Warcraft Retrospective 37: And Now for Something Completely Different

We have just one campaign left. Like I said, the Horde campaign in The Frozen Throne is disconnected from the three-campaign main plot. That’s why it’s called the “bonus campaign” in the main menu. It’s also very different from every other campaign we’ve played so far, being heavily custom-scripted in a way that’s a testament to the insane capabilities of Warcraft 3’s World Editor.¹

The Founding of Durotar

“You kids these days. The mask isn’t supposed to be a bat, it’s a wolf! And a dark one at that!”

One sign that this campaign is special is the animation that plays when you select this campaign in the main menu: it shows a scroll that unwraps into a drawing of this character and his pet bear, which in turn becomes a 3D scene.

The orcs actually almost didn’t feature in The Frozen Throne. The writers couldn’t think of an organic way to include them in the main plot and didn’t want to shoehorn them in. However, during the development of Reign of Chaos, the level designers came up with a number of ideas that didn’t fit into the traditional RTS mold, and wanted to do a campaign with more RPG elements. For The Frozen Throne, level designer Tim Campbell pushed the idea for a standalone orc campaign and designed the majority of it.

Now, I’m wary of using the term “RPG” because it’s so ambiguous these days. So what do I mean when I say that The Founding of Durotar is an RPG campaign rather than an RTS one?

For my purposes, in the context of video games specifically, an RPG is a video game where:

• the player controls a small, limited number of characters with distinct identities;
• who have numerical stats that can be improved;
• where the basic gameplay loop involves defeating enemies and completing quests…
• to improve the player characters’ stats…
• so they can defeat tougher enemies and complete more challenging quests.

It’s a fairly broad definition, which encompasses “traditional” RPGs like the Baldur’s Gate series, but also Diablo (which has a linear plot with no roleplaying per se, and no story decisions to make) and Mass Effect 2 (where the character advancement system is really basic), and it is under this definition that I call this campaign a mini-RPG.

To Tame a Land

Unlike all other campaigns in the game, this one doesn’t depict maps on loading screen for its primary missions.

We’re back in Kalimdor, in the Barrens, where all seems quiet. We zoom on our protagonist, Rexxar, who is talking to his pet bear.

Out of loneliness, I presume.

The bear is called Misha, which I find rather funny. To a Russian speaker, “Misha” or “Mishka” is a diminutive form of the name Mikhail and can also serve as a diminutive, term-of-endearment word for bear. The Russian dubbers thought it sounded unintentionally funny and left the bear nameless.

Suddenly, he sees an orc fighting quillboars!

The animated portraits can be goofy sometimes, but I think it adds to the game’s charm.

He rushes to the orc’s help and chases the quillboars off, but not before the orc, Mogrin, is mortally wounded. Having failed his mission to deliver a letter to Thrall, Mogrin believes he has lost his honor, and with his dying breath, he asks Rexxar to deliver it in his stead.

So begins our mission — and from the very start we can see that it’s going to be very different from everything we played before.

I sure hope this hint will stay on screen long enough to read.

The map is huge, and we start in a small corner of it. We’re controlling just Rexxar and Misha, who is infinitely resummonable and doesn’t expire like a typical summoned creature. Because of this, Misha is an excellent tank; if she² dies, we can always just resummon her.

Not that losing Rexxar is the end of the world either. This is a campaign where the player literally cannot lose: if a hero dies, they just revive at a Resurrection Stone. We can thus endlessly retry quests and encounters. All this results in a fun and relaxed experience with no time pressure whatsoever.

We move across the map, fighting through quillboars, until we reach Orgrimmar — the new capital city of the Horde.

A city with no civilians. But it is, after all, still under construction.

Rexxar heads to Thrall, who is overseeing the construction in progress.

While still sitting on his wolf.

Rexxar introduces himself as the last son of the Mok’Nathal. Thrall heard of them a people who have both orc and ogre blood in their veins (thus explaining Rexxar’s unusual look). He offers Rexxar his city’s hospitality, prompting him to offer to earn his keep by helping with local problems.

Thrall, in turn, introduces Rexxar to Rokhan of the Darkspear tribe, one of his finest scouts.

Is he… scowling?

Unfortunately, Rokhan gets neither characterization nor plot relevance. Rexxar is introduced as a loner who has wandered the wilds for years and has now grown tired of solitude, so he welcomes being among civilization for a change. Rokhan is… a troll, and that’s basically it. He almost never speaks in cutscenes, letting Rexxar do all the talking, and even when the trolls come into relevance later in this mission, he still ends up being irrelevant.

In some cases it’s fine if an RPG’s player character is the least interesting person in the story; it might be an intentional choice on the game designers’ part if the player character is customizable and they want the player to be able to project any personality they want onto their protagonist. Here, however, both Rexxar and Rokhan are specific characters with specific identities, so it’s odd that the cutscene conversations only involve one of them.

