The Alliance and Horde have been congregating in the same hubs and doing exactly the same content for a long time now. It’s fun every now and again, but I’m itching for some conflict and tension at this point.
Besides the story, I think there’s a great appeal to running through content which is tailored for your character in accordance to their faction, class or even race. It feels exclusive, offers replayability and divides the bland community soup into united components. In that way, I think the game actually becomes more social when you split people up. Say what you like about BFA but the divided continents and PvP world quests were some of the best overworld content additions in recent times.
The Horde has broken the peace too many times. Let the Alliance commit some atrocities, Break up the Horde council (its lame). Put the war back in Warcraft!
Best case scenario would be to bring back the Alliance and Horde situation from Classic through TBC up to Wrath.
When they were not having an open warfare but were very hostile to each other, often sparking skirmishes when possible.
Dragonflight really killed the WarCraft feeling with it’s lame and bloated togetherness. People really didn’t like it. But also WoW is incapable of supporting all out war between factions. Or rather it’s team cannot do it.
Second BfA is the last thing this game needs.
And what’s worst is that people are predicting World Soul Saga will not make even a single move toward reignited violence between the facions.
Even more so Midnight expansion that will take place in Quel’thalas might display a disgusting feature of turning Silvermoon into a neutral city. If we will have Alliance filth running through it’s streets how are we supposed to have war with them in the future?
I really hope that for Midnight, Alliance will get it’s own hub. Like relatively nearby Gilneas that they worked so hard for to reclaim.
And not a moment too soon since TWW is a third expansion in a row where both factions share a hub.
In the past it was three expansions that had seperate ones with Cata, MoP and WoD.
This is all possible while still exploring faction conflict narrative
Why are there always people who think the two are completely tied?
Yes for gameplay reasons release all the restrictions, but limit the story to ever only be third party threats? I do not understand the logic, it got stale in dragonflight and its still stale now.
Let horde and alliance fight let them take over territorys and shape the world.
But we can’t be part of that. Let us be adventurers who work for whoever pays well. That way it does not matter which race one would like to play and no one would need to feel bad cause there faction lost territory.
The horde takes over Westfall? Cool new quests zones changes. Story gets enhanced with a horde outpost so close to the human capital.
But if we are still tied to the factions that would fell incredibly bad for all alliance players.
And you could still root for a faction and like them.more then the other one but if we are no longer the generals and heroes of a faction we don’t need to feel like we failed/the story forced us to fail our faction.
They can make zones where you can work just for one of the factions so it’s a clear “in this zone they are the enemy” type of deal and in other zones you can work for both and in the end of blizz decides to develop the story further and one of them wins the zones we can look at it and decide for our selfs if one side just had better tactics or forces
The Horde and the Alliance have stopped having conflicts of interest for quite a while now.
Meanwhile they have increasingly dangerous common enemies.
How long will it take for people to let the Warcraft 3 intro to sink in? It is stupid to fight each other while the world itself is in danger due to a third party.
If there will ever be another faction conflict, I want the option to disassociate myself from either side and be the adventurer for hire that we are supposed to be.
We are either adventurers for hire or world saving heroes. Either way we are not supposed to be bound to one of the 2 factions due to birth and political decisions of some faction leaders
This is not a Star Wars game with a Republic and an Empire that are clear good and evil.
Due to this being a two-faction game, neither side can actually win (Or lose), territorial gains and losses need to even out, because telling half the playerbase “Sucks to be you” is bad PR, it’s all a lot of hassle for highly debatable benefit.
I’d rather have more race- or class-based content (Levelling an alt in “Legion” was at least different in places), and just leave the dead horse that is the faction war buried and un-beaten.
In almost every expansion, such as Wrath of the Lich King or Mists of Pandaria, there was a faction conflict. While exploring and overcoming tough challenges, the Alliance and Horde often clashed, adding depth to the story. However, the current narrative has both factions constantly working together with little to no conflict. This undermines the fundamental distinction between the Alliance and Horde, making the faction divide feel meaningless. If there’s no longer any real rivalry, they might as well remove the concept entirely, as it no longer serves a purpose.
Always funny to see people cry for war but without any reason (or just to have a reasin to justify pvp only to gank noobs)
Guys, Blizzard won’t do another faction story, were over that one.
They brough so many cross faction featurs, they wont throw that in the trash because some want war.
And the faction war story is dryed up, its suck because neuter siede win (or lose) and everyone wont be happy-look at bfa how much backlash it had.
One sid e must be (very) stupid at the beginning only to reverse the situation
Do you belive night elves were hapoz shown completly incompetent?
Do you belive horde was happy geting villian baited again and lose then the war because Blizzard cant let one side win?
And after the many World ending threats it donst make sense to fight each another, even after Legion it was stupid.
You know that woud effectively remove one low kevel questing zone for the alliance.
And Blizzard wouldn’t do that again after teldrasil and tirisfall.
It gave huge backlash and as you mentioned, it woud stir wide in favor if the horde and even Blizzard isnt that stupid to pi** on the alliance leg-who pay for the game, and not to get slowly removed because horde in advantage slowly takes over.
