On the contrary - what set Wacraft II apart from all the other games in the RTS genere were battleships and cruisers, zeppelins and gyrocopters, submersibles, explosive goblin sappers, dwarven mortar teams, transport ships. In fact, War II was successful largely because of its naval elements and pioneering. So it has a very long history of 'technology' in the fantasy environ and in fact owes it much of its success.

True, the Naaru and their technology are clearly a stretch in a fantasy setting, but they are only one of the many denizens of Blizzard's universe. The blood elves have panicked in their addiction to magic and built an out-of-control industrial nightmare using high technology - which is really just huge magic-based machines. The only thing that sets that apart from traditional magic is that the magic is "manufactured" and harnessed by a machine built and sustained by many rather than wielded or channeled by a single entitity (Warlocks - portals) or inherent in a static environment (Karazhan - lay lines).

Some of those same themes are present in LotR. Tolkein flavored Saruman's contraptions as the infernal war machine - technology interfering in the natural order and backfiring.

In the end it's somebody else's brand and property. I've always thought of the Silithid as a long-lost splinter race of the Zerg and Draeni as another incarnation of the Protoss race. While the two are physically much different, the progenitor race in Starcraft (the guys that travel the universe ordering worlds... sound familiar?) abandoned the Protoss to move on once they began to squander their natural perfection. I almost want to look 5 years ahead when Blizzard may be grappling for new ideas and see the cinematic with some Draeni chopping wood in a forrest when a meteor falls in the forrest, he runs out to meet what he thinks is an Infernal but finds a crash-landed Protoss observatory. The Protoss emerges from the ship, the Draeni makes some ancestral greeting sign and the Protoss returns the oddly familiar gesture.

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