Also while I think Exile’s Reach is fine, it also feels extremely shallow.
Won’t happen, but a bunch of race+class combo specific storylines along the levelling process to help ground you in the faction would be nice.
And would serve to dump a whole slew of new NPCs for them to use elsewhere.
Yeah it’d mean a ton of extra work needed, but a) that’s their fault for not restricting race+class choice more and b) small indie company gonna cry??
I think you are misconstruing my point about the Zandalari. If we had a plethora of Zandalari NPCs that were prelates in this expansion and this one Zandalari was highlighted to be rebellious for whatever reason then I think me and other folk would not mind it as much. Generally folk would rather that when Zandalari are being depicted they should do justice to their racial background other then having a dino armor and not be another Silver Hand tabard diversity stand-in because for some odd reason the quest designer didnt want to have an all human team.
I would say personally it’s just about Blizzard’s unwillingness to write new characters and stick with them. Several races suffer from the problem where there are only a handful (if even that many) notable characters to choose from to advance their story. It makes their entire faction seem useless and incompetent without that faction’s OP named character to carry all the weight for them.
This leads to two problems - either the characters never die and there are no stakes, or they do and there’s nobody to replace them. Because Blizzard won’t write new characters that can become the ‘figureheads’ for the faction.
It also got pretty stale seeing the same characters in every patch doing the same thing, and some are present throughout expansions (which also has its own problems, for example - you do write a new character that’s present throughout the current expansion, but once the expansion is over you drop them completely??) so any potential new characters stop getting any spotlight and get forgotten.
I am forever peeved about Night Elves not getting Delaryn as a potential new recurring character. Draenei are like, doomed because Velen is like the only notable Draenei left. Forsaken is led by… Lilian Voss and Calia Menethil? In some ways I’m thankful for Shadowlands for writing out Sylvanas and Anduin (for however long), but the replacements are just so bland.
Yrel could’ve been such a nice new character, especially for Draenei who really need some new characters, but she’s stuck in WoD. I get it - AU and everything, but when has that even stopped anyone?
A night elf woman?
is honestly a great sum-up of Blizzard’s incompetence.
People would definitely enjoy a setting more if it was explained in better detail. They wrote Traveler, which had good reception, which also told about the world from a down-to-earth perspective - what stops them to expand on that? To open the discontinued overarching plotpoints and expand on them more, creating more flavour without the need to rescue the world for the Nth time?
I get that it is 
for some and people want indefinite action like it is ESO with Cyrodiil, but it has been driven into the mud and needs a simple reset. Timeskip simply wasn’t enough, because Blizzard cannot even do that properly without nose-diving into a dreadful situation n.184th and not expand on what was happening and how the world has changed. (without some obscure one-liners in quests and novels outside of the game itself)
I’ve always defended the addition of new races, so for me the setting went bonkers around Legion and Shadowlands.
Specifically, I took issue with the Legion having space ships. In Warcraft 3 nothing of the sort was suggested. They seemed to use the same weapons as everyone else-- swords, axes, bows. And they had portals, but those are magic.
When you introduce something like Spaceships which can navigate the cosmos into your setting, you instantly make swords & guns look like a joke. How am I supposed to take an orc with a sword seriously when the Legion has seemingly figured out FTL travel?
Why did the Legion even need elaborate invasion plots ( War of the Ancients, Warcraft 3, Gul’dan in Legion ) if they have space ships? How am I ever supposed to look at a catapult and think " Oooh dangerous " when the Alliance has a spaceship that shoots giant laser beams?
It’s like Anime power scaling, it just took everything to 11 for no reason.
That’s one of my big issues, technology in a fantasy setting that makes you wonder why anyone still uses swords.
Secondly is Shadowlands, the Covenants/Big Four being so… small, just makes it feel unsatisfying. And yes I know Blizzard said there’s more afterlives and what not, but the Big Four are all settled in a zone roughly the size of a Dragon Isles zone.
