Blizzard has announced Cross-Faction Guilds are coming in Patch 10.1: Embers of Neltharion.
While Cross-Faction grouping enabled players to be the faction they wanted and still play with their friends, many had to create alternate faction guilds fracturing their guild communities since guilds are single-faction. Blizzard looks to be rectifying this situation by enabling Cross-Faction Guilds allowing players of both factions in a single guild. Currently, details are sparse regarding the limitations of this new system, but expect thorough testing on the PTR.
With Cross-faction guilds people will really easily be able to create class themed guilds like the Legion Order Halls if they want too, not to mention neutral organisations.
Looking very good for neutral rp right there! Only in capital cities you canât all come together but honestly⌠thatâs such a minor inconvenience I donât mind, and I would feel weird suddenly seeing orcs and tauren in SW or humans and dwarves in Org like itâs nobodyâs business.
Good.
It overstayed its welcome by the end of WoD, and definitely with Legion. The only way BFA dragging it out the grave again could have been interesting would have been going hard on the Old God and corrupting influence of Azurite angle. Which they utterly wasted and faceplanted on.
When Dracthyr arrive in Stormwind, the NPCs roll between a hostile or a welcoming response. One of the hostile responses from guards is mistaking you as Horde and trying to banish you. Even at times of peace, Horde are not welcome in Stormwind and the guards treat them as an enemy.
Maybe not as extreme as being over-over, and theyâll likely still be writing the story with the slow decay of tension in mind but it does seem theyâre moving towards a more permanent-in-some-way form of communication and co-operation between the factions as a whole. The interview with Steve Danuser and Morgan Day had them saying that they want to preserve the identity of the factions whilst loosening the restrictions and hostilities which I think (perhaps optimistically) is possibleif they focus on telling stories about the different races in the factions and give us more worldbuilding and setting-building centred around them.
Steve: In Dragonflight, there is so much content that is available to every player regardless of what faction they are. And we have things like conditional quest text in places, that allow us to maintain some of that flavor showing differences between the Horde and Alliance, so weâll continue keeping that spirit. But in terms of the fiction of the world, it gives us a lot of opportunities and places to take the storyline that would be more limited if we had just a hard line of these two factions never being able to cooperate.
It seems that the story teamâs take-away is that they can do a lot more and be a lot more versatile if they keep the Horde-Alliance as just background factions that someone is a part of.
I think whatâs wilder for me is the lack of object permanence some people seem to suffer from where everything outside of the immediate spotlight of the story ceases to exist, and that theyâre not allowed to make stories they find interesting outside of it. There being an official peace between the factions doesnât prevent war heads from doing conflict RP if they so desire.
The present circumstances of the Horde and Alliance is very different to the Classic and TBC era. Relations were frosty without devolving into outright hostility then and they would never consider such a large scale, shared endeavour like the Dragonscale Expedition. They only teamed up in those early days to face off against threats like Câthun â now theyâre cooperating to pool knowledge, resources, and pursue mutual goals.
What weâre getting now is largely a story that reflects a more consistent path towards peace.
Yeah, thatâs why I specified that itâs over as a major theme. I think thereâs still room for them to include old hostilities in future stories, it just wonât reflect the majority view of the factions and certainly not their leadership.
Curious to see if thereâll be an increase in guilds centred around the Argent Crusade, Cenarion Circle, Ebon Blade, Kirin Tor etc. with this addition. Or even existing guilds choosing to embrace or reject the change.
Because I can just as easily see a lot of âAlliance Guildsâ just tacking on Horde membership like itâs an â& Knucklesâ
I would say there will without a doubt be, having a system in place where they can all be in one guild, understand one another and RP freely together is a huge thing for neutral-based guilds.
This is also true enough, provided they keep âmuh consequencesâ in mind for being the war-heads the possibility is still entirely there.
I think most guilds will stay faction-specific. I RPed in an Argent guild for about a year and the inability to enter most hubs and bases as a whole was bit of a problem (fortunately, Hearthglen is beautiful).
Without a cool theme to balance things out and justify being cross-faction, most guilds would find out itâs just too much of a hassle.
