'Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans' news: Cancelled Blizzard game leaked online

Promotional screenshot image for the "World of Warcraft" gameWorld of Warcraft website

Blizzard once worked and nearly completed a point-and-click adventure game set in the "Warcraft" universe titled "Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans." The game was canceled, but a fully playable version of the game has now been leaked online for gamers to download and experience.

The game, which is a near-complete build, surfaced on the Scrolls of Lore forums. The game can be played from the beginning to the end. It has all of its cutscenes intact as well as the recorded dialogue, music, and audio clips. Only a few assets are said to be missing, and some of the audio is not synchronized with the cutscenes.

As noted by IGN, Blizzard has since taken down the link from the forum page, but gamers can still find it available via torrent sites and other sources.

"Warcraft Adventures" was initially meant to be a traditional adventure game, a genre that was quite popular in the 1990s, but was canceled right before its 1998 E3 presentation because the designers at Blizzard decided it did not meet up to their high standards.

The report also points out that the developers saw that it did not hold up against its contemporaries such as "The Curse of Monkey Island" or "Grim Fandango." It is also not the only game Blizzard nearly finished and then canceled as they also halted development on "StarCraft: Ghost" and "Project Titan," the latter of which was the basis for "Overwatch."

However, the story of the game was later adapted into a novel of the same name, and this book served as a prologue to their next video game at the time, "Warcraft III." The book focused on the backstory of Thrall, a main hero of the Horde and would later become sort of a mascot for the franchise.

"Warcraft III" also took many ideas from the canceled game such as the concept of roleplaying a hero instead of merely building bases and amassing an army.