How can I look at Maldraxxus and think " Yo these guys are the Scourge’s daddy " when they’re so… unimpressive? Arthas ruled an entire continent and endangered the whole world, Maldraxxus struggles to control its own zone-sized territory. And the Jailer, who by now rules the Afterlife with what should be an infinite army ( trillions of souls in the cosmos feeding him ) fails to take Azeroth, ONE PLANET?
Shadowlands was a mistake. Revendreth/Denathrius/Castle Nathria were all great tho.
The faction war has been replaced with absolutely nothing. Since 8.2.5 the Alliance and Horde, the two factions through which players are connected to the setting, have been completely inactive. Stagnant. Stormwind’s king has been gone for some 7 or so years now in the setting, and replaced for 1 or 2, and we have yet to hear of this affecting anything.
Alexstraza asked the factions for military support and both send exactly 2 soldiers, who stand in the waking shores exchanging greetings and making dinner plans.
Why are there no faction forces actively fighting the primalists, serving not only to actually add some much needed depth to the mortal primalists but also an actual connection to the player factions? Why is there zero unease whatsoever between the Horde and Alliance races on the dragon isles?
Sure, worlds should grow and develop, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, they’ve just left a void where there used to be something, and stopped writing characters with any depth whatsoever.
(And no, going full british museum by sending tomb raiders and archeologists is not military support.)
Two words. Time Tavel. All else snowballs from this initial transgression treating established canon as a tourist attraction to scribble “Dork The Orc wuz here” onto, blooming into the half-assed desecration that was WoD. From there, the setting was irrevocably broken and the mere suggestion of shadowlands was treated as a remotely good idea.
Some of it went wrong when people started to expect that the game was a one-track story.
Going with the boomer answer and say it went wrong somewhere in WotLK
That is not to say the lore was great or always respected previously, but it had plenty of ambiguous plots setting up a future worth exploring.
Wasting Characters
Thrall going on a quest to outland and reconnect with his people and meeting Groms kid, to said kid getting lectures and learning what it means to be a honorable and intelligent warrior by Saurfang and Thrall in Wotlk. For all of that to manifest at the end of a single questline, which sticks out as an oddity in the plot because Garrosh otherwise went off the deep end.
Not to mention how we celebrate the butchered potential of Garrosh in shadowlands, because if nothing else he was the same war-crazed racial purist dictator, we had to beat back in mist of Pandaria.
Garrosh is just one victim, we have a whole towns worth of forgotten characters, who are doomed to obscurity besides maybe a few cameos or nostalgia bait quests.
The few among them who gets to hang out in the relevancy club more often than not feel forced or out of place.
The Warchiefs Curse.
Besides thrall, no Warchief lasted beyond 2 expansions on the throne.
Vol’jin didn’t even get a chance to BE warchief besides showing up in a single patch and dying in the next expansion.
Garrosh was put on the throne early and we knew he was volatile, but rather than continue to nudge him towards a horde counterpart to the aggressive Varian, he instead became a warmongering, racial purist dictator.
And Sylvanas only repeated that mistake, although with a slightly different outcome and with slightly different morals.
Meanwhile the Alliance maintained a steady and solid roaster of leaders, who seem only to suffer from bloat, shelving the lesser leaders to focus only one a couple at a time.
The Rule of Cool and The Lies.
The rule of cool is great, but Blizzard overuse it and the setting suffers because of it.
On top of that they have continually become less and less trustworthy with the player base, from lies about the future, to poor executions of predictable outcomes, they try to convince us our predictions is actually gonna subvert our expectations (“you won’t guess who it was that burned the tree!” , “she’s morally grey”) but they don’t,
The Books
Its a mixed bag, but I will tilt to the side of the fence that believe the books have done more bad than good for the setting. While there are some great books that explore long past conflicts or focus on a single character in the in-between time, we also suffer on the reliance of books to fill up the plot holes or explain character motivations, meanwhile we are left confused in the game because why would they bother explaining it to us again, when there is a half-baked book doing it for them.