As long as we can still do cross faction instanced content and cross faction guilds/communities can keep going, sure.
The game is too far into cross faction gameplay to turn that around now, but if they can find a way to keep that while also putting the tension between factions back, go for it.
From story perspective after 4-5 End of the World scenario sprinkled with wars between races who been and still are at the brink of extinction with a population probably not even 5 digit number it not really make sense to reheat old grudges
I know as long as there are two people one would want to kill the other, but really… if you want to use the story argument to justify the “faction conflict” you can’t really cherry pick what you like, but take the whole enchilada
The thought process behind my ‘limit the story’ it is very simple, we have different story archetypes in wow but they boil down to two types:
Horde and alliance comes together to face overwhelming threat (or fail to do so and players have to fix things, this is what Legion story is but functionally I’d still put it in that category, but even Suramar and all its brilliance had a faction conflict narrative even if it wasn’t direct fighting)
Horde and alliance are fighting eachother for different reasons wether it be terrain, physical goods or access to resources, someones honor got slighted, whatever.
If you take out one of the two entirely, you’re only left with one.
If the story was a tree with two branches, people are advocating for removing a whole branch.
If you were to remove lets say the coming together to face overwhelming threats, I would have the same critique, you’re still removing half of the story archetypes we’re used to seeing.
I’d also argue that without the faction conflict, horde and alliance coming together loses its special feeling and becomes boring in the same way that if we only have cosmic or third party threats, that becomes stale too (it already has to me)
In every single way, it is a reduction of possible future story outcomes.
And Azj-kahet stopped feeling like we’re at war with the Nerubians halfway through the leveling quests so the whole conflict itch isn’t being killed, another part of this is because the Nerubian charactes are fresh and unexplored, the factions are not, they have the interesting characters, seeing interesting characters interact interestingly is interesting and there’s only so much handshaking and smiling everyone can do to eachother before it all turns into a lullaby
Also I wouldn’t advocate for forcibly separating the players from the faction, an option to do so? a full mercmode? maybe, but there’s a lot of players that have the fantasy of faction loyalty and forcibly disconnecting the players from the factions will harm their perception of the game.
I agree with OP. I think player characters should be given far, far more autonomy and be far, far more frequently acknowledged for what and who they are. Race, faction, class - even gender might be fun though I’m not getting my hopes up these days tbh - but also what factions I’ve allied myself with. I want to fight players and NPC’s on the basis of what I do and who I am.
I genuinely just want to be acknowledged in the game instead of standing around all the time watching these characters take all the spotlight and generally doing rather stupid things. I did not enjoy TWW’s story at all. And there was so much questing content I could’ve levelled to max 5 times over, which is a convenient showcase for the fact that Blizzard could actually do this - they clearly have the resources.
Why do some people drop the “warcraft” part of the name and seem to imply that it is only “war” if it is between the Horde and the Alliance.
We have had war on Black dragons, Elementals, Scourge, Demons, Unaffiliated mortal groups, titan constructs, more bad dragons and now forces of the Void.
I also wouldn’t put black dragons and elementals in the same ballpark as scourge and the legion, the latter two felt like actual worldwide existential threats, black dragons and elementals did not, they were quest and raid objectives.
The scourge and legion had whole zones dedicated to show their might and influence on the land in comparison to the extend the others two don’t come close too.
I hope that helps answer your question of why some people or at the very least I consider faction conflict to be in a different ballpark as non-faction conflict
Edit:
And again, I believe that both archetypes of the stories are needed to prevent the other from going stale, if people were argueing that faction conflict should be the only type of story we should see, I would also go against that.
A vs H Faction conflict could only work after a massive timeskip that allows the newer generations to forget the lessons of the past, just like the situation we seem to be having right now IRL with all the lessons from the 20th century.
This would effectively need a WoW 2.
Right now anyone in the horde or the alliance who tries to start up messing around will become a pariah and fought by both factions. The memories of the 4th war are too recent.
Never going to happen in a MMORPG; devs would need to keep track of way too many things different players could chose differently. I mean, they didn’t even manage to properly work with the few choices we could make in the past (Loyalists vs. Revolutionaries; Red dragons DK questline etc) and had to be reminded by the community; and you expect them to keep track of even more such things?
Implementing adjustments to every quest based on player choices? Hell, we can be happy for dialogue options in quests that won’t change anything about the outcome of the quest. And it’s not just dev lazyness; it’s also the players themselves stopping devs from doing such things, because wherever players can make a choice there will have to be an option somewhere to undo that choice (or else there will be endless whining about it), because some ppl can’t live with the consequences of their actions.
It’s still there, you’re just too blind to see it.
WoWs different races & factions (different interests in ressources & developments into the future) could be worked with in way more interesting ways than primitively having them bash each others’ heads in. We don’t need to return to such backwards behavior in this game - it’s enough that some countries in the real world just can’t get over it.
And there was so much questing content I could’ve levelled to max 5 times over, which is a convenient showcase for the fact that Blizzard could actually do this - they clearly have the resources.