Play’s Republic

As the tags might suggest, this is an aside about something that I still find somewhat amusing. One topic that I always recall coming up in class about World of Warcraft is its plot- and/or lack thereof. As convoluted and nonsensical as it may be, however, I’m simply amazed that it still manages to be coherent.

The Warcraft series had its start a long time ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and games ran in DOS. I recall reading somewhere that Warcraft was meant to be a corollary to another, older fantasy series, Warhammer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer), which explains a number of similarities (mostly in the green-skinned design of the orcs themselves). As such, Warcraft I: Orcs and Humans was a simple, straightforward clash between good and evil- evil extraterrestrial orcs invading the human lands, basically. No other races were actually introduced.

Warcraft II started throwing in more complexities: more races were introduced, including dwarves, trolls, elves, and ogres. The world itself evolved to fit, throwing in more locales, factions, and clans, and it became clearer that the (evil!) orcish Horde used demonic magics and necromancy, while the human Alliance used, naturally, holy magics and wizardry. The scale of the battling itself became broader, throwing in aerial warfare in the form of gryphons and mounted dragons, as well as nautical warfare, with wooden ships and submarine turtles alike. This game is also where Blizzard’s trademark sense of humor grew from- clicking on a unit makes it start spouting sound bytes and classic sayings (yes, this is where “Dabu” and “Zug Zug” comes from).

Then they came out with Warcraft III, which is where things started getting weird.

It turns out that the orcs AREN’T actually evil, just demon-possessed; MORE creatures, species, and races were thrown in, ranging from the tauren to the night elves to the undead to the naga to the furbolg to the OTHER types of trolls to the gnomes to the centaurs to the blood elves to the demons themselves, each with their own backstory (too many, perhaps), and it turns out that the world of Warcraft consists of more than one continent. And more than one world, to boot, which happens to be the vaguely specified homeworld of the orcs. History is expanded upon- it turns out that the demons were actually behind everything bad that happened to Azeroth, and there was a cataclysmic war between the magic elves and the hippie elves, and it ALSO turns out that certain forms of magic are addictive and/or corruptive, and dragons can actually transform into any species they want.

There is, in fact, a timeline stretching back from 10,000 years before the present day (or longer, depending on whether or not the creation of Azeroth is included). While it’s certainly not a BAD thing for World of Warcraft to be so thorough with its own history (and there’s always that visceral thrill present when a player recognizes references, characters, and events from previous games in the series), the fact still remains:

It’s still ridiculously dense.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Retcon

http://www.wowwiki.com/Retcon_speculation