The Chronicles
Great they tried to create sort of lore bible, but then abandons it and says it was written by a unreliable titan narrator, which could work if WoW was like that.
Warhammer is build on unreliable narrations, you can have conflicting lore, its expected to be convoluted and sometimes false.
WoW and Warcraft as a whole is not that.
So why would I care about a series of books that boils down to titan propaganda when I really want concrete lore I can trust?
Under Delivering
The army of light is a disappointment, build up to be this army of survivors from different legion torn worlds, only to turn out its 1 ship full of Draenei, partially lead by a human, and he has 1000 years of experience because nether time wobblily wobbliy.
The legion is endless, unstoppable, uncountable and yet their own homeworld is not entirely under their control and was easily assaulted by a single ship and a handful of regular Draenei and horde/alliance champions.
Without its master the scourge will become an even greater threat, not really we managed to stage a counter assault in Icecrown and later when we were in shadowlands it was relevant once and never brought up again, so much for a supposedly world ending threat.
The shadowlands is one big case over selling and under delivering.
Figure Heads
In Mist Varian goes on a quest which lead to some much needed character growth, while he previously had shown a soft side to the horde, Mist solidified this.
His quest for troops to aid in his Pandaria campaign taught him about his allies, and he worked with them to gain their respect. He was rewarded by his allies in the alliance with leadership of the faction, affectively becoming the first alliance warchief counterpart, known as High King.
Anduin seemingly inherited this title instead of earning it because, I dunno.
And now in some twist of irony the horde has done away with their warchief ruler becoming more like the old alliance, while the Alliance maintain their warchief for all we know.
In conclusion, The setting did not maintain its own foundation and we are witness to natural degradation as new talent replaces the old guard. The new talent is left to either piece together crumbling ruins or discard it and start from scratch with what they can salvage. Maybe if the developers had maintained a strict adherence to a lore bible, we wouldn’t be discussing this issue today.
While War in on itself, for the sake of war, with nothing else but to do war and foster new wars – ain’t it chief, neither is every character speaking of a peace that isn’t in some way manifested in anything beyond a “few” (actually, quite a number) of dialouges spread out across 1 set of zones, the Dragon Isles.
I know the cries and desperation for an overworld change is getting to be a bit zzz at this point, but so far, the only plot progression from war and into the -preferably- and more realistic, tenacious peace, is within the Dragon Isle and it’s a complete overhaul. One could argue that there was “peace” in the Shadowlands too, but no one beyond the Heroes of Azeroth and Ol’ Emma for some reason, ever went there or saw it as far as we know. No military force, no commanders beyond the heroes and champions, no scouts, no traders - nothing.
War exists on Azeroth, against the still roaming Scourge, against Demons hiding out there (Looking at you Man’ari…), against Gnolls, against Quilboar, against etc etc. And if anything the “peace”, and I will continue to put that into qoutations, is a truce and a ceasefire that we are following as factions to some effect, but with skirmishes very likely happening across the globe in far-flung regions as we speak. I think the added touch of realism to the peace being something you actively have to strive for, that cannot be beamed into the heads of every Azeroth inhabitant the second the patch dropped - Peace you have to work for, and respect and treat as a fragile egg in the hands of a rabies-infested mongoose on an ungodly amount of black tar Her— … Rather than everyone instantly kissed and made up is, IMO, a better way of storytelling and a much more believable narrative. Instead of everythings forgiven ever, heh sorry for trying to ethnically cleanse your entire faction and people from Dalaran Aethas Sunreaver but thank you for giving me my old locket my old friend he he he says I Jaina 
TL;DR - Peace isn’t a guarantee, it’s a full time job by innumerous hearts, minds and souls and it should be treated as such if they want to have the world be at peace. If not, then there will be conflict, even in a fantasy world.
But we have characters, we have Ishanah, Boros, Nobundo, Fareeya, Romuul, Y’mera etc… Blizzard just refuses to flash them out and use them in the setting, and when they did used Telaamon in BFA they killed him off in the same patch and made his sacrifice even worthless in the long term.
