Because those are the 2 factions that the vast majority of races formed after WC3 (the starting point of WoW).
The factions already have plenty of characters that have a “questionable morality” if not outright evil. Mostly those are lesser characters, since if you put such a character in charge, it is a matter of time they start some serious bad stuff (Garrosh, Gallywix, Sylvanas,etc).
Now if you are asking why can we not play as the BAD guys (like siding with NZoth or some stuff), is because blizzard have a story to tell, and you cannot actually play a character that is actively siding with the antagonists and survives the game. Your character would be able to side “once” with an antagonist, and then he would get killed.
However, story and gameplay are two different things. Sometimes you can merge the two together.
But sometimes you cant. This is one of those cases.
Factions and races cannot fight each-other anymore. Because while all this “orc vs. human” and “horde vs. alliance” thing sounds cool on paper, in practice this is a multiplayer game and you depend on finding, and playing, with other people to get stuff done.
If you cant do that, you cant play.
So… unfortunately for you… our only way forward is to dilute factions and races even further. With orcs in the alliance and stuff like that.
°rises hand° … did all where the mount looks nice, which is all except Monk, Warrior & Druid (last only because the class in general is boring and I don’t really play it).
But yeah, in general I agree; doing seperate quests for the double edgy players would be time invested at the wrong point. Plus, they would need to keep options for “redeemed” characters to switch to the good side again. Plus, looking at how they forget ingame choices like Sylvanas Loyalist quest line or DK red dragons that should impact NPCs reaction to those characters later on, I doubt they have the capacity/will to do it right… and a few exceptional dialogue options with no change to game events otherwise wouldn’t do.
I remember with the Bloodsail buccaneers rep, a bunch of players ground that up to maximum for… a pirate hat by killing goblin NPCs, becoming hostile with the neutral goblin cities in the process, crying a river when an important quest led them to said goblin cities and they got attacked.
Now imagine “I need to get a quest from these NPCs, but in a huffy mood i killed them for not being edgy enough!”-threads on the forums, countless threads like that, because some players hate every NPC in the game, i’ll just file your suggestion in the “Good thing you don’t design the game”-archive…
Oh no, players will have to live with the consequences of their actions when roleplaying their characters in an RPG?
Honestly, the fact that the game doesn’t have these sorts of things is why it can feel grindy. It feels like you have to do everything and you’re always the hero.
That’s the problem with playing a MMORPG, the story paths need to remain similar for all players or you get technical issues, such as having to phase each NPC individually, based on whether the player killed them or not, Blizz can barely get phasing to work already.
If you want to play the baddie, and have consequences for your actions (Remember the outcry when the Horde lost after going “evil” for the fourth war? WoW-players love playing the baddie, but hate the consequences), single-player RPGs are more likely to deliver that.
Just because you work for different factions does not mean the story must diverge.
You’re assuming the player always succeeds regardless of the folly of the choices he makes or the factions he joins. You’re probably also assuming that good always wins, which was never the case in Warcraft until Cataclysm. Prior to that it was mostly evil that won, especially in The Frozen Throne!
The outcry over that is that they were forced to play the baddie and then forced to be good afterwards. For most characters that arc doesn’t make sense. Many would have seen through it and stood up prior to everything else, and for others they would have continued to work with Sylvanas.
None of that would have changed arcs of the major characters of course, but it would have allowed people to play what they want to play.
If they could each have chosen whether or not to join Sylvanas and then had different starting zones in Shadowlands as a result, I think the reaction would have been very, VERY different!
WoW is basically a “Good guys defeat the bad guys”-story, and the players are the good guys (Whether they like it or not), we only got the “Side with Sylvanas”-option after her fans demanded it, but since we can’t have Sylvanas doing Maw dailies for one part of the playerbase, and still standing around being edgy (And Warchief, which would cause no end of story-issues) for the rest, such decisions are inherently meaningless.
