Offline Raid Group

I love Warcraft. I truly do. It's a game that I've admired for years since I had a demo of Warcraft II back when I was a sprog. Orcs have always been my favourite faction. I don't know why, possibly because I don't mind playing the bad guy on occasion, or because I simply liked the aesthetics of them all.

Could also be because I have a distinct hate for Elves. We may never know.

But I've enjoyed the franchise for as long as I can remember. But I haven't been able to play a Warcraft game in a number of years. Why? Because of World of Warcraft.

It's a good game in its own right. It's polished and shiny and hits all the good spots of its long time fans, while changing the style of the game from its traditional Real Time Strategy (slash Strategy RPG by WCIII) to an Action RPG.

Who wouldn't want to play an Orc Grunt? I know I did. So I did. Not straight away though. When the game first released, I didn't have money in high school, let alone a computer that could run it.

Eventually though, I made it into the game and started a Dwarf Paladin to play with my Alliance friends, who wanted to play Elves and Humans. Nancies, the lot of them.

But I still had fun. I ran around with a Giant fuggin hammer and smacked ever living shit out of every poor computer run monster there was. I just couldn't die.

The years went by, and the novelty wore off. I played a couple of the expansions and everything, but now you never even see me consider loading up the game. Not for fear of having to download 20gb of updates for it, though now that I think about it... But because The game has become tedious. I could play it once a week as part of a raid guild, taking on some of the more severe instances of the world amongst a large number of comrades, but I would still get bored. I've gotten into the habit of paying for a month of play and just farting around levelling up whatever character I wanted to play. And also getting used to the new abilities, because they're usually different by that time too.

There's the thing though. It's been almost ten years, and I am tired of WoW. So what about some love for the offline players?

I've been thinking about it for years, an RPG of Warcraft, telling a story between several characters from the Horde and the Alliance, each from different Races and Classes, going through the main events of the World of Warcraft series, and maybe even the entire franchise. Heck, their next expansion sends players entirely back in time, so why not?

One of my favourite RPGs is Final Fantasy IX simply because the game follows the entire cast, not just one and whatever companions he comes across at the time. It splits between them all, even just for a short while. That's how I envision an RPG Story told about Warcraft, flicking between different events a character could have been at, maybe with a couple bits of character substitution.

It's a wonder what the play style would be. Would it be just a rehash of the World of Warcraft System? Or would it be something like a JRPG, or a Tactical RPG? Visually, I couldn't care less if they just got the art style of Warcraft II or III and made a system from those, but it would still have to have features from the original game, like skill trees, and the rage and threat systems.

There's no chance of this happening, I'm aware. They're focused still on WOW and their other games, like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm. But one day, it would be cool.