The Settler Horde

Orgrimmar is a city under construction, where peons are working tirelessly, in the middle of an untamed wild. We’re in a frontier setting: now that the orcs have discovered new lands to call home, they’re going to actually live there.

I love frontier settings. The border between wilderness and civilization is prime breeding ground for all kinds of adventure stories and practically the perfect setting for an RPG, whether tabletop or a video game: the authorities exist, but their power is weak and they need the help of able-bodied independent agents for hire, like typical RPG protagonists, to keep civilization functioning and clear all those wandering monsters in the wilderness — which, coincidentally, can contain any exciting dungeons and ancient ruins the game designers want.

In hindsight, I would say that The Founding of Durotar was the turning point when Warcraft finished its transformation from a primarily warfare setting into a primarily adventure setting.

As the authorities in question, the Horde, too, undergoes a metamorphosis. We’ve had the Monster Horde of Warcraft 1, the War Machine Horde of Warcraft 2, and the Rebel Horde of Lord of the Clans and early Warcraft 3; with this campaign, we’re moving into a fourth identity, the Settler Horde.³

The Settler Horde doesn’t dream of conquering the other civilized peoples and has no quarrel with them. Its goal is, instead, to tame the wild, to shape this rugged land of theirs and build a home for all. This is reflected in the first three quests we pick up by running around Orgrimmar:

• Nazgrel, the captain of the warchief’s security forces, wants Rexxar to take care of harpies who have been ransacking their supply caravans for weeks.
• The shaman Drek’thar, whom we know from Lord of the Clans, wants shimmerweed, a herb that grows in Thunder Ridge, to brew a potion that will aid the warriors in battle.
• Engineer Gazlowe has a problem with kobolds in tunnels. Let him explain this himself:

Gazlowe’s model shows two goblins, but we’re interacting with only one. I assume this is because they reused the sapper model without making a unique one. This was fixed in Reforged.

Yikes. “Rat-freaks”.

Recall, if you will, that Warcraft’s innovation compared to D&D-style fantasy was to treat orcs (and now, by extension, goblins) as people in their own right rather than irredeemable monsters who can be killed without mercy. And now we have a goblin working for orcs apply the same treatment to another classic “monster race”.

…What is it, Elephant in the Room?

I’m afraid this story does have colonialist undertones. The orcs have arrived here from beyond the sea and are wrestling this land from its native peoples, namely the centaurs, harpies, quillboars and kobolds, by lethal force. You could argue that they left the orcs no choice by refusing to negotiate and by universally attacking everyone on sight, but the truth is, we don’t really have the evidence to judge either way.

Gameplay mechanics are an abstraction. Yes, when you approach the kobolds and centaurs, they attack you on sight, but is it because the orcs aren’t even trying to negotiate, or because the natives are not interested in negotiations at all?

We don’t know. But either way, the orcs are taking someone else’s land, and the morality of it is never questioned in-story.

The Early Quests

The three quests can be completed in any order.

As we head for the kobold quest, we cross areas filled with low-level centaurs. The mobs on the main map actually endlessly respawn, providing the player with an unlimited source of gold⁴ and XP, but they only respawn when the area is hidden by the fog of war, so players using the map reveal cheat are screwed.

The entrance to the Orgrimmar tunnels is marked by mine carts, campfires, and… a shimmering line.

Clearly, it’s an Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid.

This is another new mechanic seen only in this campaign. Unlike all other campaigns, where each mission takes place on one map, here, the first mega-mission consists of several connected maps, which all remember their state between loads. Crossing a zone boundary loads the map it leads to:

Central Kalimdor has changed somewhat since we last saw it in Reign of Chaos.

It is not yet the seamless world of World of Warcraft, but it is nonetheless a persistent world. The heroes travel between zones with all their gear and experience intact, though, annoyingly, Misha doesn’t travel with them and has to be resummoned every time upon crossing zone boundaries.

In the tunnels, we meet some of Gazlowe’s goblins:

Are they doing paperwork in a tunnel?

They have a plan. If we fight our way through kobolds and send goblin sappers to blow up the tunnel’s support beams, it will collapse on top of the kobolds. We’re provided with an endlessly respawning supply of sappers, so like everything else in this campaign, we can retry this indefinitely.

This fits with goblin culture as it’s been shown so far: that they’re neutral traders selling to the highest bidder, and that they’re obsessed with explosions.

The harpy quest is just a gauntlet of progressively stronger harpies ending with their leader, Bloodfeather.

Even harpies accuse orcs of taking their lands.

Finally, for Drek’thar’s quest, we enter Thunder Ridge, kill whatever thunder lizards we meet on the way, and collect six shimmerweed herbs.

We kill, and we collect. This, of course, foreshadows World of Warcraft.

When we return, Drek’Thar notes that something must have riled up the thunder lizards and that he’ll head to investigate this.

