The Queue: All tuckered out

Welcome back to The Queue, the Q&A column for all things Blizzard related. If you have a question for the Queue, leave a comment and you may see it answered!

Poor sleeping orc peon. He’s had a long day of standing in one spot and making sure only the right people walk through the gate. It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it. You know what isn’t a hard job? Answering questions — so why don’t we just get to the business of doing that?

You can ask @WarcraftDevs on Twitter, but that’s the development team, not just the lore department, so you might not get an answer. Occasionally Blizzard will do an Ask-A-Cdev event where players can ask lore-related questions, but we haven’t seen one of those in a while now, I kind of wish they’d do another one.

As far as canon material goes, the only things in Blizzard’s library of published material that have been declared non-canon are the RP source books that came out for the old World of Warcraft Roleplaying game. There’s a lot of material in there that was written for the purpose of creating campaigns and a varied cast of characters, but none of that material is actually canon in game, unless it actually appeared in game or in one of the canon novels, comics, or short stories.

Lord of the Clans, definitely. Well, I don’t think I’d do Lord of the Clans exactly — that story was re-told in the Caverns of Time Old Hillsbrad instance. But that style of adventure game, the whole point, click and interact with things, man that would make a great tablet or mobile game. And it’d be a great way to introduce old lore stories and make them a little more accessible and fun. Like the story in Day of the Dragon, that would be a really cool little adventure game, or maybe even the story of Arthas’ downfall, or the formation of the Silver Hand, or heck even Of Blood and Honor would probably make for a pretty cool little game.

It’s a genre they could potentially do a lot with, and a market (tablet and mobile devices) that they’ve only just tapped into with Hearthstone — there’s a lot of potential there that they haven’t taken advantage of just yet.

Not that I’ve seen just yet! I don’t know if we’ll see him, at this point — I wish we would, but it looks like he’s one of those things that is just going to fall by the wayside as an interesting side note, which is more than a little disappointing.

Note that you’re only seeing one still image from the film and a promotional statue at Comic Con. Orcs were originally brown, after all — it wasn’t until Gul’dan really got the orcs involved with the Burning Legion that they ended up turning green. That image could be a flashback to before they got the green cast, or it could just be the lighting. We won’t really know until the movie is released.

I think it would grind Illidan’s gears far, far worse if he knew why Kael’thas survived. It wasn’t because we didn’t kill him, it was because he had ditched Illidan and begun working with the Burning Legion in earnest, and they chose to save him. I kind of wish we’d seen more of that slow betrayal in action — for all that Illidan was one of the biggest bosses in Burning Crusade, we sadly got very little in the way of actual lore content surrounding how he got there, what he’d been up to since Warcraft 3, and the interactions between himself and Vashj, Kael’thas, and Akama.

You know, that might make a pretty cool mobile adventure game too, wouldn’t it.

Those are the leaders of the Sons of Lothar — the Alliance Expedition that traveled through the Dark Portal at the end of the Second War to Draenor. When Draenor was destroyed and the Dark Portal was sealed, nobody knew what happened to the Alliance Expedition, they never returned. So in their honor, statues of Kurdran Wildhammer, Archmage Khadgar, Danath Trollbane, Alleria Windrunner and General Turalyon were placed in the Valley of Heroes when Stormwind was reconstructed.

The reason the statues don’t appear in the film is because the film takes place before the Alliance Expedition was ever created. We’ll see Khadgar in the film, but the rest of the crew likely won’t make an appearance, as they didn’t really become major players until the Second War.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!