Throughout the course of Warcraft I, Warcraft II and the expansion for Warcraft 2, Beyond the Dark Portal, Blizzard weaved an involving tale through in-game missions and the odd cinematic. The idea with Warcraft Adventures was to take the setting of the Warcraft world and tell more of the tale in greater detail thanks to the more story-lead nature of adventure games. As the name suggests, Warcraft Adventures was graphical adventure in the tradition of the Lucas Arts and Sierra games such as the Monkey Island series. With the portal to the Orc world of Draenor closed, the nation of Azeroth turned to enslaving and pacifying the Orcs that still remained on the human side of the portal.

In Warcraft Adventures, gamers were to play Thrall, an Orc enslaved after his father, head of the Frost Wolf Clan, and mother were both killed on the battle field. Throughout the course of the game Thrall was to learn of and later reclaim his warrior heritage in order to unite the Orcs in Azeroth and fight their way to freedom and independence on this new world unfamiliar to the divided Orc hordes. The attractive artwork was largely produced in St. Petersburg by Animation Magic to visually realise the story created by the capable hands at Blizzard. Much of the voice acting was also recorded and, if released sound samples are anything to go by, easily up to the standards set by previous adventure games.

Warcraft Adventures was cancelled in 1998 just before E3. A Blizzard "strike team" consisting of the company's top designers, artists, programmers and other staff members met to discuss the game's future and decided that it just wasn't up to the high standards Blizzard set for themselves. So what went wrong? To quote Bill Roper from an interview with Gamespot,

"I think the only thing I would have changed was having the foresight in the very first part of the game to say, 'Let's learn from the past, but let's approach this with a very futuristic vision,' as opposed to 'What iterations are we going to make?' I don't think that we did that. And that would have obviously drastically altered the course of what we did."

Fans argued that Blizzard should just release the unfinished game as it was when cancelled. Much of the artwork and voice acting was complete and a renewed design was ready to be put into action to improve various aspects of the game. However Blizzard seems adamant that it will never be released.

While we will almost certainly never see Warcraft Adventures, we may experience part of the story none the less. Announced only a few months ago, Warcraft III is set to reveal part of the tale that gamers were to experience in Warcraft Adventures. Thrall features in the Warcraft III story line, leading the Orcs back to their shamanistic roots and trying to unite the divided clans, and the greater focus on roleplaying that Blizzard is adding to the real time strategy genre in Warcraft III may just give gamers clamouring for a more story lead game what they were hoping to get from Warcraft Adventures.