as to what this scene portends.

Look, a Quest!

And while you control multiple characters in the usual RTS fashion… fighting, building, harvesting… You do control a hero character who levels up, has stats, inventory, and spells.

Arthas as a level 4 Paladin

Even the icons feel so very familiar.  Not that I would expect Blizzard to discard them for a new game, but it does make the jump between games… backwards in my case… feel like less of a distance to cross.  Warcraft did not so much jump between genres and slip almost seamlessly between them.

Or such is my impression.  Hindsight is clearly in play here.  So I’ll ask anybody who played through Warcraft III and then went to WoW… where is SynCaine, I think he fits that description… if it felt that way back in 2004?  Were the two games close enough that the genre change was not that big of a deal?

Meanwhile, I made it as far as Hearthglen in the human campaign, where I stopped because I didn’t want to stay up just for a 30 minute RTS base defense event.  I am pretty sure I could manage it… my RTS skills are not that rusty.  But the question is, should I continue the single player campaign?  I know there are undead, orc, and night elf campaign segments to play through as well.  Are they worth it from a lore discovery point of view?  And how about the Frozen Throne expansion?

As an additional thought, I have to wonder if the garrison idea that is coming with Warlords of Draenor was at all influenced by the RTS roots of Warcraft.  Building a base and upgrading it certainly seems to hearken back to an earlier age.

Finally, in my usual tourist mode, a few more screen shots from my time with Arthas in Warcraft III.

Arthas and Uther by the fire

Is that a child… or a prototype gnome?

Another quest!

Speaking with an orc peon

The pain of low polygon counts

Murlocs at play

Mages have water elementals!

Jaina provides some dialog

Facing some scourge

We call him “patches”

Kel’Thuzad got the grain shipments out on time

Looks like it is straight from WotLK… at extreme low graphics settings