I wasn't really planning to see the Warcraft movie anyway, but from what I hear the early reviews are pretty abysmal. The film currently has an average Metacritic score of 31! Well, it was still the top grossing film this weekend in several European countries, and we'll see how it does in the USA next weekend (You can't launch a movie next weekend in Europe, because the European soccer championship starts). But I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't as much of a success as the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Because after spending hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours on World of Warcraft for over a decade, the Warcraft lore still makes no sense to me.

Much of that of course has to do with the natural limitations of a MMORPG. The world of Warcraft has several million player heroes, but comparatively few non-player peasants and other ordinary people. Most players care more about their own heroic rise from level 1 to the top than about the story of the NPCs. And in your daily activities on Azeroth, you do a lot of mundane quests like killing 10 wolves, while being only very rarely involved in an event from the larger Warcraft lore. It just doesn't feel like a living world, and many players just ignore the lore, because it isn't actually needed for anything.

The whole time-traveling thing doesn't make the lore any more accessible either. Frequently it appears as if the devs wanted to have certain features in an expansion, and so the lore was written to fit those features. I definitely had that impression when they announced the next expansion, Legion, which is all about trying to repeat the success of the Burning Crusade. And while the lore frequently talks of war between Alliance and Horde, the system of World of Warcraft doesn't really allow for large scale battles, and so that war remains largely hypothetical.

Apart from the convoluted story, the lore of Warcraft is often not very unique. A lot of features of World of Warcraft are deliberately generic, the same elves, humans, orcs, warriors, and mages that most fantasy role-playing games have. The original Azeroth also had a lot of generic landscapes, snowy mountains, steppes full of wild animals, green rolling hills, and generic forests, although the landscapes got more fantastic in the expansions. What makes for an accessible MMORPG that anybody can instantly understand makes for a rather boring background for a movie.