Warhammer Lite
This world don't give us nothing. It be our lot to suffer... and our duty to fight back.
Legion ships appear to warp in to locations with portal magic. And they're powered by souls, right? So, they're magic. Demonic-tech as a kind of offshoot of the mage-tech we sometimes saw Gnomes employ, but it's still magic-focused for the energy and the power. So can we really call the ships significant tech if essentially all they are are fancy husks with lots of holes in them?
Yeah this is a really good point.
They don't have wiring.
They don't have life support.
They don't have airlocks.
They don't seem to have fuel tanks or anything, and the "reactors" seem to be magical focuses.
They don't even seem to be made of metal - when they break up, they crumble and break like stone, they don't twist or melt like metal.
So they're basically giant flying stone magic-focuses. Almost like a giant wizard-staff or something.
It's high fantasy, as in you have to be high on paint thinner fumes to come up with this shit.
I am the one who knocks ... because I need your permission to enter.
Ah yes, Legion dropships and lazer beam cannons. The best kind of steampunk.
Don't forget the Ethereals and their otherworldly tech. That must be very steampunkish too.
Or the Mechagnomes, and their cyborganisms fueled not by steam, but by actual technology, electricity, circuitry. Very steampunk.
My first inclination would be to say it's 100% fantasy. But when you look at the definition of science fiction - "Fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.", I gotta say that the science fiction folks have a point. There are facets of wow that certainly check a lot of the boxes for science fiction.
So I guess I'd say it's probably a hybrid now, based on things like the Dranei, wod, etc. It's still more fantasy than science fiction for sure though overall when you take a step back and look at the game as a whole. It's primarily a fantasy game with some specific science fiction-y aspects here and there. If a person who never played the game sat down and rolled a level 1, to that person it would still very much feel like humans vs. orcs with swords and spells fantasy.
I'd say that the Draenei and mechagnomes (whose tech is clearly more advanced than standard gnomes) absolutely qualify as science. King Mechagon developed a WMD that was going to nuke the flesh from all life on Azeroth (see the alternate Mechagon quests for the results of that) and Draenei are literally aliens flying crystal powered spaceships.
- - - Updated - - -
Well said.
Appreciate your time with friends and family while they're here. Don't wait until they're gone to tell them what they mean to you.
It'd say sci-fi fantasy. There is plenty of science-fiction in Warcraft, even if you apply Arthur C. Clarke's argument that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', and I believe that absolutely applies to Draenei and Legion technology. However, on Azeroth itself, Gnomes have developed technology even more advanced than real world tech. They have flying machines, teleport devices, and shrinking or enlarging tech to name a few. That's some high level sci-fi to go along with all the fantasy elements already present like dragons, arcane and fel.
Who cares? These are just categories. What does it matter if WoW doesn't fit into the same category as it used to?