Their incompetence and laziness in bringing in Alliance races was so blatantly motivated by marketing purposes that it’s not even funny anymore. I understand this is a product and if it needs a reason to justify “rule of cool” it will bend characters, motivation and lore to deliver whatever next gimmick is to be on the back of the collector’s edition.
I’ve made peace with it the same way I’ve made peace with knowing WH40K’s story is gonna move at a glacial pace… In a decade maybe the Lion and Roboute will meet, I’m sure.
How do you personally feel about these two statements…
Do you think it should be possible for the Alliance and Horde to ever set their divergencies apart and be actual allies at a certain point in the story? If not, do you think they should always remain two superblocks fighting one another, or you envision a different alternative?
If they should put their enmity aside, then how long should it take? Because while I agree that the Alliance and the Horde haven’t entirely mended the massive rift between them, I also think things should change, and having these superblocks fighting one another can get stale after, well, 20 years.
I do not want anything like the Reclaimation of Gilneas or the Nelf tree content for Horde, thank you very much.
I want bloodshed, war, scheming and usurping. Throw in some underhanded tactics while we’re at it too.
I don’t want to hold hands with the Alliance while we turn Orgrimmar into an awesome city. And I certainly do not want lost isles back for the goblins if it’s a semi-neutral city like the elf one.
Furthermore, if my choices are mediocre faction war and repetitive storylines vs scrubbing ducks from oil, looking after kids, dealing with the emotional trauma of bozos (regardless of which faction they belong to), I will pick the former every single time.
I don’t want this garbage. Simple as.
The most based thing they could do is reshuffle the factions.
Make a storyline that breaks the current factions apart into smaller factions. Make them fight over resources, old hatreds, grudges, whatever. Make stuff up.
I do think the races of the two factions could eventually become genuine allies but at that point in time you’d need not only several instances of mutual aid but also many of those who remember the scars inflicted on each other to die off. Resentment is an emotion that can be passed on to the next generations and let’s not even talk about the long lived races who remember and have been present or subject of those tragedies. You’d need to timeskip several centuries in the future for that or an era of peace and prosperity so divine that ruining it on account of old hatred is unthinkable or socially taboo “Alright, alright uncle Starleaf, you’re drunk on Moonwine again, enough of your ranting about Trolls during the Nazmir campaign.”
Different alternative. Two equal superpowers locked in a forever coldwar means there’s never any development. They don’t even need to lose to each other (though they could/should). A ‘neutral’ big bad could dunk on one side more than the other, forcing a change in the balance of powers.
There’s too many options to choose from, but one example: What if the Iron Horde had, owing to the Dark Portal’s location, decimated the Alliance in the Eastern Kingdoms?
If the Alliance is suddenly not a super power the Horde needs to fear, how do things change?
Too equal entities that only ever square up in 40v40 RP-PvP skirmishes in the Arathi Highlands that are settled by magic beer means they’re never properly challenged on an emotional/moral level.
A close second.
Though, thinking about it, faith wars between Naaru aligned Draenei and Light faith Humans could always have been super interesting an angle, too.
Honestly I am surprised that during all this time, a third faction never arose, perhaps out of races that felt threatened by the ever-encroaching Alliance and Horde. A faction that just wishes to be left alone by either of the two, but realises that in order to be able to repel either of them, they need to band together to grow strong.
A few of the races I would have added to those would be:
The pandaren. They logically shouldn’t have any interest in a faction war and while the Alliance and Horde helped them with the Sha, the war also caused quite a bit of damage to Pandaria.
The neutral goblin cartels. This one’s self-explanatory. They’d probably continue selling to both Alliance and Horde, yet may feel that they’d need some help to stay neutral. And with the industry and production-capability behind them, they could definetly help their faction level the playing-field against the A and H on a technological level.
The tuskarr maybe. Similar to the Pandaren they’d have no interest in a faction war and may perhaps feel safer with other allies at their side. And atleast with the Pandaren they share an interest in good food and drink, those two would get along swell.
