Slightly is a bit of an understatement. They pretty much ran the faction concept into the ground, by just making the conflict story about nothing but that conflict was bad. Maybe switching aggressors more readily would have been undermining that concept, because the Alliance attecking after the last attack came by the Horde would feel much more justified? I don’t know, but either way, doing the same kind of faction war story twice, with a Horde civil war mixed in, and essentialy ending with a general amnesty for everyone, doesn’t speak of either great planning, or great writing talent either way.
I’d say we can be happy that the Factions are functionally dead now, but I guess that only made Blizzard stop writing two perspectives on conflicts, instead of writing better and more flexible ones…
It’s not just their looks, though. Orcs come from a violent primitive culture, and have been fed with demonic energies that changed their bodies and made them prone to brutal rage. The Forsaken were introduced as spiteful, cruel and hateful, killing, torturing and experimenting on the living on a whim. Goblins are a parody of exploitative capitalism. The Blood Elves’ original claim to fame was their crippling magic addiction that made them take up the vilest magics to combat it, and their military dictatorship. Most of the Horde races were pretty much created to be pretty bad guys. They just had better justifications before, because, in the good old Warhammer tradition, pretty much every side was full of baddies.
The humans were depicted as squabbling kingdoms that would hunt “lesser” beings like trolls pretty much for sport, the dwarves had an imperialist mindest that made them decide to dig wherever they wanted, and were willing to just murder any natives that resisted relocation, and the Night Elves were depicted as a bunch of xenophobes, giving you a warning shot in the head for daring to enter their expansive woods.
Not to mention that there were straight-out oppressive racists like Garithos around, and revenge-crusaders like Daelin inhibiting the attempts of the demon-freed new Horde from turning over a new leaf.
While the Horde races probably were worse by their written nature, there were more than enough grievances to go around to combat any guilt about slaughering the Alliance scum.
So, I don’t thinkt the Horde being bad guys is a problem. I think the problem is that for some reason the devs decided to make the players into good guys, and changed the factions to fit that. So suddenly the bad sides of the Alliance were pretty much written out, and the bad sides of the Horde were excised in civil wars, so that only the sufficiently good guys remained there as well. So now “Warcraft” just refers to fighting random trash armies from nowhere, like the pretty much unexplained Primalists or the random bigot armies the scarlets conjure when necessary, as well as the “cosmic forces” most people don’t care for, I guess…
For a long time… not much, really. The biggest conversations were probably abou Camp Taujaro, where Alliance misjudgements led to the unintended death of civilians, and the purge of Dalaran, where all the Blood Elves, guilty and innocent alike, were incarcerated and those who resisted (or met the wrong side of “police violence” by the Silver Covenant) were met with deadly force. Apart from that, I guess Jaina wanted to drown all of Orgrimmar after the Theramore bombing, and was only barely averted from executing that plan. Some people seem to find it objectionable that the Alliance raided Zandalar in BfA. And there are still some old quests that reflect the older, more mediveal character of the old Alliance around, like “culling” of Troll youths. But Alliance evil hasn’t been much of an issue for quite a few years, sadly.
