The Queue: Warhammer vs. Warcraft, Order Hall Campaigns, and the Age of Azeroth

If you want a different experience, from what I’ve seen so far Demon Hunter and Warlock have a significantly different experience. Druid is also pretty interesting. (No, I haven’t played them, but I tend to spoil myself as part of my job.) I’ve only played my Hunter, Paladin, DK and Warriors this expansion for any length of time, but the stuff I’ve read on the Druid seems a real change of pace, and my Shaman also started being interesting, I just didn’t have time to dedicate to him yet.

There are several things I’d like to comment on here, not all of them interrelated.

1. Ysera started off as a Proto-Drake, a natural creature born on Azeroth. I don’t know if her species predated the Titan’s arrival or not, but some species on Azeroth did in fact exist before the Old Gods themselves arrived and Proto-Drakes could have been one of them. As a result, after the coming and the Titans and the shaping of Azeroth, it’s entirely possible that Ysera and the other Proto-Drakes had their own spirituality utterly divorced from the Titans.
2. As others pointed out, Ysera ‘adopted’ Elune’s son Cenarius, who spent much of his time within the Emerald Dream. Exactly how Cenarius is the son of Elune has never really been explained, especially with recent revelations that the goddess also created the Naaru and took part in the ordering of the cosmos at the dawn of creation. We know very little about Elune, much less why she would choose to have a child with one of the Ancients or allow said child to be reared by Ysera. But it’s possible that through her connection to Cenarius Ysera came to know and respect Elune, or even that she was chosen for this role because she’d already come to respect the moon goddess.
3. It might not actually be worship as such. One of the issues when dealing with religion in a fantasy world with beings of enormous, near godlike power like Elune and Ysera, is that it’s entirely possible to respect and admire a being without worshiping it or seeing it as a worshiper. Did Ysera worship Elune? We don’t know. She never really said.

Last names. I’d love to give characters last names. Especially since even Elves seem to have last names in WoW – my poor Night Elf is standing around talking to other Night Elves who all have last names, and I don’t. (Since one of my Warriors, my DK and my Hunter are all Night Elves, I keenly feel this lack.)

Other than that, I don’t really know what I’d add. The Emote system and /me seem to do most of what I need from my RPing, but I tend not to use addons or do anything terribly fancy when I RP. I’m curious what other people will come up with though. I might as well ask, what RP addons do you all feel I should get? What am I missing out on? (At present I don’t have any.)

It’s fair to say that Warcraft, as a setting, wouldn’t even exist if Blizzard could have gotten the license to Warhammer. Indeed, there wouldn’t be a Warcraft at all. According to producer and lead programmer on Warcraft: Orcs & Humans Patrick Wyatt:

Allen Adham hoped to obtain a license to the Warhammer universe to try to increase sales by brand recognition. Warhammer was a huge inspiration for the art-style of Warcraft, but a combination of factors, including a lack of traction on business terms and a fervent desire on the part of virtually everyone else on the development team (myself included) to control our own universe nixed any potential for a deal. We had already had terrible experiences working with DC Comics on “Death and Return of Superman” and “Justice League Task Force”, and wanted no similar issues for our new game.

So yes, by the admission of the person who both produced and lead programming for the first Warcraft game, Warcraft was inspired by Warhammer and had Allen Adham gotten his way, it would have been a Warhammer game. But it’s also clear that pretty much everyone else involved in the creation of Warcraft didn’t want it to be one.

It’s ironic that DC Comics being pains in the butt saved Warcraft from being a licensed property. If it had been, it’s unlikely it would have become the juggernaut it is today.

The age of Azeroth and the period of the coming of the Titans is not precisely dated. Going through Chronicle you see words like ‘Ages and ages passed’ or ‘for eons’ but nothing specific for a great many of these events. How long the Black Empire lasted, how long the Elemental Lords fought among themselves, or how long it took the Titan-Forged to subdue the Old Gods and start the Ordering of Azeroth are unknown.

It’s known that the shaping of Azeroth took place before the ‘deaths’ of the Pantheon. It seems likely that the elevation of the Dragon Aspects likewise took place before that, as the Titans’ power was called upon by their Titan-Forged servants, and if they had already started to notice their creators had gone silent they likely wouldn’t have expected to be able to call upon them.

But we really just don’t know. It’s known that a lot of time passed. Enough time passed between the beginning of the ordering of Azeroth and the elevation of the Dragon Aspects (which were created a great long time in the past) for the Keepers to have grown distant and no longer concerned with the day to day workings of the project, necessitating the Aspects creation. And we don’t even know when the Aspects were chosen, exactly.

So it may in fact be possible that the Draenei/Eredar didn’t exist when the Forge in the Halls of Valor was created. In fact, that forge might well predate the Dragon Aspects, since Odyn created the Halls of Valor out of the original Ulduar complex. We’re talking about huge, ill defined swaths of time here.

Or someone wrote an NPC dialog that doesn’t take into account the character’s race, since every other race (even Night Elves) would in fact be indisputably younger than the forge and no one thought to have that NPC determine if you were a Draenei or not. For that matter, it might be unlikely that a Vrykul who’s been trapped in the Halls of Valor since well before the Sundering would even know what a Draenei is.