We might don’t get an answer from Blizzard but it is quite obvious they refuse to do any heroism or even actual anti hero stories like they did in the past anymore. I stick to the fact they hate the Horde since that is the most obvious answer.
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I’m not sure if you’re deliberately misinterpreting the points I’m making or just simply not taking the time to read them, as I’ve stated several times now (a pro faction-war poster) I don’t believe that faction conflict should be the only & sole purpose of the franchise. Furthermore, faction conflict has been prevalent throughout almost the entirety of WoW’s life span, just the same as the constant onslaught of world ending threats, to have one without the other just simply takes away from the game without giving anything in return. To say that its not the core of the franchise is half correct in the same way that its half of the entire franchise. These things can and have co-existed within the boundaries of the lore for the longest time.
I’ve stated several points above in the conversation that isn’t just “we find peace boring”. You’re welcome to scroll up if you care to take the time. Skipping cutscenes because people aren’t invested in doing quests for Jaina is not a good look. If anything I’ve only heard innumerable complaints about how this expansion so far makes player’s Horde characters feel like they’re Alliance by the amount of questing we have to do for the opposite faction. Funnily enough getting told to simply suck it up & you must kiss each other is not very becoming.
Cross faction gameplay doesn’t have to directly correlate with lore if the mechanic is purely for gameplay, you can still have people beating their chest at one-another without frothing at the mouth irl because that’s not healthy. The same way that Lightforged Death Knights/Warlocks are a thing, it doesn’t reflect lore at all but Blizzard still implemented it without a feasible explanation.
Perhaps if Blizzard once again gave people the environment in which they’re able to make up their minds about which faction more directly aligns with who they are as a person, by displaying core values, giving the opportunity to instill pride then there might be less of an imbalance. Because to me that just sounds like there’s an absolute white-washing of factions so people just pick whichever regardless, because ultimately it makes 0 difference, even though it should, flavour is important in any game.
This current bland story is simply not “it”.
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It does make a difference. You can play different races. You get different transmog and mount options. You have different quests (not the case right now, but there’s many examples of it in the past). You can spend time in different cities.
That’s just a few examples. So there’s still flavour.
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The problem here is that choice of character race, the most comprehensive flavour-decision you can make (Or power-wise, if we count racials) inherently ties you to a faction too, the faction’s ideals aligning with who people are as a person is strictly secondary to that, especially for somebody’s first character.
20 years ago, i wanted to play a Night elf, so faction choice was made for me by that choice, Alliance it was, reinforced by my alts being Alliance too, like this one, because Draenei are Alliance-only as well. (And before that, when this character was still a human, due to faction-limitations that have since been removed)
The one way your idea could work is if race-choice was decoupled from faction, making faction choice more of an Aldor/Scryers thing (Or a more recent example, covenants in SL, albeit less easily reneged on), and then we risk the Alliance just emptying completely because being in the faction led by a simpering boy-king isn’t very “Power fantasy”.
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I don’t think races should be decoupled from faction, but rather the player characters be decoupled from faction. We are not like ‘regular individuals from our selected races’. We are special.
In lore Orcs as a society should still be part of the horde. But if I should roll an orc who chooses to align himself with the alliance, then I think that’s an interesting choice.
As for your last remark: I think it’s the other way around, honestly. The alliance has such better cities. And power fantasy has nothing to do with NPCs. It’s about YOUR OWN power.
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True
SI:7 have a Blood Elf - not high, not void, BLOOD - Rouge agent, Narsilla Keensight
And we have a bunch of technically unaligned Orc NPC running around
Let the green/brown boys if they behave to join the Alliance
Same with Human, there isa TONS of reasons why a Human would side with the Horde or its ideals of working together
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I’ll be interested to know where that statistic came from?
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Some people think that because they’ve seen a couple of posts on the forums from the vocal minority, that must mean that ‘most people think this way’.
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That makes the most sense.
Let us be adventurers that work for who they want.
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Yeah, poor phrasing on my part (Was in a bit of a hurry typing that post), divest the PCs from the factions.
As for “Power fantasy”, the Horde just feels more powerful (Although in invisible numbers hidden in novels, they’re not), they get stuff done, the Alliance just reacts and mops up after the fact.
Cities don’t really enter the equation since BfA, the expansion cities (The ones that matter, in day to day activity) are the same for both factions, last time i went to SW proper (Not just the mage tower portal lobby) was for the Darkmoon faire…
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Fair enough. I don’t share that feeling, but that’s okay. Us, as players, having the choice to align ourselves with whom we want (maybe even allowing us to change this - with a cooldown) is always a good thing. Choice is good.
At the moment yes. But that could change.
I’m still expecting a big open world update. After this current saga could potentially be the perfect time for that. If such an update were to happen, capitals might get some more use again (also combined with the upcoming housing system).
Flavour from a time/expansion where faction conflict was present? Darkshore/Arathi warfront transmogs & mounts were an absolute blessing; Thematic to the race, well designed & carefully thought out, a mog for each armour class.
