I have no real horse in this race since whether I play or not hinges on RP more than anything else, but I do want to echo Aerilen’s earlier comments on tribalism. Blizzard has kind of fostered this weird mentality where it isn’t just about story involvement, but involvement in relation to the respective factions. Sylvanas was the face of the Horde (to some) throughout Legion and BFA, so the moment she turned antagonist Anduin had to go do the same.
There’s really no other reason why, besides cheap Arthas fanservice. It probably honestly would’ve made more sense for Bolvar to have been the one to be “turned” or for him to have already been under the Jailer’s thrall, considering he literally wore the Helm of Domination. But because Anduin was picked to mirror Sylvanas, to make sure both factions have their evil leaders, if Anduin ends up being forgiven for being brainwashed and Sylvanas isn’t you just know some people will be very upset.
Alliance bias will be the first thing people talk about. And because of that, I genuinely don’t see them killing Sylv if they don’t also kill or get rid of Anduin.
that’s pretty much it the garrosh cinematic was cool #removefactionsin10.0
The big true is that they never should have implimented the factions as a mechanic and the original idea of- a faction free wow - would have been incredibly muscular.
Agreed but here we are. I actually quite liked the idea of factions, but the longer the game’s gone on they really do just feel a bit tacked on. Like how many peace talks do we need to have or how many times do we need to see humans in Orgrimmar before they decide maybe it could just be permanent?
I think what hurts it the most is they just retell the same story but with a different veneer of paint. The Horde having success before turning on itself because corruption is a tale as old as 1995.
The Horde, despite being shown to have genuine grievances are battered down and made out to be villains for it (Magister Hathorel did nothing wrong) and conversely the Alliance’s grievances are made out to be narrative defining features and arcs (Teldrassil) but they’re never concluded in a way that pleases anyone.
I like factions and the faction war, but I have to concede that Blizzard is incapable of presenting the story in a nuanced light or even outside of near-explicit good/evil.
When the focus is on the factions, the Horde ends up as the protagonist, but without any agency and existing purely to be saved from itself by the heroic Alliance, while the Alliance exists to save the Horde from itself, but all story developments can’t endanger the status quo, so they never get resolved.
Factions kind of feel like a relic when Blizzard realised there was too much bad blood floating around for the Alliance/Horde to be rubbing shoulders just yet, and I imagine the effort in 2004 (particularly given Classic WoW was objectively unfinished) was too great to allow for race-specific questing to be allocated to nearly everything.
So Blizzard, being Blizzard, kicked the can down the road before realising it was really effective marketing. So they hype it up and soon it’s more or less the face of the game for advertising, but never really the heart of it. Blizzard gets dangerously close to making a point about petty conflicts in the face of wider adversity, except they keep making it because the actual focus of the story is just the wider conflict which is always explicit good/evil
that was more-so meant to indicate that sylvanas probably won’t die because i seriously doubt anduin will
This is true, but then again Blizzard isn’t exactly good at following up on either faction’s story. Vol’jin was set up to radically change how the Horde works after Garrosh and then just vanished until he died. Most recently we got a new Council in place of a Warchief, something that has never happened before, and they’ve done basically nothing with it.
I don’t even remember if the Council has gathered in-game since the 8.3 scene or whatever patch it was.
They’ve done absolutely nothing with Azeroth and it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t even deign to fill anyone in on what happened qhike Shadowlands happened until some question at Blizzcon. And the answer to that will be as insipid as you can imagine.
To be fair, the whole killing an Old God thing probably made people feel like Azeroth is fine now. That big sword sticking out of Silithus is just a lil’ flesh wound.
Pretty sure the planet’s alive and well, after the Champion of Azeroth worked with the Champions of Azeroth, led by the Speaker of Azeroth, to transfer all of the Azerite back to Azeroth through the Heart of Azeroth.
Yeah but it still has dungeons as well as dragons doesn’t it
The issue is the writing team’s utter incompetence, not the factions.
If anything the factions are what at least let RPers do interesting things outside of the current Red Alliance state of being.
Remove factions and nothing will really change with the overall story’s quality
Tyrande forgives Sylvanas and they share a hug and talk about how they both weren’t in control or whatever, but Malfurion and the rest of the night elves don’t. Cue night elven civil war and (gasp) internal conflict in the Alliance.