I cannot think of other races that’d fit so far, but my bar for this faction would simply be “We don’t want to belong to either the Alliance or Horde.” A faction literally born out of necessity to not get swallowed by the other two superpowers.
Dracthyr. I think the fact that Dracthyr are available to either faction isn’t because of some grand divide between them, but simply because the game has two factions and dracthyr need to be in both.
They would bring a magical component to the third faction, aswell as a cadre of super-soldiers to beef up the armies, especially with tuskarr and pandaren not being as numerous, nor really fielding standing armies.
Buuut, the Drachtyr don’t have the same frame of reference as the other races do, in that they haven’t seen the Alliance and Horde in action , so they’ve less reason to be distrustful of them. They came to know the factions when most of the hatred seemed to die down.
I will say, I don’t think this is as true as some people here make it out to be. Yes, people have feelings of hostility towards the diverse, the strange, the different, true. Yes, some people actively hold resentment for the whole cycled of hatred thing.
But the races of the Alliance and [some races in] the Horde should know, at this stage, the cost of fighting one another. They lost hundreds, thousands of people to that. Would they be willing to lose more out of mere resentment? Is your family worth sacrificing for, so that maybe some less orcs would be around? Some might, but it does not seem what most would want.
On top of that, we see plenty of moments in which this or that race is always ready to forget or forgive that this happened.
Ie. The Wrathgate affected the Horde’s trust in the Forsaken too, and it’s not clear to which extent their efforts in Cataclysm helped. Yet this was conveniently ignored as of BFA and most were fine with it.
At a certain point in time, we need to acknowledge that these factions keep getting together and make it part of the plot, instead of finding reasons to return to point zero everytime.
Agree to disagree then. I would prefer for us to go in that direction, tbh.
The Iron Horde happened 10 years ago. Yep. That’s what I mean when I say the conflict has grown stale. That Iron Horde ship has sailed.
I would personally appreciate:
i) Turn the faction war into arcs were the Alliance and Horde can build a tenuous, but growing stronger over time, alliance.
ii) Reshuffling the factions, with some races changing their alliegance (not going to happen)
iii) Slowly switch from a faction-driven narrative, to a race/culture driven one, make that less big-picture oriented, and make it more like it was with Classic, with small pockets of geocalized conflicts. Taurens VS dwarf explorers, and so on. I would not be opposed to inner conflicts with the same faction too.
iv) Have a third faction emerge, perhaps with more neutral roots.
Have you read history by any chance? It’s filled to the brim with examples of decades long wars that recur over and over again, sometimes over completely ridiculous things, simply because people resent each other.
Imho, I have a different impression of it. It is often leaders who move entire armies as they desire, with the common soldiers not always being in love with the idea of getting through the seven hells and back. To make an example, during the First World War people started to make uneasy truces with the other side of the fence to avoid getting killed, because the conditions were this dire.
It was often those in charge who wanted to conquer and exploit, as is the case with the Fire Nation, and unless they were easy wars of conquest, the moment they started to sink in your everyday life, most citizen would hate the idea. And imagine on Azeroth, where in the span of fifteen years or so you went through five wars: the Lich King’s, Deathwing’s, Garrosh’s, Garrosh 2.0, and then Sylvanas and N’Zoth. You’d think they’d be tired of fighting and losing resources to that.
tbh warcraft should be an idealized fantasy setting where theres constant war between the playable factions as well as all the big bads and not an idealized fantasy setting where we learn to cooperate and be friends
The lack of a third faction is almost certainly a gameplay conceit, in that they’d have to build a bunch of levelling content, find space for them in the world, etc. etc.
A WoW 2 could do it, but try dropping a third faction into the game now. A solid like…idk, 80% of the quests are faction locked, especially the levelling quests.
