I think more likely it means that this would have been a separate character. Probably a new character who may have only appeared in this one scene, and ultimately was removed in order to reduce the number of actors needed for the shoot. It's a fairly typical thing during script development - if you're not careful, secondary characters proliferate along the way, and at some point you need to start merging characters together, because it's simply cheaper to have one actor doing twenty lines than two actors doing ten lines. In this case, it's probably also worth taking into consideration that Paladin plays an important part later in the story - the moment the decision was made to have Paladin show up for the whole temblor thing, they must have also immediately realised that they just can't have him show up out of the blue at that point in the story, they need to introduce him early in the piece. So, they would have replaced the no-name major with Paladin... and then for an added bonus, would have realised that this gives them a possibility of having the Blair-punches-Paladin scene for additional character development.
I had a feeling this might be the case, and we'll never know who the Major might have been now. I always thought Origin missed a trick by not drafting in Patsy Kensit to play Major Edmond...
...but I guess she went down with the rest of them just off the
Stendal Mistral coast, and Rollins did just fine. Paladin was a super inclusion for a number of reasons; but for me he's special as one of the returnees that really cement the consistency of the storyline.
People often complain that WC3 feels like too big a jump and break from storyline and style, but the more I think about it, it actually stays quite true to the backstory. There are really quite a few mentions of things from the past, we're fighting the same war with some of the same ships, and a generous contingent of returning faces (Blair, Angel, Hobbes, Maniac, Tolwyn, Paladin, The Emperor and Thrakhath) and we even get to see our old carrier in pieces at the start.
Shame about old Edmond though
Actually, what would have been rather cool is if she'd just been in that one scene, referred to only as Major and never explicitly named as Edmond. Hurrying Blair along and not being seen again, like a clandestine cameo.
...a bit like Spirit in the movie, who may well not be Spirit at all. There's a fleeting shot of a silent, smiling lady on the bridge of the 'Claw, who I naively assumed was her because she was slim, mid-20s, oriental and had a Tanaka look of wisdom about her.
I'm rambling here.