So, back in the dark days of 1995, I was really into the whole medieval shtick, and when I found there was such a game as Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, I had to have it. And after I'd worked out to type back slashes instead of forward slashes to get it to run, I discovered it was actually quite a good game. No, if you haven't already played it yet, don't look now. There's no point. You'll hate the gameplay and choke on the pixels, but once it was great.
I tend to be the sort of person who plays by feel, so subsequently I'm never very efficient at games. When it comes to RPGs, I dump all my points in the wrong stats without any sense of balance. With FPS-ers, I only play the standard rifle, and consider grenades and other exotic weaponary to be something other people use. In racing games I've never learnt the subtleties of using the brake, prefering instead to employ walls and sandpits to slow me down. With side-scrollers I tend to just mash buttons in the hope something good will happen. My brain just can't make on-the-fly descisions which is why I suck at gaming, sports, and ordering lunch.
Orcs & Humans indulged my gameplay style, because in almost every mission you could amass resources for hours and then strike for the overkill. Because you could only select four units at once, I'd exclusively play with the most overpowered units available to me. My favourite play was to build up my technology tree until I could play conjurers, get four of them, wait for them to to reach full mana, and then start belting out water elementals. Know what it's like with four water elementals on the board? They'd squish their way about the map, their water-blast attacks making thunderous impact on enemy targets. They would fall at the onslaught, letting out blood-chocked moans as bursts of water liquified their internal organs and pulverized their bones.
What about when I played orcs? I had four warlocks summoning a demon apiece: oh yes. These flaming bastards weilded oversized scimitars of pixelated doom. One lob would take down most mortal men; a whole five might be needed to reduce a building to flaming rubble. If you increased the speed of the gamplay you could revel in the soundtrack of tempered steal unmaking both flesh and mortar.
But I digress, because what really tickled my fancy about the original Warcraft was its glouriously B-grade writing. It was purely the stuff of sword and sorcery fiction. You have to imagine the following being narrated over a gloomy 32-bit soundtrack:
"...then came the Orcish horde. No one knew where these creatures came from, and none were prepared for the terror that they spawned."
In fact, don't imagine: see it here. Essentially, all the game's cutscenes are narrated in such a fashion, and the manual is littered with exaggerated fantastical descriptions of everything from peasants to necrolytes. But the plot made perfect sense in its simplicity. You fought from your castles as human defenders of the realm, or from muddy huts as uncouth invaders from another world. In both you start out as a lowly commander who rises through the ranks and then, whether by chance or treachery, becomes the leader of his race.
I never played Warcraft II, but I was pleasently surprised when I first played Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. It assumed the humans had largely won against the invading orcs, and you start out as an educated orc once imprisoned in an internment camp. Wanting nothing more than to lead his people to a new land safe from human concerns, he busts his friends out of prison and sails across a giant ocean for freedom. And this all happens in the first couple of missions. Where Orcs & Humans had a simple plot of evil invader vs. righteous defender, Reign of Chaos introduced subtleties that served to mature the narrative, as conflicting peoples are forced to band together against the invasion of a greater evil. You have ambitious Princes embracing seductive power; banished villians being reluctantly conscripted into the fold; evil mages of indescribeable talent attempting to atone for previous sins; and the disenfranchised orcs trying to divorce themselves from a past of bloodlust and chaos.
Then Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne came along and shat on it all. Developing characters were striped back to single-dimensioned personalities, abandoning their motivations and good sense to explore nonsensical plot lines. Near-identical antagonists replaced those who'd died. Blooming plot threads weren't burnt back to make way for others shovelled in. But why? Well, a new game was coming along, and all this epic fantasy had to be retooled to accomodate it.
Yes, World of Warcraft undid the franchise. MMORPGs need factions, so players can fight each other, so certain alliances had to be busted apart to create a binary world. Where Reign of Chaos showed us that what side you were on depended on context, WOW slapped you into either the "Horde" or "Alliance" camp. Never mind that Night Elves are made Alliance, when they actually have an abstract way of life that gels closer with Orcish shamanism. And even where WOW makes sense, it takes bloody ages to get there. A task as simple as killing a few rodents can take you an hour, and when you get back you find five other players on the same quest. Where once Warcraft told the deeds of armies and the fates of populations in the span of the weeks it took you to finish the game, now the franchise stumbles on for years releasing only the tiniest hints of plot advancement.
The unfortunate truth is that WOW generates massive amounts of money for its producers, and we will never see Warcraft's return to its RTS roots and the narrative standards it inspired. Where once there were grand stories, there are now only quests and events. B-Grade fantasy is dead; long live B-Grade gaming.
I'm off to pick up a book and leave the WOWzers to their engrossing gameplay.