Suddenly, Humans

When we return to Thrall, Nazgrel tasks us with investigating the humans encroaching on orc lands, whom he doesn’t trust. We should head to an outlying watch post and meet with his lieutenant, Gar’thok.

And we’ll do that. But first, we’ll go meet this guy:

In the Russian dub, for some unfathomable reason, they called him Raivo. Raivo of Pandaria.

This is Chen Stormstout, a pandaren brewmaster who left Pandaria in search for exotic ingredients for his brews. That’s right: no matter what later lore says, here in TFT, Chen is clearly stated to come from Pandaria. But what is Pandaria? Where is it?

We don’t know yet. We certainly won’t find any answer in the game or its manual. The only things we know are in the description of the pandaren brewmaster hero:

Hailing from the secretive Pandaren Empire, the mighty brewmasters travel the world in search of exotic ales and the finest brewed spirits. These affable warriors rarely seek out danger or trouble, preferring instead to spend their time concocting new and tasty beverages for any brave enough to imbibe them. However, if attacked, the laughing brewmasters bring all of their pandaren agility and ferocity to bear! They even bring their beer to war! They are peerless warriors and world class drinkers all in one!

A warrior Hero, the brewmasters of Pandaria have emerged from the bamboo forests of their ancestors to bring their unique fighting style (and robust ales) to the highest bidder.

Which doesn’t really tell us much beyond Chen’s introduction here. In fact, when the pandaren brewmaster class was announced as the first neutral hero class for multiplayer, ahead of any particular character’s introduction, people wondered if it was a belated April Fools joke — a confusion that persisted until a new beta build rolled out with the class fully functional.

Anyway, Chen tasks us with finding three exotic ingredients. One is just sold in a marketplace, one is protected by murlocs⁵, and one by phoenixes. Once we return to Chen, he makes his brew — which apparently tastes so horrible that Rexxar asks if Chen is trying to kill him — and, now that the brew is complete, he desires to see more of this strange rugged land, and joins our party!

It’s notable that he is entirely optional. There are no quests that lead to him, he just waits in his corner of the map until we stumble into him. Because of this, he’s permanently missable.

Also along the way, we meet a dying shaman who gives us a side quest to eradicate a warlock coven:

Seeing how he wears wolf skin, “Wolfsong” is a bit on the nose.

At the watch post, Gar’thok hasn’t heard of any humans, but the local quillboars have been getting bolder. There’s an observatory nearby to scout for potential threats, but the quillboars are roaming the area, so naturally, Gar’thok tells us to exterminate them all.

This, too, is foreshadowing of some lore that won’t yet be revealed in this game.

Seriously. Down to the last one. There’s a counter and all. That’s called genocide, what the heck? Thankfully, it’s a side quest and is not required to complete the mission. For good measure, while we’re in this area, we kill some satyrs and destroy their corrupted night elf structures. I wonder if it means night elves once used to live here too.

We reach the observatory, and Rexxar “activates” the telescope (which he knows how to do… somehow). Through it, he sees humans landing on the shore!

That Lordaeron banner kind of makes no sense given later revelations. I assume it’s just a reused asset.

When we return to Thrall and report this to him, he’s surprised. He can’t imagine Jaina would pull something like this. For now, he commands Rexxar and Nazgrel to go to the watch post and keep an eye on these humans. Thrall would prefer them unharmed, but if they prove hostile, he gives his permission to slaughter them.

And we’ll go to the watch post — eventually. First, though, we’ll look for Drek’Thar, who Thrall mentions went to investigate the lizards near Thunder Ridge. And indeed, when we cross over to Thunder Ridge again, we find him there:

He would make a living running a TV show about the habits of animals.

So we scout Thunder Ridge, collecting thunder lizard eggs for Drek’thar to study, and in a corner of the map, we discover the cause of their unexpected migration:

It must have researched that +5 lumber upgrade.

Since Thrall has signed a non-aggression pact with the humans, we aren’t allowed to destroy the lumber mill, as that would lead the orcs to open war. To avoid this outcome, we must put the rampaging lizards down — again, down to the last one. Hooray for ruining the environment for political reasons!

Some patch throughout the years must have broken something, so the quest header now says (null). At least they didn’t rename Rexxar to (undefined).

For collecting the eggs, Drek’Thar gives us his spellbook, which not only gives the carrying hero bonuses, but also allows unlimited teleportation back to Orgrimmar, like a reusable Scroll of Town Portal. Nice.

Back in Orgrimmar, where Thrall promises to look into the matter with the humans, we pick up Nazgrel and head back to the watch post. Only…

Maybe we could have made it in time if we weren’t busy doing side quests for Drek’thar. But actually no.

All that we can do is avenge our fallen brethren by destroying the human landing site.

