Can Midnight bring WARcraft back?

Lore Story
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been playing on and off for a long time, missing most of the new content etc.
I usually come back and do the main quests, immerse myself in the lore and the new path for the game, and this time it struck me during that “cinematic” with Faerin; with the War Within we’ve reached an all time high (or low depends on how you see it) of bad storytelling and poor lore decisions.

Where’s my WARcraft MMO? Why is everyone helping and loving eachother?
I’ve seen Azeroth go through a lot, but this is too much.

With Midnight aiming to take us back to Quel’Thalas against the Void, I can’t help but feel a longing for something that feels like it’s been missing for a while: the actual “WAR” in Warcraft.
Don’t get me wrong, fighting cosmic threats like the Jailer or the Legion is epic. But for too long now, it feels like the Alliance and Horde have been forced into this perpetual “together with the power of love and friendship fighting the big bad” scenario.
This constant kumbaya dilutes the very essence of what made this game’s world so compelling for many of us; Identity and purpose.

With the Void invading again, and a return to a more “grounded” (relatively speaking) threat, I believe this is the perfect opportunity to bring back meaningful faction conflict, and with the failed attempt with N’zoth, this could be a perfect time to “redeem” the void and make it be a constant threat and menacing presence over Azeroth. C’thun? Yogg Saron anyone?
We’ve seen a little bit of this during Dragonflight but, come on, friendship and butterflies can’t be THAT powerful right?

Imagine this:
The Void as a REAL manipulator rather than a big baddie boss for the sake of endgame.
We don’t fight him, we don’t try to stop him, because the idea is that we can’t; we’re too deep in the old god’s lies and manipulations, too busy waging War(craft).
The Old Gods and the Void thrive on discord, paranoia, and internal strife. Instead of just another full-scale invasion where Horde and Alliance line up side-by-side, what if the Void exploited our divisions?

We’ve seen the Horde go through chaotic leadership changes and internal struggles. What if the Void’s first major strike, especially in Midnight, was aimed at the Alliance’s perceived unity, specifically through human leadership?
Anduin remains fragile, his mental state and convictions are vulnerable.
A subtle, insidious corruption or manipulation of his spirit could cause him to make questionable decisions, sowing distrust among the Alliance races. This could lead to a slow-burn internal conflict. The core of WARcraft, while also allowîng the void to work behind the scene, with very little to no obstacles…
Imagine the Draenei, with their deep connection to the Light and past struggles against the Legion, being subtly framed as compromised or too close to the Eredars by Void whispers. This would isolate a key pillar of the Alliance.
The Alliance’s core strength is its unity. If the Void can shatter that trust and cohesion, the faction would tear itself apart without a single battleground clash. The Light, the primary counter to the Void, would be weakened by the internal doubt and division among its strongest champions.

This isn’t about just wanting us to kill each other for no reason.
It would bring back a real sense of belonging and purpose to our chosen factions, forcing us to deal with internal threats as well as external ones.
The Void is perfectly suited for this. It’s not just about overpowering armies; it’s about breaking minds and bonds, and being able to grow stronger while the enemy loses its focus.
We’d get the “WAR” in Warcraft back, not just as cosmic battles, but as intense, personal, and factional struggles.

With Midnight focusing on the Void’s invasion of Quel’Thalas, and the potential to spread through Azeroth, this is the perfect time for the Void to play chess, and create chaos rather than playing this “evil bad guy with a plan” that will fail because we’re the heroes so in the end we win.
How about we lose? How about this time, we’re the ones falling at the end of the raid?
They almost did it with ICC back in the day, and we got the anime-ish plot twist (as much as I loved it back then), but this schema has been repeating over and over and each time it makes less sense than the last.

Psychological warfare has so much potential

1 Like
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If the devs wanted conflict within the factions, they surely wouldn’t need magical mind manipulation to get it. There are vastly different ideologies within the two big banners - or there were, until Blizzard just decided to ignore that in favour of “we’re just 21th century good guys”. Alliance and Horde both have very different cultures, with different religions, different ideas of progess and the worth of traditions, different wants and needs. If you can’t spin a plausible internal conflict out any of that, you shouldn’t be a writer.
And especially if you are pointing towards Anduin, why would anyone need to introduce void influence to explain why people would have doubts about Anduin, after he basically broke down over having to wage a war, was imprisioned by the god of torture for a year or so, and was already mind-controlled by evil vodoo, after which he chose to just abandon all his responsibilities for years? With the DF-timeskip, Turalyon has ruled Stormwind considerably longer than Anduin.

Introducing void influence only makes any conflict less real and less interesting, not more so, because it makes the acting characters less responsible for their actions. Yeah, you could use the void agents to bring up some real simmering conflicts, to let them loose, but so could any foe without the void.

But that aside, splintering Alliance cohesion, and focussing on the peoples and characters we actually care about instead of some random new NPC faction isn’t a bad idea. I just don’t see any reason to expect it now. What I heard about the Arathi questline (I still haven’t found any motivation to play myelf) seems to be the direction they want to be going. “We all want the same things and can be friends, if we only keep the few bigots and propagandists at bay”. If they turn away from that with Midnight… great, that’d certainly be a step in the right direction. But I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

The “we should actually lose” idea has been around for quite a few addons as well. I vividly remember being quite baffled that Blizzard didn’t decide to let us lose in WoD, when it would have made for a great troughline into Legion, and nothing but some weird parallel dimension would have been lost. In BfA I was basically certain, that we were playing into N’zoth’s plans all along, and still find it hard to understand, how any writer thought it a good idea to let us kamehameha him instead.
But in Midnight? When losing would mean destruction of basically everything, since they just can’t seem to make any more relatable stakes than that anymore? Yeah, that’s not happening, either. Our plans to defeat the enemy might fail, so that its story can go on in Last Titan, or we might lose, just to be bailed out by titan ex machina, or something like that, but with the stakes as they are, the enemy can’t win.

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Ehh if they were to add another Alliance vs Horde totall war I’d like to have option to “Khadgar out of it”. You know like Khadgar did when BfA started.

My character spent too much time cooperating with various Horde characters for suddenly hating them and their kind to feel immersive.

I’m all for distrust, local conflicts and mutual caution bordering on hostility on faction level. Specially like we’ve seen in Arathi where it’s mostly the commoners, peasants, grunts and other simple normal folk who dislikes the other side. People who are far from all those world ending threats and history shaping events. To them Horde/Alliance are those pesky neighbors who stole “their” lands and resources.

What I’m against is full on faction war like in BfA, Cata or WC 1 & 2. If anything I would prefer a reverse BfA where players have to work with other faction champions to stop or prevent the war while raging hordes of namless npc want to murder one another en masse.

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We did had many WAR things.
Like other enemies. No always about Horde and Alliance war thing.

Myself dont much care about Horde vs Alliance. I have still enjoy war for other like TWW’s enemies spiders and undermind. Next ethereals/void.

If Midnight still not about Horde vs Alliance war. Better you quit play if you’re upset it.

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I’m sorry but the way the story has been going since BFA, I don’t think we will ever get a major conflict between the Alliance and the Horde. Best we can get is splinter supremacist factions, like the Red Dawn. Lame I know.