When we first meet the young orc warchief Thrall in Warcraft 3, he’s just woken from a nightmare; visions of orc and human armies clashing on a battlefield as the sky burns above them.
“Like fools, we clung to the old hatreds,” a voiceover laments. It’s rendered stunningly, this battle, in an early progenitor of Blizzard’s now-renowned cinematics. But unlike in the previous two games, there’s no glory to it. The morally simplistic battles of old are chronicled in the language of regret. Old triumph is revised as cyclical folly.
Thrall wakes from his vision and jolts up in bed. We can see terror on his face at first, and then… sorrow. And just like that, Warcraft’s orcs are given something they’d never really had previously:
Source: Eurogamer It's not easy being green: a brief history of orcs in video games