When the nine clockworks of the unseen strike the lion of the shadowed canticle, the silenced construct of twilight will herald its second emergence, Vixi
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Following “The Last Titan” our real enemy is revealed. The one who originally manipulated Zovaal into breaking the shadowlands.
This enigmatic figure is the true adversary, stronger than any prior. And he wants to destroy Azeroth for…reasons unknown.
This storyline has been in the work for decades, as Blizzard already had this character in mind when they first created “Warcraft 2: Orcs & Humans”. Everything that has transpired was his design.
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The “mad” seers are always right, they’re just not patient and polite enough to make their point eloquently and so we keep killing them until the full force of the truth hits us wholly unprepared, no matter how many dying gasps warned us in advance.
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Imagine if Illidan told everyone back in WC3 or in TBC that “Actually, I just want to destroy Sargeras. My plan is to let the Legion open a portal directly to Argus so we can do that. Let’s team up?”
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And then he totally goes along with being lightforged for the objectively true prophecy and saves us all.
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Might also be that people don’t want to break out of the Horde/Alliance mindset because that is what got them in the game to begin with.
I love the Horde and Alliance rivalry, cold war, hot war, border conflict fighting, it’s why I started playing and it’s what I want from the game, the noble, righteous Grand Alliance vs the savage Horde.
You make quite a few fair points, but I dunno if I wholly agree.
The Alliance had to change alot to survive too, in both leadership and culture, even if they kept their core territories (which really only the dwarves and humans kept).
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While true, I do think that some stuff needs to end eventually. The faction divide was an original part of the setting and WoW in particular yes, but it’s been almost 20 years of WoW and over that of the franchise.
It gets tiresome after a while, there is only so much you can really explore with it and we’ve already had numerous re-treads and rather botched attempts to keep it up.
And currently it’s not relevant. Gameplay wise, we can already now queue up cross-faction and the story is moving away from it very blatantly.
Clinging onto the faction system both for lore and gameplay just helps WoW stagnate in my opinion. It’s not to say I dislike it or hated it. It was alot of fun. I just feel it has run its course.
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I don’t want it to end 
Please Vixi, dont force me to team of with them :stares_at_goblins:
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All good things must end. Embrace the new union of the technological short folks.
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Absolutely this.
That story arc has run its course. The ONE chance they had to do that well, in BFA, was botched massively, and wound up being ‘SoO 2, Even Worse Boogaloo’ and didn’t lead into the various better plot hooks it could have done (like the Void, which we’ve come back to, late, anyway…)
WoW has had its ‘present day’ worldbuilding done badly for ages now, but none more-so that Faction interactions/relations and, frankly, if they can’t even handle that then they just shouldn’t.
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The same thing which got Saurfang on side with the war originally: the Alliance will never truly ever leave the Horde alone in the long term. Even if they became isolationist.
The Alliance technically started hostilities, in Silithus and the dwarves were mulling over a cataclysmic first strike on the Horde with Azerite imbued weaponry So eh.
Alao re. The factions, the original idea for wow, would have been better. The factions should have always been a narrative backdrop and not a total gameplay mechanic. That’s my take. You could then have more dynamic conflicts and interactions between them and the peoples of Azeroth.
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Hmm in the War of Thorns short story the Alliance present in Silithus were dwarves and night elves and they got ambushed and attacked by Horde goblins tho.
But dunno what happened first: Before the Storm, the game, or the War of Thorns short story D:
Thats true, same way that the Horde wouls never leave the Alliance alone even if the Alliance cedes all the territory the Horde wants to them!
They truly are two-sides to the same coin, can’t live with, but also not without eachother anymore.
I just can’t imagine a world were humans, dwarves and gnomes aren’t close allies defending 
I’ll get to it when I reach vanilla WoW in the Warcraft Retrospective, but the faction divide wasn’t even in the original plan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/rrdiio/original_plan_for_wow_did_not_include_factions/
I tracked vanilla WoW development news back in the day, and factions were announced only later in development. Blizzard introduced the faction divide into WoW after playing Dark Age of Camelot, and Kevin Jordan specifically claims credit for convincing Allen Adham to include them.
