Warcraft is a fantasy(ish) game franchise created by Blizzard. It was initially a series of RTS games, then an MMO called World of Warcraft, which you’ve probably heard of once or twice. Besides the games, there are several books and comics expanding and tearing apart the story.
I think of myself as a pretty big Warcraft fan, seeing as I’ve been playing The Frozen Throne semi-regularly since I was 9 or 10…in single-player only. That said, I am not at all happy about how the story has gone since The Frozen Throne^A) and I don’t think anything short of a hard reset can fix the issues that plague Warcraft. Ironically, although I really really like a lot of what Warcraft has, I can’t help but criticize it.
Anyhow, let’s just get into it.

My regular approach to canon is kinda broken here so I initially wanted to present canon information together with retcons…but, after checking what I actually wrote…
I’ll do that where it’s relevant, so that you get a good overview of the information relating to Warcraft.
Note that the reason my approach to canon is broken is due to Blizzard’s incompetence. If they didn’t consistently screw with the lore, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Now, I should note that I’m not exactly going to be super serious with this stuff. My super-serious approach (visible on Toaru Project) just…yeah, I don’t like it and I don’t think it’s good either.

The story here is good…I think. Though there is an obvious problem in that it doesn’t really explain how we went from Warcraft 2 to here…not that I’ve played Warcraft 2, but there is basically zero explanation of the state of affairs.
It’s also obvious that this is when they started doing whatever.

The story here is pretty good as well. I mean, it’s the second half of Arthas’ story, which is nice.
My notes note that the most notable thing that I noticed was the rebalance. Though all I really noticed was that units were made cheaper.
The last thing I’ll note is that I think this was the first time players encountered the Old Gods. Right now though? Not infuriating. If only those players knew.
Though I’m not saying much here, The Frozen Throne is definitely one of my favorite games of all time.

I’ll be honest…I think fans are too harsh with this film. Blizzard was less respectful towards Warcraft and they own it.
I occasionally re-watch the film because I legitimately like it. The aesthetic was nailed (though I would have preferred the WC3-era aesthetics). The plot just works and, while trying to make the worldbuilding cohesive is an un-enviable job…they did a pretty good job with making it all fit. Ironically, I’ve found fans don’t like that it wasn’t a good adaptation…but it did do a good job adapting lore that constantly changes.
That said, there are issues here:

• The pacing is off, and the film would have benefitted from being longer. Or being re-written.
• The acting is just bad. Khadgar is an exception, Lothar is weird, the orcs are good in general, but everyone else is just bad.
• They fail to explain a lot of the stuff in the film. The film expects you to just know who the Kirin Tor are, what Dalaran is, what Stormwind is, etc.

I’d say the Warcraft film is a mix of good and bad.

All of the shorts have the same issue: they are setup for laughable payoff. That should be kept in mind when watching all of them. They can be good, on their own…but, yeah, they amount to nothing.

So here’s the major exception. These shorts are actually quite nice…just that they don’t really fit in with Warcraft.
That said…the artwork is nice and the story is…nice, too. Yeah. Yep.

These are all pretty okay. There are no particular issues…yeah, pretty badass.
However…all the stories start with interactions between Maraad and Varian and those are…not. If those were cut out, everything would be better.

Among the three…uh…Khadgar’s was intriguing, but there isn’t much there. I wouldn’t say it’s great, but it’s not bad. Illidan’s is pretty cliché and edgy. The bigger issue I had with Illidan’s is that I was trying to reconcile the Illidari demon hunters with a dead Illidan…assuming Illidan remains dead.
The Gul’dan one is in a league of its own as it gives Gul’dan a backstory that fits neatly into what was already known about him…I mean, as far as I know, nothing was over-written. Watch this one.

Jaina’s one was incredible, especially with the song. Azshara’s was pretty great too…showing the grand majesty of the former elven capital, while also showing her empathy for her people.
The Sylvanas one was alright, though I find it distasteful.

This was honestly the worst of all the animated shorts. It’s a serious downgrade from the previous ones. I’d argue that even the Illidan and Khadghar Harbingers ones (which, of the previous animated shorts, are definitely the worst) are better than this series.

I don’t think MMOs are well-suited for telling a story, as they require a great time commitment from the players…which also means that there are huge gaps between cinematics and the massive gaps between expansions doesn’t help.
All that flavor text in-game is pretty nice…but the majority of players never read it because they don’t need to…‘cause why would you? You’d just be wasting time that could be used for the quest instead.
Honestly, WoW should have been story-light from the start and explicitly non-canon. They should have released games concurrently with WoW that communicates the story. Though, I’m guessing that would have still ended poorly. In the sense that the story would still have been screwed up.
Also, the vast gaps between story beats leads players to experience memory loss. Oh, and I almost forgot, but some characters, like Wrathion, have their stories locked behind class-specific quests that are very late-game, so the majority of players have no clue who he is…then they put the next major beat of his story into a book. And then he’s a main character in the next expansion. It’s baffling that they think the story can be told like this.

