I haven't played this, but since
felipepepe says it can be played all the way to the end and is merely missing a few sounds/animations, to met the absolute craziest thing here is that Blizzard couldn't figure out until
the whole game was made that it was not a good game. (It seems like something similar happened with Ghost.) How does that happen? I mean, it's not like these are in some kind of novel framework like, say, KoDP where you can't tell if it's good until the thing can be played. For those who have played it, do you have any sense what the explanation would be?
So far, what I can tell is the following:
1) It's a game that would've fit in more in 1994, 1995, 1996....Not 1998 or 1999.
2) It needed to be beefed up in some areas in terms of level of interactions/refining some puzzles
That's basically, IMO, why it was cancelled. Warcraft Adventures entered development in early 1996, and was probably in pre-production in 1995. At the time you had games like Space Quest 6, Torin's Passage, Broken Sword, and Curse of Monkey Island all come out and have a similar style. Warcraft took elements of these and refined the interface into what I feel is the best adventure game interface ever. But by the time the game was finished, Grim Fandango and KQ8 were on the horizon. The world had moved on from 2D, cartoony adventures, and seemed to want a more "open" 3D experience.
Blizzard didn't want to put out an outdated product in 1999, and retooling the interactions/puzzle elements along with an overhaul of the game from 2D to 3D would've been way too much work for a game that had already missed its completion deadline by almost a year. Warcraft Adventures had been due for release for Christmas 1997, missed that deadline due to work on puzzles with the designer of A Mind Forever Voyaging, and they weren't happy with the product even as of May 1998; they were insecure about it. It would've been pushed back to Christmas 1998 or even early '99 and been utterly noncompetitive with KQ8 and Grim Fandango.
That's why they cancelled it.
Quality wise, I would say for a studio that had never made an adventure game before, I think it's a B. If they continued making games in this vein and refined their skills, they could've easily been on par with Sierra or LucasArts in the adventure game field. It's nothing revolutionary. But, if it HAD been released, it might've been popular enough to convince other studios that Traditional 2D Adventures weren't quite dead, and thus might've kept traditional adventures on the market for a few more years. We might've had Space Quest 7 instead of it being cancelled a few months after Warcraft was, for example.