The Queue: Let's get mad about orcs
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
Oh boy, this first question is going to get me in trouble.
RustinMeek asked:
for those in the beta, is WoD giving appropriate attention to the more peaceful and shamanistic side of orcs? It's not all war and mayhem, and the players that don't read the novels should know that
I don't know, World of Warcraft has given me a pretty solid "war and mayhem" view of the orcs. Sure, they claim this or that -- but generally speaking, they've been brutal, brutal people toward everyone they've met. We've seen that many of their traditions, even before the Burning Legion showed up, involved beating the crap out of both each other and outsiders. And ... that holds true in Warlords of Draenor. The Frostwolf are the exception; they're still warriors, many of whom relish battle, but they have a code of sorts. Every other clan is out to smash your head in. There are individuals from other clans that want to do something beyond smash face, but they're small potatoes in a raging sea of war. Other than the Frostwolf, the Shadowmoon clan was theoretically peaceful at some point ... but in both the original timeline and the Warlords timeline, most of them broke bad with glee.
I think the belief that the orcs were once peaceful is seriously off. They may have been slightly more peaceful before Kil'jaeden, but at no point were these guys peaceful shamanistic hippies. Their entire culture is based on strength and violence. If you dig into the expanded universe (novels and so forth) you can find numerous examples of the orcs doing Very Bad Things before the Legion ever got involved. The orcs exiling children because they were sick, orcs murdering their own children to defend their position at the head of a clan, skirmishing against and killing members of other clans on a regular basis. Recall that in our timeline, Oshu'gun in Nagrand became a sacred neutral ground. Would a peaceful society need to establish neutral ground where they agreed to not fight? A peaceful society would assume most places are a place to avoid fighting.
I'd go as far as to say the narrative of a peaceful orc society is an outright lie. It was the narrative told to Thrall when Thrall knew nothing about his own people. It may have been somewhat true regarding his own clan -- the Frostwolf -- but certainly not all clans and not orcish society as a whole. Since then, we've seen Thrall struggle time and time again to bring about any sort of peace and he tries to use what he thinks he knows about orcs as a foundation for that peace. It fails every time. Because what he thinks he knows has never been true. He sets up some of the worst murderers and warmongers of the Horde as noble heroes to be revered and emulated, not knowing the full truth about those people. Thrall then uses his partial knowledge to try to build up Garrosh Hellscream's confidence back in Burning Crusade -- it backfires spectacularly, leading directly to our current conflict. Garrosh knows strength is all that ever mattered to the orcs because he lived it. Garrosh was ostracized as a youth because he wasn't strong enough. Garrosh then tries to prove his strength and return the orcs to their glory days.
Thrall is the dream. Garrosh is the reality. The dream might become reality, but reality is and has always been reality.
Phere asked:
How does the stat squish feel? Does it make more sense than the wildly inflated digits we were bombarded with?
Once you get used to seeing double-digit stats on item drops instead of 4-digit stats, it doesn't feel any different. Everything plays the same way.
@Felida3002 asked:
what do you think is the special WoD event from Blizz during gamescom?
They've previously released expansion cinematics at Gamescom. I can't think of anything else Warlords-related that would be worth hyping at this point. We're deep in beta and it's way too early to talk content patches. I think if they hype it too hard and it's anything less than the expansion cinematic, they're going to see some backlash.
@elepheagle asked:
If you were given the chance at a role in the upcoming Warcraft film, who/what would you want to play?
Honestly? My body type would be horrible for anything other than an orc or ogre. Maybe Hodor can jump across franchises. I could probably do a decent Hodor. Or an extra in the background of a shot. I could totally be an extra.
Ottahz asked:
have we seen the remodels for all the races now?
Nope! We're still missing a bunch. Blood elves, trolls, male night elves, and so on. We've seen more than we haven't seen, but there are still some missing.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!
