Follow TV Tropes

Following

Trivia / Warcraft

Go To

    open/close all folders 

    Warcraft I and II Trivia 
  • Acting for Two: Bill Roper did all of Orcs and Humans' voice acting.
  • Descended Creator: This trope was pervasive in the series' history - Bill Roper was the voice actor for all performances in Orcs and Humans as well as the game's producer, and was used again as a voice actor for Warcraft's sequels. IIs' voice actors were all Blizzard staff:
    • Tymothi Loving, who was lead tester.
    • Chris Metzen, the game's writer and a designer...and he would continue to be a voice actor for pretty much every Warcraft game thereafter!
    • Ronald Millar, the game's lead designer.
    • Bill Roper, as previously mentioned.
    • Stuart Rose, also an artist.
    • Glenn Stafford, the composer. He was also used as a voice actor in pretty much every Warcraft game thereafter, though to a much less prominent extent than Metzen.
  • Dummied Out:
    • Warcraft: Orcs & Humans has some data for a Dragon unit. There is little reason to add it to the game, however, as it lacks an attack and has only placeholder graphics (it looks like an Ogre).
    • Warcraft II has some assets that were removed, making some levels easier. Some notable instances:
      • "Human 10: The Prisoners" has an Orc opponent who can't build Ogres or unlock Ogre-Magi because an Ogre Mound and Altar of Storms was not given (nor will they try to build the missing structures).
      • "Human 12: The Battle At Crestfall" also lacks Ogre-Magi for the same reasons as Human 10.
      • "Orc 13: The Siege of Dalaran" lacks a preplaced Foundry, so the Humans never research weapon and armor upgrades due to their scripting being cut short. Dalaran was also scripted to be a land, sea and air faction, but their navy is almost nonexistent due to the lack of the aforementioned Foundry.
      • "Orc 14: The Fall of Lordaeron" only has Lordaeron attack the player, but Azeroth and Kul'Tiras have attack scripts that are unused due to lack of required structures.
      • In the expansion, on "Human 12: The Bittersweet Taste of Victory", you were originally going to face off against some of the Orc heroes, but their faction isn't flagged to appear.
  • Manual Misprint: The Warcraft II manual incorrectly claims that units with greater "stamina" (presumably Hit Points) can resist the Polymorph spell. The spell always works, even on hero units.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Warcraft I
      • The original game was originally intended as a Warhammer Fantasy adaption, but Games Workshop cancelled the contract with Blizzard at a point where the game was far enough in production that Blizzard decided to change the name and release it anyways. To hear Blizzard tell it, they approached Games Workshop with a pitch, but Blizzard wanted more creative control than could be allowed in a licensed Warhammer game.
      • The name Warcraft itself is an Artifact Title, and Blizzard originally planed to release a series of unrelated strategy game titles with varied themes, with Orcs & Humans being the first one. One idea for Warcraft II was the orcs opening up a portal to Earth, fighting F-16 fighter jets.
    • Warcraft II
      • The game was going to have a fourth resource called "ore" which peasants and peons could collect by mining rocks. It worked exactly like collecting lumber. Rocks are still in the final game, but they can't be mined for resources and can only be destroyed by kamikaze units.
      • According to some pre-release screenshots, foundries and oil refineries could be built on land rather than on coasts.
      • Ballistas and Catapults were originally supposed to be crewed by another unit — and therefore capturable by the enemy if the crewman was killed — but this got dropped during development. However, the basic idea does turn up a couple of times in the finished game: you get to "rescue" a few Orcish catapults in "Grim Batol" (Alliance Mission 7) and use them against the Horde, and in one cutscene a Footman stealth-kills a Grunt manning a catapult and then uses it to destroy a Goblin Zeppelin (which is also impossible in-game, as catapults cannot target flying units).

