It’s evident that factions are very outdated lorewise. Horde vs Alliance is not a thing anymore and storywise it always ends up with that the Horde and the Alliance teams up against the greater evil.
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Factions as they were in WoW never made sense. Orcs vs Humans made sense. Invading Horde vs defending Alliance made sense. Alliance vs. Zombies and New Horde vs aggressive primitives made sense. Alliences in war make sense. Stable political power blocks in the absence of a current war, and with quite a lot of spread around the globe, and not much in the way of cultural homogenity on the other hand don’t make sense. It made sense for Horde and Alliance to break apart after the second war. And it would have made sense for them to break apart after the third.
Instead it got ever more ridiculous. Why, of course the Night Elfs will enter a treaty of mutual defense with the people from another continent! And of course the Horde will do the same with a group of murderous zombies that they kinda pity! And who cares about civil wars, and racial hatreds within the factions, we’ra all a great big family, because… well, because the gameplay doesn’t allow us to leave or faction, mainly, but if that’s not a stong bond, I don’t know what is!
So yeah, let’s just throw in dimensional travelers, servants of the void, and whatever else we can find somewhere on the world, it’s not like it mattered anymore…
Nah. I’m all for war in warcraft. I’m all for some of these wars to be along racial lines. But I don’t think treating alliances as immutable like the game mechanics do ever did anything good for the story. The world would be so much more dynamic, if the Belves actually could have switched to the Alliance, or if the Night Elves could actually have left the Alliance, because it wasn’t working out for them, and they actually don’t really want to work with industrialist dwarves and anti-environment gnomes. But that was never really on the table.
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They are also one of the last fun things in WoW lore. Just look at how active this forum was in BfA with its faction focus to how active is it now in Shadowlands where everything is neutral. Now if you want the future to look like SL be my guest, but don’t be surprised if not that many people stick around.
I’ll agree that there is a lack of fun things in WoW lore. So let’s get some new ones. And if you want wars, creating an environment where dwarves can fight goblins and elves can fight trolls without involving world-spanning power blocks isn’t exactly a bad thing. It certainly would be a mistake to take the opportunity to kill some orcs from you. But the factions actually hinder that, rather than help it, which is why MoP’s and BfA’s faction wars ended the same way: Team-ups against the “bad Horde”.
That’s like saying that Sylvanas is a great character, because one in three threads are about her, though… Factions are certainly more polarizing than neutrality (duh…), but that doesn’t make them a good idea. There is an argument that anything is better than apathy, and I might agree with that, but the idea that we can’t have anything better than the contempt I had in BfA seems so pessimistic that I don’t see why we would bother.
All those races and agendas being forced into a singular organisation that constantly takes terrable decisions, while the other is inactive 80% of the time… I agree
BfA was about a faction war? I remember that I killed blood trolls and witches most of the expansion. And 2 warfronts that quickly became loot driven.
War can be fun if they are able to make it credible. So far, both wars started with a powerful Horde winning and doing genocides and a feeble Alliance losing on all fronts. Then the Horde leader goes bad, and everybody fights the “bad” Horde, and everybody is (un-)happy after.
A real war with fronts that go both ways, with victories and defeats for both factions would be interesting. But WOW team is not able (or willing) to do something like that.
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It’s also quite clear that Blizzard…
A: …doesn’t want to glorify or normalise war at this point. So even when they focus on the faction war, they will make sure to hit us with the tragedy of it all, and will essentially tell us that we are doing wrong, whenever they comment on it.
B: …wants the ability to give Alliance and Horde the same story content whenever they want to. That includes cooperating with the same NPCs to reach the same goals, and that isn’t really compatible with a deep hatred for each other.
I don’t see either of these restrictions changing any time soon. So anyone who wants faction war plots should also be aware that in this framework they are asking to be constantly guilt-tripped, and that they will still be asked to cooperate with big names like Thrall and Jaina, no matter how much you think you should be allowed to hate them.
An all-out war with a mediveal take on morality isn’t coming back.
