Oh I think the Starcraft/Warcraft 3 Format was much much better then the original 2 sides and different outcomes, from a lore/history perspective.

It's a shame Blizzard isn't the type of company that does remakes, I'd certainly pay cash for a Warcraft 1 & 2 + Beyond the Dark Portal remake that fleshes out the entire backstory, and lets me play with those old school heroes again. Doomhammer, Grom, Gul'Dan.

I'm toying with the idea of trying to match together all the retcons and pre-retcons and make it all work. The final idea came to something along the lines of "lol infinites", with the first clue of the Infinites actually being competent at what they do being the discovery of a First War veteran in the Caverns of Time whose recollection of events differs from what is considered the truth of the matter.

"We gave him a map of Stormwind's lands at the time as proof. He asked for a quill and ink and drew his own. It was all different. And yet..."

I'm going back a page here to the discussion of new races - apologies for the interruption.

I actually find the prospect of neutral choose-your-own-faction races (Goblins being the prime candidate) far more likely than another addition to the Alliance or Horde. This doesn't mean that they are at all likely - just that they are more likely. Some reasons that come to mind:

1. The existing races are integrated with their factions in a way that a new race never would be. Consider the Argent Tournament, where the champions, tabards, and reward mounts are already in place in such a way that hardly leaves room for more additions. A new Alliance or Horde race would be excluded from the same system of rewards and reputation gain as well as the lore. Sure, they could add new-race-specific rep dailies and account for their absence from the Tournament by setting their opening quests further back chronologically than the events in WotLK, but there's no question that they would be odd ones out. Tournament mounts, tournament pets, and so on would have to be obtainable by other means. And if you roll that race and level up, who becomes your home faction for the first set of Valiant dailies? And so on.

2. TBC introduced 1-20 / 60-70 content while funnelling people through the same 20-60 old-world quests (minus revamps like Dustwallow Marsh). WotLK hardly addressed this, giving DKs a starting zone where your level was inconsequential as a shortcut to 60. Introducing a neutral race where the player doesn't integrate with a faction until, say, level 15, also incentivizes the refurbishment or further development of 20-60 levelling content. (Why 15 or so? So players can run the likes of Deadmines and RFC at the appropriate level, and also because above level 20, players on PVP servers should no longer be protected from world PVP.)

While Blizzard is doing enough to accelerate the 20-60 experience (rather than flesh it out) that this may well be unlkely, I do think it isn't to be ruled out immediately. And as someone else said above, problems with identifying enemy players are redressed because their names appear in red. Apart from gnomes and tauren, who really pays immediate notice to the race of other players as it is?

3. Playing as a goblin mercenary, or a mercenary of any race, eliminates the problem of integrating the race as a whole into the Alliance or Horde. Well, mostly; there would still need to be a workaround for things like your first set of tournament quests. I could see reputation with a neutral race working as it did with the Ebon Blade, where participants in the new content (DKs) got a head start, but everybody gets a chance to earn rep with them in the new content at the end of the levelling game.

4. Of course, this doesn't address other mechanical issues like guild membership while you're neutral. The starting zone content, prior to affiliation, may well have to be condensed into 2-3 hours, as was the case with DKs.

I personally think the game is too saturated for new playable races or classes as it is. Races have very little impact on the game: racials aren't very distinct nowadays, so their appeal is entirely in a) cosmetics, b) lore, and c) new starting-zone content. I just don't think a new race is a selling point in quite the way a new class would be. Even in TBC, the Draenei and Blood Elves had the benefit of introducing "new" classes in the form of Alliance shamans and Horde paladins. It was a neat trick of Blizzard's to do it in a way that made the game easier, not harder, to balance. From this point on, barring a major change they introduce to the game mechanics, new races won't have the lasting appeal in practice that people think they will.

There really is no need for more room or working in a new race into the Tournament for example since that content will be 'old' once the next expansion hits. There is no need to update it for a new race if there is one since if anything there will be something in the new area.

The leveling is so accelerated that there is really no reason at all to be concerned about going from 20 to 80 and if anything they can make the new races 'hero races' and have them start at a higher level such as 65.

I doubt we will ever see a neutral or mercenary race since Blizzard has been pretty clear that they like keeping the factions separated pretty visually (since armor in this game is pretty lackluster) and there would be just be a whole lot of other issues that come into play if the race was fully neutral and never chose a side.

New races are a pretty good selling point to a expansion and there are many people like me who would just play the new race for the simple fact that it is in the end still something new. New classes are nice but I doubt we will see one in the next expansion just due to the reasons with the balancing game that Kalgan brought up. In the end the main selling point is the new landmass itself more than a new race or class which are more 'extra' stuff than the main attraction for a expansion.

Blizzard mentioned when they announced WotLK that the next expansion was going to have many more visual upgrades. So with the Maelstrom I'd imagine one of the big things with the expansion will be something such as upgrading all the vanilla races to be on par with the draenei/blood elves.