    Warcraft III Trivia 
  • Christmas Rushed: Warcraft III: Reforged was postponed for quite some time until its eventual release in January 2020, and it was met with the mother of all backlashes pretty much instantly from the playerbase due to the uneven quality of the new graphics, plenty of bugs, cutscenes that were promised and not featured in the finished product (some were even shown at the Blizzcon 2018, only to be replaced by underwhelming ones made with the game's engine), the obligation to download the (heavy) Reforged launcher to play the original Warcraft III, a change to the EULA that meant Blizzard owned all fan-owned content (universally interpreted as Blizzard not getting over having turned down the creator of Defense of the Ancients, leading to him going to Valve instead), removing custom campaigns from the game menu (leading to fans needing to create an entire mod just to play them in Reforged), the damaging decision to replace the original games' 17 years old (and still better) infrastructure with the bare bones new one and such. This was eventually confirmed in January 2021, along the fact that the failure of Reforged resulted in the dissolution of the team responsible for its development.
  • Creator Killer: As noted above, Team 1 lost the chance to develop the Diablo II remake and was eventually dissolved after the failure of Warcraft III: Reforged, with its members being re-located within Blizzard or leaving the company to go elsewhere.
  • Descended Creator: Like in Warcraft I and II, many of the units in Warcraft III were voiced by Blizzard staff members. The Blademaster hero in III was voiced by Warcraft III's art director, Samwise Didier. The Goblin Tinker hero was voiced by a quality assurance tester, Kaeo Milker.
  • Executive Meddling: The developers of III were forced to change the names of various units in The Frozen Throne to avoid copyright issues, mostly with the mechanical and siege units.
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: The final version of the original Warcraft IIINote  prior to the launch of Reforged can no longer be downloaded exclusively from Battle.net and was replaced with the classic version of Reforged. Made much worse if you're still playing the original game as it prompts you to update the game into Reforged if you're connected to online.
  • Mid-Development Genre Shift: Early in its development, Warcraft III was originally going to be an RPG with RTS elements. As time went on, it changed into a RTS with some RPG elements.
  • Model Dissonance: In Warcraft III the Acolyte and Sludge Monster units have their skins stored on the same file, so changing one will change the other. As the Acolyte sees a lot more use than the sludge monster, this can cause considerable surprise if the skin is switched using the editor.
  • Schedule Slip: Warcraft III: Reforged was announced in 2018 for a December 2019 release. Almost all of 2019 went by without any word or update, before the beta went out in November. By the time of the second week of December, no updates had been given before Blizzard quickly came out and delayed it to January of 2020.
  • Screwed by the Network: A report by Bloomberg in 2021 revealed that Warcraft III: Reforged received very little support by Activision due to the fact that the company was only interested in newer games that had the potential of being "billion dollar products", something that a remaster of an older Real-Time Strategy game had little chance of being, resulting in the development team receiving very little time, budget and manpower to complete the game. Also not helping matters was massive layoffs at Activision Blizzard and alleged mismanagement from Classic Games leader Rob Bridenbecker. Additionally, Activision refused to move the release date to give the team more time due since a delay would have encouraged some people to cancel their pre-orders. This meant that the team not only had to drop the promised new features but had to cut out many features that had been present in the original as well.
  • Spoiled by the Merchandise: The very first Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game book gives away the ending of The Founding of Durotar campaign from The Frozen Throne expansion of Warcraft III, even though Acts II and III of the campaign were not yet released at the time.
  • Troubled Production: In July 2021, it was confirmed that Warcraft III: Reforged suffered from many difficulties during development, much to fans' lack of surprise given its disastrous release. Activision Blizzard's contemporary leadership had little to no interest in games that didn't have the chance of becoming "billion dollar products", and RTS games had declined in popularity with the general public since the genre's heyday in the 2000s, so they gave the team a budget so small that they weren't able to fulfil the promises made at announcement, and couldn't even include every feature present in the original game. The team itself was undersized, managed inconsistently and aggressively by leader Rob Bridenbecker, and pre-orders were opened long before development had finished which put increased pressure on the team to release the game before it could be polished, resulting in an infamous Obvious Beta.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Both the Burning Legion and Goblins were originally intended to be a playable faction. Remnants of this can be found in the map editor.
