One of the the last part about Warcraft's bright color palette is very fascinating. Especially the insight that you have to consider the actual environment that many of your users will be in.
I would argue, the bright color palette served the visual design of the warcraft games very well --all the way up to the mega-blockbuster, World of Warcraft.
I thought it was pretty interesting as well because I have always thought that game players played in the dark, the only light being their computer or TV.
If you look at the big LAN party conventions, or LAN parties in general, they're always hosted with the lights off.
I thought about this a while back, and the colour palette used was basically the reason I preferred the Red Alert series over the Tiberium universe series of Command & Conquer. The games were otherwise very similar.
I would argue, the bright color palette served the visual design of the warcraft games very well --all the way up to the mega-blockbuster, World of Warcraft.