What are the central issues with the Warcraft series? I believe I’ve identified a few.

I’m really concerned with aesthetics, which is why I’ve noticed that Warcraft’s aesthetics have changed for the worse.
I think that this started with Cataclysm, but I’m not entirely sure.
Originally, Warcraft was quasi-realistic…just slightly stylized. You can see this best in Warcraft 3’s unit designs and cinematics. The designs themselves were not over-the-top or excessively detailed.
There was a shift from ‘minimalism’ to ‘maximalism’ where they simply threw realism out the window…replacing it with excessive detail. This is most obvious with the design of Alexstrasza.
Her earlier design is radically different from her newer one…and I’m not just talking about the fact they covered her belly. The newer design has so much stuff and is so detailed that it just looks ridiculous. Now consider that this same thing has happened with everything in Warcraft and the issue becomes apparent.
This is a problem because the world no longer feels as ‘real’ as it did initially and, the more they stay with this maximalist aesthetic, the harder it will be to immerse into it.

Warcraft over-relies on retcons. Though, I guess it’s more accurate to say there’s a disregard for canon.
These retcons vary from small to large and from ‘meh’ to infuriating. Two that still infuriate me are Illidan and the Draenai…but there are plenty of others.
Sometimes you even have retcons that retcon existing retcons. I believe that Jaina’s character was flip-flopping due to conflicting retcons between the writers for WoW and the writers of the books, where the book writers (apparently) tried to fix the problems caused by the WoW writers.
Listen, it doesn’t matter that the story idea you have is cool or ‘better’, because you’re over-writing the previous story, which kills immersion. And since the canon keeps changing, it’s difficult to latch onto anything. How am I supposed to take the story seriously? Why should I even bother looking into anything, or playing anything if I know it’s just going to be over-written?
Personally, the retcons are what make it insanely difficult for me to keep up with the storyline and, if Warcraft wasn’t such a ‘big deal’ for me, I probably would have dipped ages ago.
There’s also a certain irony when Chris Metzen emphasizes the importance of continuity when he is responsible for some of the more infuriating retcons.

Even excluding the retcons, Warcraft’s writing has issues. I think this is because they have a mix of incompetent and competent writers. But because there are a lot of incompetent writers…we’re stuck with a lot of weird issues.
For example: Wrathion.
Why did Wrathion initially distrust the Red Dragonflight? That one has no clear answer, but we can assume he was just being paranoid. However…that’s not the only question his early story raises.
Why did the Red Dragonflight seem uninterested in reclaiming him? Keep in mind that they technically adopted him and, later, he killed one of them. He claims to have been defending himself, but we never hear the Red Dragonflight’s perspective. This question has zero answers and it’s just perplexing.^B)
Here’s a hyper-specific question: why isn’t Corastrasza interested in getting him back? She is basically his adoptive mom (or big sister), since she was put in charge of taking care of his egg. She’s the one who tasks the player to find him and her brother is the one who gets killed by him. But, to my knowledge, she doesn’t care about finding Wrathion again. She also has no reaction to her brother dying, by the way. Though this is mostly because she never appears again.
Now consider that Warcraft has a bunch of stories that are just like this. Then consider that they build good stuff on top of awful retcons.

This is more an issue with the Warcraft (and technically StarCraft) fanbase rather than Warcraft itself, but the writers manage to get away with a lot of stuff due to this.
When I say memory loss, I specifically mean the fact fans seem to forget lore. I think it’s understandable why it happens, which also makes it frustrating. First, the lore is difficult to get through, so most people probably rely on the Wiki. The wiki prioritizes the latest lore, which means that they will write based on the latest retcons instead of presenting all of that information accurately. I dare you to find an article that explains the retcons during the article itself. The wookiepedia does something similar, which leads to a similar kind of memory loss, but they at least split between legends/canon.
On top of this you have channels like PlatinumWoW which are good, yes, but the people working on it also suffer from memory loss. So the entire fanbase is eternally forgetting plot and lore details. How many people actually remember that the Night Elves had a society segregated along gender lines? The answer is probably ‘not many’. And that’s one of the more visible retcons, imagine trying to explain to people that Elune used to be the only God of Azeroth, or that the Naga probably weren’t created by N’Zoth.

• Official Website
• Warcraft Wiki
  • Actually quite good, but doesn’t actually present the retcons choosing instead to prioritize the latest lore.
  • The term I use for it (WoWW or WoW Wiki) is technically not correct, as it’s simply the ‘Warcraft Wiki’, but I don’t think it matters too much.
• Warcraft
• World of Warcraft
• World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game
• If you’re wondering about the quote in the banner: watch this.
• Despite the use of a Nelf in the banner images and the use of their language…I almost didn’t publish the article on them. I realized that this would have been weird, so I polished it last-minute.