    • The original version of the Scourge, as envisioned, would use corpses as resources instead of gold. You'd kill creeps instead of mining. Abominations for example could only be formed by merging three Ghouls together, the Meat Wagons couldn't attack at first until an upgrade called Meatapult was researched, and a few other minor elements like this. This was too hard to balance though.
    • Another for the Scourge faction is that they originally had another tech-tree structure called the Gargoyle Spire, which was obviously supposed to be the production building for the Gargoyles rather than them being built from the Crypt. The most likely reason for the cut is because Blizzard probably thought the Scourge having two structures to produce their air units was too much. However, the cut Gargoyle Spire can be found in the CD game files, which of course, custom mapmakers took full advantage of using said structure for their maps.
    • In early stages of development, Jaina was intended to be killed by Kel'Thuzad in Arthas's campaign, providing Arthas with additional motivation to pursue Mal'Ganis, and would later be resurrected as banshee. However, this was scrapped because it was too similar to Sarah Kerrigan's storyline from StarCraft and, after everything Mal'Ganis did, Arthas didn't need any additional motivation. In addition, they felt that killing Jaina off right after her introduction both wasted a potentially interesting character, and also wouldn't have any impact because the player just met her. Meanwhile, the role of the first Banshee was given to Sylvanas. Also, Arthas and Jaina were going to be written more romantically, but this was toned down, and instead material after the games release would flesh out their relationship.
    • The Culling of Strahholme originally made the civilians come out as hostile units, making it easier to kill them. The team decided to make them neutral instead, as it would make the impact of Arthas' actions resonate more with the player since they were the ones killing the people and not because of solely gameplay reasons. Also, they originally had lines of dialogue expressing horror at Arthas' killing, but the team removed them after testing it due to finding it to be too gruesome and dark for how already serious the level was.
    • Originally, it seems the way to purify Grom of the demonic corruption would involved using a Troll Shaman as the person to cast the ritual. This was changed to Jaina however, likely as a way to develop a better bond with her from Thrall's perspective.
    • There was supposed to be one more Night Elf level that had the player stopping Archimonde for real, but it was scrapped due to the developers feeling it was too long and that the level before was already sufficient enough to use as the final level. It was described as being essentially a Tower Defense style level where you'd build towers to slow down Archimonde.
    • The "Dungeons of Dalaran" level from Frozen Throne was going to have a unique mechanic where there would be invisible enemies that could only be revealed with an adjusted version of the Dust of Appearance to reveal ghosts, and the player would have needed to use this to find the ghosts of the fallen Dalaran Magi. However this was removed, likely for being hard to work.
    • Dialogue found in game suggests that the third level for the Undead in The Frozen Throne, The Dark Lady, was originally going to allow the player to use Banshees to possess more creep factions such as trolls and murlocs. Ultimately this idea was not used and instead if you possess the leaders of said groups, the enemy will simply attack them instead of being taken over as a whole.
    • The Naga were supposed to be a new fifth faction in The Frozen Throne, but ultimately they were instead made a semi-faction in the story mode, and neutral heroes were made available.
    • The Frozen Throne was planned to have naval combat as one of its major new features, hence the addition of shipyards and warships for all factions (and the Naga, whose units could all swim). However, like the Naga, all relevant units and structures ended up unused outside the story mode.
    • The cameo for "Disease Cloud" is a pop-eyed ghoul belching out deep green fog, implying they were going to be affected by it at one point as well.
    • Early screenshots, website information, and even voiced lines in game all indicate that the Horde's Troll units were originally supposed to be the same Amani Forest Trolls from II, as evidenced by them saying "Vengeance for Zul'jin". For an unknown reason, they were changed to be a new tribe in the final product, the Darkspear Trolls.
    • The "Founding of Durotar" campaign was almost not made. The team felt they didn't have the time to make it, and scrapped the idea to focus on the other campaigns. Tim Cambell pushed for the level's creation, and essentially made it himself, choosing to go for a different campaign style in order to make it unique, and it still didn't come out (in a patch) for almost six months after the game itself was released.
    • Some units had different names during development, such as the Death Knight originally being named the Anti-Paladin, before it received its name from the original Death Knight unit, whose model was instead repurposed for the Revenant. The original Death Knights were planned to be the same ones from Beyond the Dark Portal who followed Ner'zhul and were forced to serve the Lich King.
    • There were a lot more hero units planned for each race that were eventually scrapped or downgraded to a base unit:
