I worry that I'm getting too excited for Warlords of Draenor. Letting my head run away from my heart, so to speak. I've done it before - pretty much before every expansion, I got super excited and imagined up a whole host of ideas for what the expansion was going to be like and all the cool things we were going to get to do and sometimes they came true and sometimes they didn't. Wrath of the Lich King ended up disappointing me greatly, because the Northrend I'd imagined wasn't even close to the Northrend we got (and to people who loved Wrath I probably sound like a crazy person) while Cataclysm ended up going so far beyond the revamp I expected that to this day I'm still very fond of it as a 1 to 60 experience. It started the transformation of the Horde/Alliance balance to one of much closer parity.

Mists has been an interesting experience in that regard, in that I simply didn't expect the Pandaria we got at all, but I'm fairly happy with that - the hozen, jinyu, mogu, grummies and saurok are all far more interesting to me and did a lot to make Pandaria far from a monolithic experience. And so, I sit here imagining all sorts of things for Warlords and wondering how much of any of it I'll get to see.
I know this much - if the draenei storyline doesn't continue right up to the end of the expansion and its last boss, whoever that is, I'll be disappointed. And I don't just mean going to draenei settlements and doing quests - I mean that I want to get to witness the draenei doing it right this time. I want to explore this lost world, help defeat the Iron Horde and save the draenei, and I want them to be instrumental in their own salvation. They're one of my favorite races, and I keep imagining all sorts of story hooks - a raid on Shattrath, draenei settlements in need of rescue in Farahlon, and every day I get more and more curious about the final fate of Telmor, I want to see the city in game. I want to save it.

It's equal parts fanboyism and years of curiosity, I suppose - I've never actually seen Draenor, outside of a few play through runs of Warcraft II and that was a lot of years ago. And this Draenor is one that wasn't seared and rendered nearly lifeless by warlock magic, so it barely resembles even that - it's finally getting to see a world that could produce orcish culture. But the draenei only lived there a few hundred years, so I admit, I'm getting all sorts of curious about how they lived.

In general Draenor triggers my planetary romance vibe - equal parts Clark Ashton Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs with a world of aggressive life and an ancient, scholarly civilization pushed to the brink by a younger, ruder, more vital culture native to the world.

I'm also very interested in the other cultures of the setting - the arakkoa, for instance, who will completely dominate a whole zone and who I'm incredibly curious about. We're not going to see the bedraggled remnants, flightless and cursed, we're going to see them at their height... and apparently they did things like swoop down and grab people to be sacrificed alive. So there's that. I want even more than that to know what's up with what appears to be a continent to the south of Draenor - if it is where the Ogres originally come from, is it the home of the gronn as well?

Tags: arakkoa, draenei, ogre, ogres, orc-pirates, south, southern-continent, warlords, warlords-of-draenor

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, Warlords of Draenor