This might explain why Blizzard made the Forsaken join the Horde because Sylvanas played upon Cairne’s sense of pity or something, and why they made the night elves join the Alliance because… er… uh… reasons.
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This would have made alot of sense considering how WC3, RoC in particular ended. The only real time the conflict between Horde & Alliance is actually brought up again in TfT is in the bonus campaign with Daelin Proudmoore. And it’s very much played like he is in the wrong and a relic of the past with everyone else having moved on.
So it felt logical by the narrative to continue a story in which the Horde had made peace with the surviving Alliance & humanity, and it would instead explore the new growing individual groups and factions like the newly sprouted forsaken and their struggles against the scourge.
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Hugs are boring. More blood, please!
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Great. Just great. Thanks, Kevin 
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Based Master, not writing about peace couse it’s boring. This is not World of Peacecraft afterall. I cannot imagine half the races just forgiving the other half so short time after last war. That doesn’t even happen irl lmao. Some will never forget. Hundreds of orcish generations will pass and there will still be Draenei who have lost their families on Draenor, never forgetting.
And you never should forget.
I said it before, I’ll say it again, I’ve been a Gilneas rp’er since 2013, and that questline was just… tonedeaf doesn’t even cover it.
This.
I felt a disturbance in the force. As if thousands of nerds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
As for the last attempt of the faction war in BfA… imho BfA suffered from trying to cram too many things into one expansion. It was marketed as being the last “Hurrah!” of the faction war, but then halfway through we suddenly found ourselves battling against Azshara and the naga who were trying to free N’zoth ( and succeeded), after which we had to battle an Old God once more.
Had it been me I would’ve done the following:
BfA: Faction war, Kul Tiras and Zandalar, though id keep the old god storyhooks of Mythrax and the fall of House Stormsong, but they’d be there for later. Naga stuff that ends up leading into the next expansion.
Next expansion: Nazjatar as a full-fledged continent, which we spend dealing with Azshara’s machinations, story leads into the freeing of N’zoth
Expansion after that: The Old God is free, Alliance and Horde are on the ropes, Azeroth now has to deal with a newly ascendant Black Empire. N’zoth is not outright destroyed but beaten similar to how C’thun and Yog-Saron were, or fakes his own death at the hands of the adventurers.
Shadowlands forgotten, instead we go straight into Dragonflight.
Would it have been everyone’s cup of tea? Probably not, but that’s how I would’ve tried things atleast.
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And the night elves, until very recently. The night elves are the only who have gone through the most Horde-like storyline, with them moving forward and going through a great deal of change. The draenei are in a bit of an odd spot too.
But even some of the races which have lost their core territories are focused heavily on the restoration of the old lands. Gilneas, Gnomeregan, even the draenei are looking to sort of reclaim Argus in their own way. Where they came from is extremely important for them.
For the Horde, it’s a little different. There’s no “claim Stranglethorn for the Darkspear so we may rule over our homeland” movement, or a “fix Outland so we orcs can live on our homeworld once more” drive, or even a “Kezan is Bilgewater clay, we need to reclaim it” drive. A lot of them are starting new lives in new lands, and a lot of that ones who still live in their old territory are living completely different lives.
The vibes are pretty different and you can see this in the roleplaying communities, at least on this server. It’s one of the reasons why “the North” is so popular is the movement to reclaim Lordaeron, along with a lot of high elven guilds and their desire to reclaim Quel’thalas. A significant chunk of the night elven community is still anti-Horde too, driven by the desire to reclaim their forests, and so on.
While I can agree with a lot of this, representation is important. I’m not arguing for a return to faction warfare or a stronger divide between the factions, just equal representation of the different races that players can play and have been drawn to.
Warcraft is a diverse setting and we all have different segments that we enjoy more than others, and it’s a little sad for some of us that the Kalimdor Horde has been put on the back burner for the time being and for the foreseeable future. The involvement of two more orc characters in the War Within is a step in the right direction, though we have no idea how major or minor their involvement is.
I’m all for the deletion of the faction divide, just as long as some attention is given to races that aren’t humans, dead humans or any flavour of elf.
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