I think it simply lost its teeth. You can argue with war but it’s not just war that is missing, it’s true conflict in general. The only time people actually were angry at each other in this expansion were Wrathion and Sabellion and that was more like banter played for laughs instead of actual viewpoints arguing with each other and not finding any solution.
Because in the end that is what the factions represented. Two sides of the same coin and the fact that you got war~ and peacemongers on both sides. That was what made it interesting. Even Though we all picked our faction we never truly wanted to see one win, or at least knew that would never happen. Now that we don’t have a war between the factions any longer, we know how every story ends. The only difference will be the color scheme that tries to conquer Azeroth next and that’s just as thin of a story as it can be.
But, to be fair, the question should also be how long could you even tell a story like that. Where you know neither side will ever win. After a few expansions that will lose its shine too but the true problem in that regard is how they concluded it.
Because as THE theme of warcraft, since the very first game, all of the faction war is just supposed to end because a sad orc was killed by a Banshee who made an oopsie.
That’s just not it and to think that we are meant to believe that everything is forgiven by now is honestly just the most offensive piece of writing they did in the last years.
When you see the Dragonflight cinematic, with the Dwarf and the Zandalari happily flying together like besties, you should ask yourself “were they not there just five years ago?”. The alliance literally raided Dazar’Alor and killed the Zandalaris godking. You have a “funny” quest on the alliance side where you control a fire elemental and kill 500 Goblins. The alliance burned down caravans in Voldun, innocent Vulpera at that, of course not to mention the burning of Teldrassil or the attack on Stromgarde and now we are meant to say “yeah that was a few years ago. My burned family doesn’t matter anymore uwu”. It’s just completely lacking any consequence from bfa and feels more like a dm quickly brushing over because he wants to tell another story now. Maybe should have done so in another franchise too.
Also with the faction pride, the pride for the races has been lost too, which honestly goes on for longer than just bfa onwards. I think the problem is that the defs started to make npc’s like a player would make their character, and not like an actual person on Azeroth.
Starting with Tauren “Paladins”/Sunwalkers and the fact that they just wear human armour and have the same human class hall as their alliance counterparts. It does not matter if a player wants to dress their Tauren like that, but it does take from the different cultures that make Azeroth interesting when an official character does so. And you could find examples like that for any race, especially now in Dragonflight.
For (a personal) example: I defended Vulpera for the longest time, because I thought desert nomads that do anything to survive, that have scary bone rituals and that live in the harshest desert on Azeroth, is cool and absolutely hordecore…but then you get the Vulpera npc’s in Dragonflight. Starting with the Kirin Tor brothers who seem to take the setting as serious as the current writers, and going on with random profession trainers, in a human dress wearing funny crystal glasses…again if a player does so, whatever I don’t have to play with them, but if this is what the defs show me Azeroth to be I can’t take the setting serious any longer and with that it simply becomes boring.
I think it shows how they try to be relatable, in random npc’s like that, as well as in their big story cutscenes and once again, that’s just not it. Varian was never relatable, he was a badass with the coolest sword since lightsabers.
I think what’s truly frustrating is that unless they actually make a big timeskip of like 20 years or whatever, something where they more or less can start from scratch, there is just no turning back. Even if the next expansion will actually be the world revamp, which I honestly do believe, it doesn’t matter if we only have to defend against the next big world ending colour scheme. The weakest characters, we actually know and understand both, fighting each other, will always be a thousand times more exciting than the biggest thing from the cosmic chart they can pull. And it just does not seem the current writers are able enough of doing that.
I´d say the problem isnt so much the faction war in and of itself, but how it is written. Media is full of eternal rivalries who wage war against each other again and again and again. Jedi vs Sith. The Imperium and Chaos. Team Red vs Team Blue. NATO vs Warsaw Pact. Norf FC vs Souf FC. You name it. And it usually works, time and time again.
