Well, not always there were very downer finals. I can name three games with downer final .warcraft 1, canonical orcs win. Diablo 1, where everything is going very badly. Starcraft Brood War, where the Queen Bitch of the Universe is winning. For comparison, we have a second of Warcraft, Diablo II, and the first Starcraft. That if do not have a good ending, then at least have bittersweet ending.
I count bittersweet endings as part of what I meant by downer endings. In WarCraft 2's expansion Beyond The Dark Portal, the heroes win but only by sacrificing themselves to seal the portal to Azeroth on their side. They had to remain behind in order to do so. (According to WarCraft 2 they went through another portal to who-knows-where but in WoW they remained behind - the point is, You Can't Go Home Again counts as a sacrifice) They may have 'won' but they still lose in a sense. That's everywhere in early Blizzard games - in WarCraft, as you note, Orcs are the canonical winners (not that I'm disputing this but I haven't heard this before, can you elaborate?). In WarCraft 3 the Burning Legion is defeated but only after Lordaeron (the guys you play in WC2) is wiped out and turned into zombie town. Thrall wins and the orcs don't become slaves again but only after Grom Hellscream gave his life to slay whatshisname the big fat demon. Y'know at the end of the orc campaign. The elves are decimated and more or less wiped out too. In Frozen Throne we see Arthas rise to become the Lich King and we help to put him there.
In Diablo you slay big red himself but then you slam the soul stone into your forehead for Reasons. Too bad that's just what Diablo wanted you to do, and in the second game you become the Dark Wanderer, the mortal vessel for Diablo's soul who goes around terrorising the lands of Sanctuary. Yes the heroes of D2 slay Diablo but the good hero you played in the first game is lost forever. In Lord of Destruction you do stop Baal, but not before he completely kicks the shit out of the barbarian lands and fucks with the World Stone to the point where Tyrael decides it needs to be destroyed.
In StarCraft just quickly because people have already talked about it at length - yes you beat the Confederacy but to do so you install a new dictator, it's not moving up it's moving sideways. Yes you stop the zerg but Tassadar dies and Aiur has to be abandoned anyway. In Brood War it's even worse because Kerrigan wins and despite her being a really kickass character with a satisfying arc she's still a baddie.
The point I'm making in all these examples is that the heroes only win if they do massive sacrifices (Tassadar giving up his life, the Alliance army sealing the portal back to their home, the Unnamed Hero who slams the soul stone into his forehead in a futile effort to contain the demon therein, Grom Hellscream) and sometimes they don't win, the bad guys do (Kerrigan, Arthas, Diablo). That stuff went against genre expectations and had a streak of realism in something thoroughly unreal as fantasy and sci-fi storytelling.
Now you beat the bad guys who have all become Chaotic Stupid and the second you do the sun breaks through stormy clouds and a major character waxes poetic in a faux-profound manner and if I roll my eyes any harder they'll spin out of their sockets.
And yes, the bad guys from Blizzard have always been bad with no issues. Diablo, Orcs, the Overmind (In spite of the charm), I can continue. I do not remember ambiguous villains there. Even Kerrigan was damn evil.
Those guys were evil but there was also ambiguity. Hell, the Orcs were only evil because they were brainwashed. Thrall wasn't evil. Under his leadership the orcs didn't do bad things either.
But what about characters like Mengsk? At the start and through most of Rebel Yell he's a charismatic rebel who makes pragmatic choices that bit by bit compromise his morals (and you're along for the ride, you help him do that - so what does that say about *you*?). At the end he takes the reins of power and becomes a dictator himself. But he wasn't 'evil' as such, he was ruthless and pragmatic and selfish but like he chose to be that, he could have chosen differently. Evil is a loaded term, and it's one that I think only really applies to supernatural characters who are intrinsically bad, like Diablo and various other demonic characters.
Here's another ambiguous character - Aldaris. He's a mentor-antagonist to the character you play in the protoss campaign. You fight him a couple of times but he never becomes
evil. Misguided, yes. But from his perspective, the Dark Templar are evil because of the backstory lore of the protoss. Despite that he puts those feelings aside in order to work with Tassadar (a heretic!) and Zeratul (ZOMG even worse!) to fight the zerg. And even then he has to abandon his home and live with those he considers heretics and even then he sees his erstwhile allies listen to Kerrigan, one of those responsible for driving him out of his home. So from his perspective he has a legitimate grievance even if he's 'wrong'. Carrying on with this theme you have the UED characters who again, aren't evil. But because they're outsiders they're the bad guys to the various Koprulu Sector factions. But from their perspective they're NOT bad guys, they're the good guys.
In Diablo the demons are evil, but are Heaven and the Angels good? I mean at least in the first two games we don't really know - we know
Tryael is good but that his hands are tied by the Powers That Be. You never see angels come down and help you fight any of the demons you slay. Deckard Cain said this in one of the quests in Diablo 2 (IIRC it was the end of Act Two when you slay Duriel and meet Tyrael who fills you in): 'While the motives of Hell seem straight-forwardly bent to our destruction, the motives of heaven are harder to discern.'
And then in a move that surprsed me (and one of the reasons I have hope that Blizzard might turn around on this stuff) in Diablo 3's expansion Reaper of Souls the bad guys *are* Angels. I mean,
fallen angels and everything but it's still a nice step and one in which the expectations were reversed. And again, other than Tyrael, Heaven does jack shit to stop Malthael.
Seriously, where is there an explanation how Kerrigan found Shakuras, how she crept up to Raszagal, how she managed to brainwash one of the strongest psionic Protoss? Or are these questions remained unanswered over the 15-plus years?
I never got the impression that Raszagal was particularly powerful, but it's been awhile since I've played Brood War. But Kerrigan is fucking powerful as well, don't forget she was a match for Tassadar.
