The Ogres: Not So Stupid After All

Ogres have been a part of Warcraft since WCII, when they joined Trolls and Goblins as new Horde races (mirrored by Dwarves, Gnomes, and High Elves - then only known as "Elves" for the Alliance.) Every race that popped up in that game has become playable (admittedly High Elves became Blood Elves and went Horde) with the exception of Ogres. There have been Ogres in WoW since Vanilla, though we're finally getting new Ogre models in Warlords of Draenor (though not as finely detailed as the other new racial models.)

So why have Ogres never been playable as a Horde race? They've seemed like a pretty obvious addition. Sure, you have the issue that no one has ever seen a female ogre (this was true of Worgen, so I call irrelevant) and Tauren are already huge, which would make Ogres perhaps impractical.

But I think the biggest problem with playable Ogres is that they are dumb. Like, really stupid. Ogres have a tendency to ignore the subjective case, for instance ("Me crush tiny human,") for example. It's such an issue that the only Ogres who seem to have any intelligence are the ones that have somehow managed to grow a second head (and for some reason this head is usually a cyclops. Sidenote: we've never had a "Cyclops" creature in WoW, but I think we're covered with the proto-Ogres like Gronn, which basically fit that bill. Mythologically, the Cyclops is a Greek creature, whereas it appears that "Ogres" are derived from more Western European sources.) The most famous two-headed Ogre is Cho'gall, who as we all know is freaking insane and wants to just destroy the universe and everyone (including him) in it. We killed him in the Bastion of Twilight after he allowed C'thun to possess him (I'm still not clear on whether C'thun is totally dead, Y'shaarj style, or if it can continue to exert an influence on the world.)

In Azeroth and Outland, Ogres have never been able to have much more than cave-fortresses and crude palisades. The most impressive structures you can find of these Ogres are the towns in Blade's Edge Mountains, which are still pretty rough. The only really intelligent Ogres we find in Outland are the Ogri'la, who have used relics of the Arrakoan Apexis civilization to boost their intelligence, and they seek to free their brethren from the dominance of the Gronn (very few people do these quests anymore, but if you do all the level 70 quests to kill the sons of Gruul throughout Outland, all the Ogres in Blade's Edge become neutral to you, which is pretty awesome.)

So, really stupid Ogres who just happened to get roped into the whole Horde thing once Ogrim Doomhammer decided he wanted to push further into Azeroth after the First War.

But Warlords of Draenor suggests that our picture of the Ogres is woefully incomplete.

First: a huge caveat. Draenor - as in, the not-Outland Draenor - is not the same one from our universe. There are huge differences that go well beyond Garrosh's time-muckery. Blizzard has explicitly demonstrated that the Draenor we're heading to is not and never was our Draenor. What this means is that for all we know, what I'm about to talk about does not apply to the Ogres we know from our universe.

That aside: The Ogres were the dominant species on Draenor.

Somewhat shockingly, WoW has never really had an "Empire." Yes, Shaohao was theoretically the Emperor of the Pandaren, but their "empire" was kind of a utopian anarcho-syndicalist commune. The only way in which the Pandarian Empire was an empire was in the way that it united disparate groups of people. But it's hardly the kind of "Empire" one usually thinks of in Fantasy stories. What we're talking about is Rome - with all the conquest abroad and debauchery at home. Sure, there are aspects of the Roman Empire we admire, but one does not have to look very closely to see that it was screwed up in a lot of ways.

And that's what the Ogres were. The Ogres of Draenor were conquerors and slavers. They built massive cities and fortresses, and terrorized the "barbarian" Orcs. Kargath Bladefist, for example, is basically the Orcish Spartacus, forced to fight as a gladiator (man, that describes a lot of WoW characters, doesn't it? Or at least both Thrall and Varian,) and then leading a rebellion that became the Shattered Hand.

The head of the Ogres at Highmaul is Imperator Mag'kok - Imperator being the title that transformed into "Emperor." This is what the Emperors of Rome were called. What's interesting here is that the Ogres were not cave-dwelling idiots. Quite the contrary, they were by far more "civilized" than the Orcs, and came to understand Arcane Magic and were basically pretty well-organized. While it will unfortunately not be the Horde capital in Draenor as had been originally announced, the massive Bladespire Citadel is taken by the Frostwolves early on in Horde questing. The Ogre Empire, vast and powerful though it is, is in the middle of falling, and certainly doesn't stand a chance against the Iron Horde.

But it does really make me wonder - if that's what the Ogres were like originally, what the hell happened? Having your civilization destroyed can certainly have ill effects on your society, but a total regression to the Stone Age? That seems a bit much. There's also the fact that Ogres joined the Horde in our timeline, and unless I'm mistaken, the falling Ogre Empire has allied with the Iron Horde, despite the ages of bad blood between their peoples.

Anyway, this new revelation of the Ogres' past could be totally transformative. One could certainly imagine some as-yet undiscovered faction of Ogres who remember the empire, and still hold to their old ways.

I'd never have thought it even a year ago, but I'd be really really excited for playable Ogres in a future expansion (with maybe Arrakoa as the Alliance counterpart?)

(Just a brief side note here: I don't mean to imply that people in Stone Age cultures are not intelligent. Certainly on Earth there are people who don't have the kind of modern technology people in the developed world have. But these people have the exact same capacity for intelligence and knowledge as anyone else - while there's some minor variations in individuals, humans are pretty much across the board smart. These isolated peoples do not lack for ability - they only lack familiarity with what we in more technologically advanced societies interact with every day. The case of Ogres is different, though - for one, they are a wholly different species, which could very well have a different level of intelligence, but the puzzling thing is that they are only, presumably, one generation removed from their advanced Empire, and many ought to remember that Empire.)