Well, that is the same argument that was used against hero classes for so long: that it would be too much work to create all those old Tier sets for the new class. Now we know that they simply will not bother with making new classes or races fit perfectly with old content.

And we saw that, with the Draenei and Blood Elves, it *can* take just a few extra quest NPCs in random zones to 'integrate' the new races. Although from Chilton's interview, it certainly seems that is something they may not be be satisfied with for any potential new races.

What this probably means is, that even if the races that will be added are new, they will get more of a Death Knight-like lore-heavy introduction through questing, and a proper introduction to them for old players in early zones of the new content.

Imagine a phased starting zone that is level 1-20 for New Race players to level up in, but also serves (in a different phase) as a level 82 zone, where we convince the New Race to help us out.

A WC1 remake with Doomhammer as the hero would have a different story than the original. In the WC1 orc campaign, the Shadow Council offs Blackhand midway through the campaign to make room for your rise to power. In the official storyline, Doomhammer kills Blackhand after Stormwind falls. Missions 6 and 8 don't make sense unless you're working for the Shadow Council, and mission 7 doesn't make sense unless you're staging a coup. You'd probably want a 13th mission where Doomhammer attacks Blackrock Spire and kills Blackhand, and you'd need to establish Blackhand and Gul'dan as antagonists through cutscenes or something.

It'd be a cool story though, and Doomhammer's part of it would be easy to tell. Most of the missions are just "there's some humans over there, go kill them." They're blank slates for advancing the story. You could easily turn mission 6 (sack Sunnyglade and capture their mage tower to train warlocks) into sacking Sunnyglade and destroying the tower before an AI-controlled Shadow Council force gets there. Or turn mission 4 (kill Blackhand's daughter because she's fucking an ogre, basically) into a warning from Blackhand - "I had my own daughter killed because she stepped out of line, I'll do the same to you."

The human campaign would be much harder because of Karazhan. I don't read WC novels but the retcon of human mission 9 looks way too overwrought and convoluted for a single campaign map, not to mention the amount of modelling work to do Karazhan right. And the human campaign doesn't have much going on besides Karazhan. You'd probably be following Lothar, and a lot of his story happens after WC1.

Chilton mentioned that the a new playable race would need to be seeded in the current world. To me that doesn't necessarily say that they are in the world now. They could easily get around this a bit by having an event a couple of months before the next xpac. Maybe a ship gets caught in a storm and crashes on the shores of southern Dragonblight. The owners of the ship were transporting prisoners but now that it's crashed they've set up two camps with some short questlines that introduce the races to us and we learn that they're from the South Seas. I'm just saying that if Blizz wants to introduce new races they could easily through us a curveball like that without it being a well established playable race currently in game.

One thing that Blizzard will most likely consider if they plan on adding a new race is whether the race has enough appeal to make a player consider not rolling human/night elf/tauren/blood elf (or whatever the popular races may be) and instead choose <new race>. While I do think that many would choose a goblin because they're humorous, ruthless, everywhere, and overall fairly interesting, the likelihood of people rolling a furbolg, makrura, or anything more beastly than humanoid is low.

In order for people to choose a race there has to be enough humanoid in them for the player to relate to, or enough cool factor to overcome that. Naga and satyrs are definitely choices I see many people making, but things like kobolds and gnolls don't show enough human-ness and lack the certain kind of visible intelligence and cool factor for people to roll those as characters.

Or, in the case of Tauren and Pandaren, the race needs sophistication and culture for them to feel like actual intelligent races. Most of the humanoids we kill 20 of for quests are low on the culture / civilization department.

Or they could have a former civilization and culture they've lost -- like the Darkspear trolls, gnomes, and arakkoa. Or they could be intelligent beings, who become enslaved and undead, and then freed -- like the Forsaken and the worgen of Grizzly Hills. I'm not saying arakkoa and worgen are likely new races, just pointing out that Blizzard is good at thinking outside of the box you're creating.

Those points are true and possible but how many of the races we've been throwing around the past few pages have much potential for a 'formerly we were advanced / acted on our own will / had a lost story that makes up for our current lack of organization'? I'm only arguing that the tribes of the likes of furbolgs and gnolls would not make terribly interesting additions to a faction unless a compelling backstory is created for them and something major changes. If Blizzard chooses to add a race, races of a more major and interesting presence like worgen and arakkoa, would give them a lot more to work with. Both my posts not counting the possibilities of them adding new races or 'advanced and/or lost cousins' of races, which was something that I wasn't intending to speculate myself in the first place.

Edit: to put it in the most concise and clear way possible, my point is that unless they change something drastically or add a huge amount of backstory ala Draenei, most of the simple humanoids we've met in Azeroth are very unlikely to become player races because of their very simple stories and looks (uninspiring for a player to choose them).

Would the Skardyn be an option for a new race? They've been introduced in "Night of the Dragon" and them being from Grim Batol would have them fit in with what we believe to be the new expansion. It was also said that they would appear in game.