Hmm. They’re wearing green. Which of the Seven Kingdoms had green as its national color, again?

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here between the narration and the gameplay. Rexxar mentions anchor emblems on their shields, but in-game, the footmen of this outpost use the same unlabeled shields as all other footmen in the game. I wonder if they were supposed to use a customized model, but (like with many other things) the developers ran out of time to design it.

Evacuating the Echo Isles

When we next return to Thrall, he notes that the anchor sigil (which we as players still haven’t seen, only heard described) does look familiar, but he cannot place it. Suddenly, Rokhan reminds everyone that he’s still there, by suggesting that the human fleet may be a danger to his people, the Darkspear trolls, on the Echo Isles. Thrall agrees and tells our heroes to take a zeppelin there to convince the trolls to evacuate.

The Echo Isles are tropical, just like the Broken Isles, and in fact use the same tileset. We fight our way through local monsters (crabs, skeletal orcs, and a powerful revenant called the Deathlord) and meet the troll leader.

Alas, almost nobody in this campaign has a unique model. No, not even Rexxar.

Vol’jin gives the heroes an infinitely respawning (as usual) supply of troll batriders to blow up the human ships, but Rexxar rightly notes that with no flying mounts, they themselves will be useless on land. Vol’jin, however, has a way for them to help: he transforms them.

Are these some kind of… spirit wyverns?

The transformed heroes can’t use their items and most of their abilities, but gain new ones instead. A transformed Rokhan has Aerial Shackles, which is useful against enemy gryphon riders, and Rexxar has what is effectively Bloodlust. Misha doesn’t despawn, but is useless for now.

Apparently Rexxar is now a level 7 Rexxar. Thank you, Captain Obvious!

With this aerial force, we take out the five battleships.

Given the proximity of the coast, this water doesn’t even look deep enough for a battleship to sink in.

Once we’re done, Vol’jin gives us our second task here: to light five signal pyres in the southern potion of the map. They’re being squatted by sea giants, but by now our heroes are so powerful that the giants barely make a dent in their HP.

That yellow + represents a permanent bonus to all three stats. When a hero in this gains a level, we can choose to level one of the four abilities or just gain a passive stat bonus.

For our efforts, having defeated the level 11 Sea King, we loot an artifact-quality axe called Killmaim. You’d think you first maim and then kill, not the other way round — unless the name is a suggestion to kill Maim Blackhand.

Ambushing the Ambushers

We return from the Echo Isles and report our progress to Thrall, whose scouts have already informed him that the trolls have landed safely. Now, he has another task for us. The humans have sent an emissary to parley with him, and are supposed to meet him at Razor Hill around midnight.

Rexxar, of course, suspects a trap and offers to go in Thrall’s stead. After all, if it’s not a trap, he’ll lose nothing.

We go to the indicated spot and meet the emissary…

So the emissary model has human eyes under the blue glow. If he’s an elf, why aren’t his eyes fully glowing? If he’s a human, what are the blue effects for?

“And you are not Jaina Proudmoore,” remarks Rexxar. The emissary is surprised that he thinks Jaina is involved with this at all, and signals his men to attack. This is a trap after all; a lot of human units jump out from seemingly nowhere, and we defeat them. The dying emissary refuses to say who sent him, telling Rexxar that this is only a beginning.

When we return to Thrall, he’s had enough and decides to take matters to Jaina. He writes her a letter and asks Rexxar to infiltrate her base at Theramore Isle and deliver the letter to her personally.

Yes, pandaren can turn their heads 90 degrees, that’s totally in the lore.

“Good luck, Rexxar. The future of Durotar is in your hands,” says Thrall as he watches the zeppelin fly into the distance, slowly fading from view.

…Wait, what’s this?

A free DLC? What is this sorcery?

This is a leftover message from TFT release.

You see, at release, the campaign actually ended here, as Blizzard ran out of time to finish The Founding of Durotar before the game went gold. Only in patch 1.13, five and a half months after release, did the remaining two missions arrive: Act 2 “Old Hatreds” and the very short Act 3 “A Blaze of Glory”. I don’t know why they didn’t remove the message when the campaign was completed. Maybe it would have broken compatibility with old saves?

Next up, we’ll visit Dustwallow Marsh and Theramore Isle, and we’ll find out who’s behind the human attacks — and stop them.

1. Seriously, people have made so many different minigames on the Warcraft 3 engine using World Editor scripts. It even popularized an entire genre of video games: Defense of the Ancients, or DotA, was originally not a standalone game, but a Warcraft 3 map. ↩

2. Misha is stated to be female in post-Warcraft 3 materials, which is odd because in Russian, it’s a masculine name. ↩

3. The four terms are courtesy of Ramses. ↩

4. Gold can be spent on items in many shops around the map. ↩

5. Further muddling the murloc/mur’gul matter, this mission has murlocs, but they use mur’gul models. ↩