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The game and to an extent the world is built around the factions so doing away with them is the biggest leap they could do. That said even when you look at large scale conflicts of reality there were multiple fronts between unique forces. And to make a functional war narrative you’Re actively required to have both sides believe their ideas are so great they’re to die for.
Can’t really work, when you have crap like Sadfang, Blanduin, Baine, etc consistently undermining the narrative.
Keeping factions relevant doesn’t necessarily imply all-out wars though. For all the reasons you listed they can’t write war scenarios properly right now, that’s for sure, but they can certainly write faction-based stories. Things like local conflicts, spying operations, rivalries over new lands/resources, border tensions, racial grievances… That’s what they had been doing up until BFA after all.
I love factions and I think they make sense. Many very different races are living on a planet deeply rooted in war, they struggle to build themselves a place in the world, and so they band together with other races with whom them have cultural similarities, historical bonds or common interests, in order to secure this place.
Now the question is, what’s a faction, or rather what should it be ? A mere military alliance ? A confederation ? A state of some sort ?
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Sure, why do you need factions for that, though? The alternative to factions isn’t everyone being happy together. It’s everyone doing their own thing. Now, I can see the practical argument for the factions in that they can’t and won’t create 24+ seperate factional plotlines. With Horde and Alliance you can just make them do stuff against each other and not have to think about more complex motivations than “what’s bad for the other faction is somehow good for us”. But we don’t have to wonder that we get the world-building depth of a puddle if that’s what we ask for.
But we really don’t have to give everyone a storyline all the time anyways. We can have one patch where the Forsaken-Human-relations are in the foreground (think Before the Storm with spy stuff around it), and focus on the Ashenvale border in the next pach, and a ideological conflict between Bilgewater-goblins and Mulgore-tauren after that, without really needing factions. The player can just be a third party investigating, or they can choose their side from conflict to conflict. As if they were a real character that could make some decisions. Ridiculous, I know. You can still have your “us against them”, it just doesn’t have to be the same “us” and “them” all the time.
Now, I can imagine that it might feel strange to have a renowned mechagnome champion help out the tauren in spiritual problems… But we already have goblins doing just that (and actually, with the number of ‘neutral’ groups we pretty much have Alliance doing that for the Highmountains as well…), and this way there could at least be a player decision involved.
They don’t even have that anymore, though. We essentially have grand empires, that span most of the known world and that are held together by… voluntary agreement. Yeah, no, no one can sell me that is a realistic proposition. Especially not with the flimsy justifications they threw at us with allied races.
I can see the arguement from a gameplay perspective but even there there’s a bunch of counterarguements to be offered
I can however not imagine that it is a good idea to just remove the factions as a story element as a whole
I understand the issues raised; feels like non humans/orcs are absolutely sidelined lorewise (unless they have a prominent wc3 era leader, then they get a little bit more attention, even then not that much) but the people you expect to completely uproot the factions and replace it with something new are the same types of people that writes everything as tall human short human purple human long eared human etc.
In general the removal of something in favour of replacement often leads to the replacement being less good
You don’t need to remove the factions to focus more on individual races or put the story on other themes, you can just focus on the individual races, maybe outside of the framework of the factions, or maybe within it. If you remove the factions, that ‘or maybe within it’ just ceases to be an option entirely.
To say we need to remove the factions now because right now in this moment of the story not much is happening feels like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot for the future.
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I’m sorry, but… what exactly ceases to be an option, if the factions are removed? Your main point seems to be the harm that removal would cause, and… well, story-wise I can’t see any. Unchangable factions are an restriction to the writing, nothing more.
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The option to use the factions as a story element itself is lost once the factions are lost is what I’m trying to say
The day orcs can walk around in stormwind or gnomes can happily walk through the drag in Orgrimmar is the day WoW will lose its soul imo
It’d “expand” the lore, but it would also flatten it
kind of like how Zhovaal extended the lore massively with his plotting and planning, but it not really feeling good at all
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The Alliance is outdated. They deserve to be fully destroyed. Only then Azeroth can have a chance at peace ans posperity. The tyranny of the alliance holds the whole world down.
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…how? I mean… if we remove the factions… how does that prevent the writers from creating and using factions whenever they like? Along whichever political and racial lines they like?
