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Crimes De Guerra (2000)

by Christie Golden(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

series

World of Warcraft

review 1: I play World of Warcraft for the satisfaction of participating in raiding dynamics and choreography, not for the story. But as a ten year veteran of the game I sometimes try to pinpoint how exactly the story went so wrong, and imagine what the writers could have done to fix it so that it would help and not hurt player motivation in the game by making player actions feel meaningful and thematically justified instead of just kind of ridiculous and flailing.There are three things:1) They needed to have at least a sketch of the master story arc from the beginning - none of this inadvertent mini series, writers constantly off guard feeling, constant need for new existential threats to the world (ok the demons and the scourge are gone, wait here comes Deathwing, ok he's gone wa... moreit here comes another Old God...) and then when that gets too obviously laughable start in with the total jump-the-shark Star Trek style multiple timeline garbage in Warlords of Draenor.There's no way a coherent epic of the necessary mass could have grown organically out of the original Warcraft 1's crude foundational tropes ("Orcs and Humans" was literally the subtitle of the game). They were meant as just a serviceable scenario sketch to support a new network video game idea. But by the time WoW rolled around or even earlier maybe back in the Warcraft 3 days there should have been a reckoning and Metzen and crew should have lain down the 10 or 20 year vision. It never happened, so the story just kept spurting forth in these teeny little flimsy outgrowths that could support the next financial year's releases or whatever and eventually the soggy structure just drooped over and collapsed in on itself.2) They needed to fully commit to subverting the racist Tolkien tropes that their genre is grown from. They made some half assed stabs at it, like with the Horde orc factions that were corrupted by demon blood instead of being an intrinsically evil race, and that proceeded to overcome their corruption, suffer through a period of slavery, and then rebel and free themselves and try to found a just society. But in the end characterization falls back into unattenuated racism more often than not. The naga are an evil race. The Forsaken by now are more or less depicted as an evil race despite their leader Sylvanas' initial sympatheticness. The tauren have always been nuance-free noble savages. Etc. Yeah the writers try to split the races into factions and then assign moralities to the factions, not the race. I can tell that's the overcome-Tolkien-racism innovation they are shooting for, and it's better than nothing, but more often than not they seem to just say fuck it and fall back to racial morality shorthand.3) They needed to either fill in their faux 10,000 year history with real history (doubtful) or trim it down to one or two thousand years or so of events at the granularity they went with. As it is, the history is barren. If you look at a timeline, the story of WoW is that basically nothing happens for 10,000 years then suddenly the world starts getting threatened and then saved or partially destroyed and then rebuilt over and over five times in 30 years. Coincidentally, the 30 years that the games are set during.In real world history 100s of civilizations have risen and died over just our recorded 4 or 5 thousand years. In the World of Warcraft we have the same 10 or 20 civilizations continue on more or less intact for more or less 10,000 years. Plus they would have had like 50 different types of magic influencing the development of their technology. After 10,000 years their world should be balls to the wall unbelievable hyperfuture techno insane by now or at least up to the baseline standards of modern post-human sci fi lit, but instead it's kind of static and uninspired.So yeah, if they could have circumvented those three problems, the WoW storyline might be something to get excited about.This particular novel is terrible, but there's no way to write a good story within the broken framework.
review 2: War Crimes is not the type of book I would normally read. New to the game I wasn't much interested in the lore. Reading through War Crimes however, not only did I lose myself in the storyline but I can't wait to continue it in Warlords. What I enjoyed the most was being able to watch the trial from various Horde and Alliance characters. And though we all can agree that Garrosh isn't a nice guy, Baine's defence certainly had me rooting for their team. less

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