So whats different in Warcraft? We are in this weird spot where factions are these monolithic blocs where each member nation is synonymus with its leading figurehead who all happen to be friends on first name basis and all share the same personality of honor, selflessness and no personal ambitions whatsoever, other then serving their people. With that being the groundwork laid, faction wars inevitable have to be contrived and weird. And it doesnt help that the reasons for conflict we get are weirder still.
You dont get a “lordaeronian exiles and high elven diaspora form a powerful political faction and put immense internal pressure on the High King to push agressive politics.” You get “Sylvanas wants global war of annihilation because if we dont start war now, 80 years from now the alliance may or may not attack us at some point, in some way, maybe???” and everyone just nods and goes along while peacenik Anduin sits at the top, of all people.
Its just bad. Writing a good faction war plot is easy, once you diversify internal interests within the factions, make use of characters who have more ambitions in life then “honor” and arent all friends on first name basis. Also dont immediatly make it a global all out war of extinction.
I just think they rushed through so many ,decades old, established plots (Azshara , 4th war and Nzoth all in one expansion was an atrocity) and retconned/changed so many things that people just find it hard to connect to any new lore they try to establish.
Like Dragonflight seems and is a good expansion but lorewise I have never been this disinterested in the plot .
The faction war had its problems (never being able to realise the stakes that blizzard kept raising, half the time being a ‘wipe the other side out entirely’ plot that is patently never going to go anywhere and the whiplash of blizzard repeatedly shoving the entire conflict into the background when they wheel out the Big Enemy Bad Guy for the final patch) but it hasn’t felt as if it’s been replaced by anything that can do the same amount of legwork for the setting.
The grounded emotional character moments have been hit or miss, some very good (the new ottuk questline hit me right where I live) and some less so. The problem I see is that these quests very often don’t go anywhere and it feels like Blizzard still has not found the balance of tying these things back to the main plot. The main plots in Slands and DF involving ‘and then suddenly threat you never knew about but who existed all the time breaks free’ does not help.
This is the correct answer. Burning Crusade was a rough time, despite being the version of the game I sunk the most amount of time and effort into.
This is still the crux of the problem, both for the faction war and the Justice League of Azeroth trash we’ve got post-BFA.
People complain how BFA was handled and I agree that it’s wasted potential, given how half the expansion wasn’t even about the Blood War but us uniting against two Big Bads, with 8.1 being the actually good patch in terms of story and content.
So what did we get regarding peace time? The period during which the world heals and could be built with new stories, new lore characters and some fresh takes on how Azeroth is doing when there’s no world war. The time when we could have had Order Halls plotting, adventurers beating down resurgent local threats and some moments of diplomacy, both skirmishes or actual peaceful resolutions, on the frontiers of the Horde and the Alliance.
We got a Time Skip and the dumpster fire that was the Exploring Azeroth guide book. It’s Blizzard admitting they can’t actually build their world and keep the playerbase invested without a plot of an overarching global threat, and even that is abysmal.
Contrary to popular belief I don’t want the faction war rebooted and engulfing the entire world because WAR GOOD (as every idiot thinks that’s what is at the heart of these arguments), it’s because it’s the only way we have seen the world advancing in some direction, as both factions are present across the world. Meanwhile the Big Bad factions are usually focused on a new continent or one area (barring the prologue patch periods when they invade capitals or whatever) and we get barely anything in terms of lore or how the world reacts outside these zones.
Though I share similar sentiments to the idea that of late a number of big threats (Argus-as-a-planet, Aszhara, N’zoth) were wasted because they showed up for one patch and then were done, it does occur to me that vanilla did basically exactly that as well.
Of the endgame raiding threats we had:
Ragnaros
Onyxia
Nefarian
Hakkar
C’thun+the Qiraji
and Kel’thuzad
Each of which only got a patch each. I expect part of the reason we (I) consider them different is that I was 14 at the time, and also that the storytelling/game design has changed as the industry/developers have evolved.
Also everything was new and exciting at that time. These days we’re so used to the cycle that it’s really jaded us into knowing exactly what to expect with each patch and the ultimate fate of every threat that rears it’s head.