Now, you don’t need Horde and Alliance to have the Stormwind faction be hostile to the Orgrimmar faction. Gameplay-wise I’d prefer it to be “unfriendly” reputation, which allows players to move around without being attacked, but doesn’t allow for positive interactions like trade and quests. But the fun thing about removing the factions would be that you could actually change which cities are available over time. When Orcs and Humans are allying against a common enemy, you could allow them to visit each others’ citites, and change it back when the story moved on from that. No reason to keep things the same forever.
But the main point is that the outcome you seem to want to prevent just isn’t implied in removing the two Factions at all.
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Factions are outdated and there is no easy solution. It will take an exceedingly deft writer to alleviate the damage that’s been done over the years and make the factions relevant again. From a storytelling perspective, breaking down the factions is a far more interesting option – but I don’t think that’s a feasible solution for World of Warcraft. I am not saying it is impossible, but the factions seem hardcoded into the structure of the game. If you are to rip them apart then you may as well just create a World of Warcraft 2, and I don’t think there’s much of an economic incentive for Activision-Blizzard to do that, sadly. Not while the cow is still going strong.
Which is a pity for someone like me. I really have no interest in exploring the “void lords” or whatever else Blizzard is cooking up with all this cosmological garbage. However, a future Azeroth without the Alliance and Horde? Now that has the potential to be interesting. You can do so much storytelling with the world if you just allow the individual factions some agency.
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Most of it seems to work through race restrictions and reputation restrictions. So I don’t see why we would assume that changing it is a technical near-impossibility. Where do you see the hurdles that would take an inordinate amount of work to overcome? Especially if the pvp system can essentially stay as it is. And with mercenary-mode already in the game and cross-faction-raiding all but announced by Ion, the grouping doesn’t seem to be the problem, either.
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Its very questionable statement. People with same opinion as you, don’t understand MMO narrative structure. As devs said before in many interviews - the WoW is a product for a wiiiiide audience. Everyone, in theory, should be able to find something to do in wow. Factions is no exception to this rule. The statistics from the age of original vanilla, shows that the most popular FIRST character for all newbies back then was - alliance/human/paladin. And that is essentially what is alliance is - the absorbent of ppl who want play lawful-stupid characters and feel justified for committing mass murder, because they have morale high ground. And that is fine. It just a video game. But there also normal ppl who just want to play a game without being patronized by quest giver all the time for “doing the right thing”. That why Horde exist, and that why horde side of the story always has been superior to alliance, consistently trough all the expansions. And that why there always will be factions. Even if they made Alliance to be purely cosmetics faction with no player assign to it. You still will have factions inside of Horde - because guess what - Horde is a faction which have sub-faction inside sub-factions and so on. So i dunno what have you been smoking when you wrote your post.
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Nowadays Blood Elves and Nightborne are strong enough to secede from the Horde and create their own independent elven faction, actually. Just be neutral toward both the Alliance and Horde and there should be no big problem (sort of like the Goblin cartels), especially because the Forsaken are without Sylvanas and weakened right now, and the Kalimdor Horde is largely busy with Night Elves anyway for now… the coalition Silvermoon-Suramar could become even a unified Kingdom especially if Lor’themar and Thalyssra will have a “royal” child together in the future, otherwise it can just stay as an elven federation. Night Elves could do the same and secede from the Alliance as well creating their own elven faction, not sure if the Void Elves would follow them as they seem more attached to the Humans for now though. Maybe Quel’dorei rather than Ren’dorei is an option too.
That’s partly right, actually…in Vanilla when I was totally ignorant of Warcraft and WoW lore, the first character I had made back then was a Human…not Paladin as I never liked lawful/stupid good but a Mage and then a Warlock, while even if Blood Elves couldn’t be played back then, I know now I should have rolled a Forsaken at least in order to be closed to the lore of Quel’thalas simply because of Sylvanas… so, originally the Alliance had way more players not just because they had all the “cuter” races, but also because most players were largely ignorant about the lore like me, so because of that you will be drawn to the Human race just by instinct, until you learn more about the lore and play older games like I did after a while when TBC came out…