      • Humans originally had the mounted Crusader hero and the Half-Elven Ranger. The Crusader's model was repurposed for the Knight with his weapons shrunk, replacing the original flail-wielding model which wore a helmet, while the Ranger was turned into a campaign hero represented by Sylvanas.
      • Orcs had the horse-riding Warlord and the Spirit-Walker. The Warlord's model was armored up and repurposed for the Slave Master you fight as Arthas in the Human Campaign, while the Spirit-Walker's model was repurposed for the Orc Shaman unit, replacing the original model which was instead reused for Orc Warlock creeps. The Spirit-Walker's unit name was later reused in The Frozen Throne for a Tauren unit.
      • The Night Elves were planned to have the Arch-Druid and the Assassin as heroes. The Arch-Druid's model was reused for the Druid of the Talon unit with his antlers removed (still present in the battle.net unit portrait), replacing the original shirtless model which wore a raven-feather cloak, while the Assassin's model was reused in the Night Elf campaign for the Warden units faced by Tyrande in the Barrow Deeps.
      • Lastly, the Undead initially had Abomination, Crypt Fiend and Necromancer all planned as hero units, before they were downgraded to regular units. The original Crypt Fiend hero also resembled more of a drider from Dungeons & Dragons, with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a spider.
    • The Dreadlord (originally Dread Lord) was less demonic and more vampiric initially, being a lot less bulky and wearing a robe instead of armor, and lacking the horns and hooves of their later incarnation. They still had the massive claws and bat wings however.
    • Some of the heroes were originally going to ride flying mounts before they were all turned into ground units: The Priestess of the Moon originally rode a giant owl which was changed to a nightsaber; the Farseer rode a wyvern which was changed to a wolf; and lastly the Death Knight back when it was originally named Anti-Paladin rode an ethereal horse made out of purple clouds which was turned into a physical skeletal steed.
    • Back when the game was being developed (under the name of Heroes of Warcraft), it would have been a Role-Playing Strategy game in the vein of Dungeon Siege (but with the ability to have units) — the story was basically a version of the cancelled Lord of the Clans that would center on Thrall and the reformed Horde, the buildings were more realistic in its scale, micromanagement would be an important gameplay element (to the point it's not meant for E-Sports), and the Alliance of Lordaeron falling on a civil war would have been a greater focus for the story (while the Horde would finally go back to their, original, shamanistic roots devoid of demonic influence).
    • Warcraft III: Reforged:
      • Reforged was going to overhaul the story and dialogue to make it match the current Blizzard lore for the series. They even hired Christie Golden to handle the game's script and were going to replace the voices for lore characters with their current voice actors. Blizzard initially claimed that it was decided to keep the game as it was due to fan backlash and a desire to keep to the original spirit of the game, but it was later revealed that the game's budget was so small that the team weren't able to implement the overhauls that they wanted. Instead, they made adjustments to certain elements like the layout of cities, and included minor characters who were supposed to canonically be there in the levels.
      • Another Reforged plan was to bring back some of the original developers to have them help on the project. David Fried and Tim Cambell were contacted and agreed to help with it, even being paid to do so. Before they could be fully implemented onto the project, however, the choice was made to cut the budget, and so none of the contacted developers were given a chance to join. David Fried stated in his experience that he was just flat out ghosted, with no word after a certain point.

    Real-Time Strategy Games - Miscellaneous Trivia 

  • With the release of Reign of Chaos in July 2002, Blizzard would go on to release Warcraft-related games exclusively for the next 8 years. Their first non-Warcraft related game after this period was Starcraft II Wings Of Liberty, released July 2010.
  • The America-based Russian studio behind the animated cutscenes of The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games and I. M. Meen, Animation Magic, were some time later contracted to do the animation for the Warcraft spin-off Warcraft Adventures. Said game was later cancelled due to the popularity decline of adventure games at the time but still, they hired the staff responsible for some extremely infamous scenes, even if what few screenshots from the game that have been seen look a lot better than the studio's previous claims to fame.
  • The voice of the Tinker hero of Warcraft 3 was done by a Blizzard employee, Kaeo Milker.
  • The series' name was coined by Samwise Didier, Blizzard's art director, named after a Dungeons & Dragons character of his. As could probably be expected by its closest sounding word, the idea for it was being an opposite to witchcraft.
  • The character Samuro also was inspired by a Dungeons & Dragons character of Samwise Didier named "Grumok the Wanderer".

    Other WarCraft Entries 

Alternative Title(s): Warcraft Expanded Universe

Top