I think in part one of the biggest problems that WoW ever endured was the power fantasy that the player was presented with in the sense of being the main story character that’s infinitely stronger than any regular NPC. There are plenty of servers where the Alliance are picked just because people prefer the aesthetic & racials (flavour), Argent Dawn being one of them, Horde side is all but dead in comparison.
Letting the player explore the trials & tribulations of the individual race’s faction could be appealing, for example the persecution of the Orcs after the second war & their imprisonment in internment camps. Again it begs the question, why would said faction be okay with letting the other faction in when there’s been an untold amount of atrocities committed against them? Are we to genuinely believe that all can be forgiven & forgotten on a whim, erasing all previous history with a 3 year time skip and a cutscene where Jaina & Thrall experience an intimate moment together? On that note, why are we being forced to forget the “bad” that happened?
Exploring the struggle is what makes it interesting, getting to put yourself in one’s boots and come to understand the path they’ve walked & all that they’ve endured as a people. Story-telling should be as a fantasy novel is, exciting & tense, not like a nursery book.
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To name a RL example, after WW2, Europe clumped together really quickly against the massive threat against all of them (The USSR), that didn’t mean we forgot about what happened, it took about 50 years for the regular people on the street to let the grievances drop, but the governments cooperated intensively very quickly.
Problem is that Blizz can’t seem to write that for WoW (Or indeed anything subtle, for that matter), maybe because there’s nothing between us and the countries’ leaders (No people inbetween to say something like “I don’t like it, but the king insists…”), so the transition from war to peace is very sudden, only a few NPCs in DF expressed any doubts about the sudden peace at all, but i don’t expect that to change, “Warcraft” never was good at subtle storylines.
Flavour from 20 years worth of WoW. Flavour from difference in race options; from mounts, to class choice, to areas and several other examples.
There’s no need to try and straw man my arguments.
Those sets were not my personal taste; the human one was much too militaristic and, for mail at least, didn’t fit any of the mail wearing classes. The night elf one was just that: Night elf themed. Didn’t really fit with any other race imo.
So sure, flavour. But not very practical.
When our PCs get decoupled from the factions they could make some kind of adventurers guild that oversees us adventurers.
That way the factions could still clash and they don’t need to forgive and forget but both could accept the pcs as mercs
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Or we can go back to the old wow formula, in Vanilla which taught the player that if they are Horde the Alliance is the enemy and vice-versa. The times before the writer self inserts.
For all the time invested in the WoW story, it has been going down hill for several expansions now. I think peak balance between conflict and story telling was Wrath of the Lich King when both factions had good characters that weren’t fans of the other faction. That was good. Now every celebrity NPC is buddies with every other celebrity NPC and nobody gets to do anything because of that.
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The factions can be enemies but we as players should not be part of that at least not directly.
Sure you can root for the horde if you want but as long as we are directly part of the factions the whole war is a stupid idea.
It can never lead to anything without major backlash. It sucks if you loose a leader or a city or territory cause the story demands you’re side to loose.
If we are adventurers that work for the factions but we are not part of them there can be real consequences of the war without us players suffering for the story.
Plus we can be whatever race we want to be and play with whoever we want to play wich is a good thing
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We’ve had that for so long. Why is it so bad to have it be different for a while?
Not only is it boring for us, the players, but it also shackles the writers and greatly limits their creativity. There’s nothing wrong with self inserts (you might not like a particular take or topic, but oh well, you can’t have it all).
I disagree. It’s always a bit of a roller coaster. Legion went up and then an exciting decent, BfA went straight on but had a few select nice twists and turns, Shadowlands ran the cart off the bloody track, DF at least got the cart back on the track, even though it just kinda went straight ahead for a bit without any exciting loops and now in TWW there’s some velocity and some curves again.
Yes, that’s quite an analogy, but that pretty accurately represents how I feel about the story in the last several expansions.
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It worked just fine in Vanilla. I don’t see the issue. Back then you didn’t care about how poor Anduin might feel if you killed his fellow Alliance. It was just a natural state of being as a member of one faction or the other. Where was the backlash back then? There wasn’t any.
Only after they started with the self inserts, they created this religion of people who actually think it’s their moral duty to bring peace to a game called Warcraft. Cringe.
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In vanilla that was less of a problem because the story just started but even back then we had problems cause the players did not populated the sides equally because of race choices.
They had to give the horde elves to fix that.
Later people complaint that we where in that endless stalemate where nothing happned.
We fought eachother nothing changed the big bad appeart we had a truce and then we where back to fighting that does nothing.
Then blitz became bold. Horde leaders became raid bosses horde didn’t liked that. The alliance lost a whole city no one liked that.
The alliance marshes into dazalor and made the entire horde look like a band of toddlers no one liked that.
It’s not about how I feel attacking the other faction it’s about how it feels to loose a city or a leader or a territory cause the story demands it.
It like I said I am pro faction conflict but I want it to work properly and that won’t happen as long as we are bound to the factions