Where would you slot them in during, for example, BfA? Would they just never get to do that content? A merc system where they pretend to be one faction or another? Seems weak.
Like it or not, the pre-existing content makes adding an ‘Independent’ faction nigh impossible; at the very least far too much effort to attempt for the gains it would earn in turn.
Goblins especially, by the way. They’re like…one of the least played non-allied races in the game. Maybe even the least played. Getting their own faction could change that of course (“If you build it, they will come!” and all that) but it’s hard to sell “hey I want to invest a huge amount of time on both story and gameplay design for an audience we have no data to say even exists.”
I said there are many options and the Iron Horde was just one, and your response to that is “the Iron Horde happened 10 years ago”. Yeah, I know, oddly the fact that I brought them up means I’m probably aware of their whole deal and when it occurred. I didn’t need that pointing out.
Maybe in Legion, the Legion focuses on the Alliance more because of the Draenei.
Or maybe they focus on the Horde more, because Gul’dan is a real sore loser.
Maybe in BfA, Azshara lashes out at the NElves and their allies more than the Horde.
Shadowlands could have had larger attacks on the Alliance because Sylvanas is petty.
Maybe the Primalists would’ve got some real development, and the Horde would be vastly weakened by the mass defection of the Earthen Ring (who also did some light eco-terrorism on their way out the door), coupled with a resurgence of Scarlets (funded by the Alliance) leaves both Kalimdor’s shamanistic groups and the northern Eastern Kingdoms on the back foot. Oh no! What’s the Alliance going to do now?
I dont really think you can be neutral IC and still be allowed to walk into a capital city of the other faction only exceptions would be blood elves and even taht would kinda be weird, cuz why not just make it a quel dorei or w.e at that point
Oh don’t worry, I know that due to gameplay reasons we’ll likely never see a third faction in current wow. It was more a thing of “Logically I think a third faction would’ve arisen by now, and this is who I’d put in it -if- it did.”
Yes, but only in the extreme circumstances that we’ve previously seen of worldwide demon invasions, void invasions and a dragon threatening to break the world in twine - even then in all those examples the Horde and Alliance still throw digs at each other, make a mockery of each other and sometimes even still fight each other. Ultimately, the Alliance and Horde aren’t just factions anymore, they’re the setting itself, they are Warcraft, they are so inherently linked to the setting and idea of Warcraft that destroying them - with good intentions or not - will kill this game in a very visceral way for a lot of people.
An alternative:
The Alliance and Horde are ever at each other’s throats, however let us look over the recent lore we’ve gotten, MoP should have been the logical end of large-scale warfare between the Horde in the most physical sense of the word ‘warfare’ but warfare takes many forms that aren’t large battlegrounds. A large part of modern warfare in our world is political warfare, the propaganda war, the proxy wars - every single one of these are elements Blizzard could put to use that would not only greatly enhance the depth of the factions in terms of worldbuilding but also provide a myriad different ways for players to perceive the problems that keep these two factions at each other’s throats.
BfA has caused a colossal issue in that it brought Azeroth into a devastating world war right after a time of relative peace and stability (not including the Legion Invasion), but its a war that they were so scared to do anything with that the resolutions to it have all been entirely off-screen, or some half-hearted throwaway npc comment about peace and truces and armestices. It is a writing mistake so blindingly obvious that I, to this day, cannot understand how they walked face first into it. Ideally, the period after BfA would have been an expansion focusing on overhauling Azeroth bit-by-bit and allowing players to see the devastation the war had actually inflicted on the peoples of both factions and allow players to help rebuild or bring some sort of coherent peace to the end of the 4th War.
It should be properly written with the impact due such storytelling first of all, but alas, here we are.
Brand Recognition. That is literally the only reason. They could - and possibly should have, the number of times I have to see this blasted ‘point’ - named it something different, but having “World of Warcraft, from the studios that brought you Warcraft Reign of Chaos and the Frozen Throne!” has a lot more marketing clout.
