The first thing I learned about Warcraft lore is that you can’t trust Warcraft lore. Blizzard doesn’t keep things overly consistent, at least since WoW came around. I’ve only played WoW, but I agree with people who say Kael’s characterization was butchered with the Burning Crusade, and the timeline for the games is all sorts of screwed up. Quasi, I’d make up my own reasons for why Clawdie can only do certain things.
Yes, lore is an optional thing.
To be more verbose, lore is mandatory. Consistent lore is a pain in the butt to the keepers of the franchise. Most pop media scifi or fantasy milieux are riddled with the kinds of inconsistencies that make borderline-autistic continuity pedants like me weep with rage, but a too-cleanly defined backstory makes life harder for the people writing new content. So, in this case, it’s Blizzard’s continuity, and they can (and have, repeatedly) screw with the lore as much as they wish.
That said, once the story settles down again, you can make all kinds of elaborate defenses of Blizz’s position, depending entirely on status quo post.
In this specific case (worgen with no horses), I think Infovore hit on the real reason: the worgen ate almost all the horses before recovering their senses, and that stupid ettin ate the rest. And where can you get a horse in Teldrassil?
The real, no-kidding, “get your head out of the game” reason? Because the Horde had fewer mounts available than the Alliance, and Blizz’s idea of fairness is comparable to the logic my 5-year-old twins use: “He got more than me! UNFAIR!”
If the only goal was to equalize the faction mounts, they could have given the Worgen two and the Goblins four. But I think they thought it would be cool and interesting to have an animal-like race running on all fours like they had at one time experimented with, with Tauren. Why was Plainstriding abaondoned, anyway?
The only think I don’t like about Running Wild is that it makes my hunter’s pet disappear, as mounting up would. I think the pet should run alongside me like a companion pet does.
I don’t remember, but I suspect it was the same reasons (not lore-related, but based on player psychology): Having a mount is cool and not having a mount is uncool. Think of it as the fantasy equivalent of walking to high school instead of driving your own car, even if it’s not really yours, even if it’s a vile piece of self-propelled mechanized fail, even if you’re gonna kill someone with your incompetence and poor attention span.
Yeah. It’s high school again. Some never really leave it.
I suspect that it uses the same mechanisms that underlie mount summoning, so all the side-effects would trigger without some kind of heroic undertaking in exception-code writing, and frankly, I wouldn’t trust Blizzard to get it right.
Perhaps, if let all hunters have their combat pets run alongside… which would look cool but expose them to attack in transit (and also extend your aggro threat space while riding).
Sorry, I should have been more clear. In a very immediate, personal context, lore is optional, at least that which isn’t reflected in game mechanics. If I think some aspect of lore is dumb, I have absolutely no obligation to pay it any heed in my own mind.
And here’s Wowwiki’s spiel about why Plainstriding was dropped:
:eek:
Well, that would suck.
At the time, it did not follow mount mechanics like Running Wild does. The way it worked was that after a certain time walking forward, you would start to accelerate into mount speeds. This, of course, caused no end of problems, such as if you wanted to walk from Razorfen to the Great Lift at Thousand Needles and Plainswalking kicked in right as you reached the elevator, causing you to miss your mark and send you hurtling over the side.
Simply having Running Wild use the mount mechanics automatically makes it way better.
And that’s a good point. As far as I can tell, no one is going to get arrested or banned from the game for disregarding the niceties of Blizz’s lore. I play on a PvP server, where giving a metric rat’s ass about lore is considered LolRP. People pay their $15 a month to virtually kill stuff and get virtually rich and famous.
I suspect that RP servers may be a bit less lore-agnostic, but again, I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for defying the official storyline, just for trolling others by intentionally and flagrantly breaking out of character. (That does happen, though. Seems odd to me, but whatever.)
I witnessed some roleplay in which a character was speaking in Latin, and another character passing by stopped to mock him:
“((There’s no Latin in Azeroth! LOL lore fail!))”
Of course, the Latin speaker correctly pointed out, “((There’s no English, either.))”
Actually, (and I didn’t realize this either until recently) there IS Latin in Azeroth. You know the Stormwind music (or the old Stormwind music…I haven’t actually been in SW since Cata dropped)? The soaring choir? Those lyrics they’re singing are Latin. I didn’t realize it until I went on YouTube to listen to a few pieces (trying to figure out which ones the sheet music they were offering on the Launcher were) and someone had added the lyrics text to their video. There is another one or two (all human areas with the choir, I think) that are also Latin.
Old Common!
I still have troubles with this concept. When my pet is out, I am not a tall, slim nelf. I am the player incarnation of Therazane.
Thanks for the Plainstrider notes. I can see why that would suck.
I haven’t checked or tested it, but I assume that despite logic, Running Wild is not available in places where you can’t mount, like inside buildings or most dungeons. Is that right?
But if you could run as fast as a car, that would be pretty cool…
Here’s the summary of how it worked, from the Official Blizzard Perspective:
1.) Your character is from Gilneas. That’s a Human country, like Stormwind. Your character was Human.
2.) During the events that you see a part of in the starter zone, your character was bitten by a werewolf. That infected them.
3.) Eventually, you completely transform into a Worgen. Your control over yourself is returned initially with drugs, and later with Druid magic.
4.) So, the end result is that while you still have a Human form, you’re a Gilnean and not a Stormwind…ite, and you’ll never be entirely Human again. There is a part of you that is a beast–a part you control, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how you want to RP your character, but a part you can never purge.
1.) Because every player in the game would throw a royal fit if they lost access to a huge number of mounts.
2.) They already let rotting skeletons, cows, space goats, and things with big huge tusks ride them. I don’t think a wolf is a huge change. 
That would also jack up the total number of mounts and make certain milestones easier to achieve, which potentially they’d want to avoid.
Speaking as someone who played a Frost Mage when the perma-pet Glyph was still bugged: trust me, DO NOT WANT. It sounds really great, until you actually have to live with it.
Correct. Many in-game mechanics are illogical but required for balance or other gameplay reasons (e.g., Undead characters not being able to understand Common).
Are there plain old horses (as opposed to skelly horses & demonic horse-beasts) that Horde characters can ride? I guess with all the different faction mounts there must be.
There are no Horde faction mounts that are plain horses. There is, however, a Charger from the Argent Tournament that is purchasable by both factions.
The paladin charger is basically a horse.
What drugs to they take, SFG? Anything which might help the German boy keep from turning completely ape-shit from bat-shit? 
Q