I’m a wordy bastige, so I’m gonna break this down into some smaller chunks.
- What could they have done differently?
Knowing what we know now, not selling to Activision, and keeping a strong grip on the neck of their ‘office culture’ would have helped avoid a lot of the nonsense that has gripped WoW from Wrath onwards.
Keeping the Dudebros and the Cosby Suite Crawlers on their toes, firmly in line and actually doing their jobs would have kept the company a lot more pleasant to work at, avoided the mentality of ‘make cool arenas and E-Sport settings and mangle the Lore and Game to fit’ that torpedo’d so much, and most importantly, would have either avoided or minimized the harm done to the staff by the management and the ‘office culture’ of the higher-ups in the company.
Hindsight is 20/20, but some of these people need to be Cyclop’s optometrist, if you know what I mean.
- What makes a man go neutral
The option for players to join a third, neutral faction that specialized in assisting both Mega-Factions, be it a Mercenary Hall kind of situation, an expanded Argent Dawn/Crusade plotline where your focus was on beating the evil scary stuff down, not grrr Alliance or grrr Horde. This would have been useful for players who didn’t enjoy the tribalism that Blizzard forced for over a decade before they realized just how badly this was going for the longevity of their game, and it would have allowed Blizzard to write expansions and content with ‘hey, if you’re uninterested in politics or schemes or nationalism, try the Argent Crusade and just be a Good Boi’.
Alternatively, allowing players to gain reputation with the opposing faction at the cost of losing reputation with their own might have been a fascinating choice to pursue. You’ll never hit exalted or even revered, but you might be able to hit neutral or even friendly with the opposing faction, which might have opened up Cross-Faction play and new questlines for players willing to pursue this path of diplomacy.
- No ‘First amongst Equals’ nonsense
Despite maining Orcs, one of the thing that really irked me with WoW from Cataclysm onwards was the hyper-fixation on Orcs and Humans as the only races who mattered when it came to making policy and directing the Mega-Factions. We completely sidelined how much help, influence and importance the other Races in the Mega-Factions had and ignored the story-beats that this influence and social structures could have thrown into the mix, like Gnomes withdrawing technological assistance and advancement until the Alliance aided them with Gnomeragon and gave them a proper voice a the council, the Taurens’ influence on the Orcs’ spiritual re-awakening should have given them immense amount of political and social influence and curtailed a bunch of nonsense.
Dwarves have been bankrolling the Alliance and specifically Stormwind during the various conflicts and while they’re good and reliable friends, every friendship has limits, and the Darkspear Trolls should have been the Horde’s secondary breadbasket, being skilled hunters, fishers and survivalists who, on a bad day, were on-par with the Horde’s best hunters and trackers, and should have been revered for their aid in keeping the Horde’s soldiers fed and healthy while the pig-farms and rice paddies were being established in Durotar.
I can go on, but the Herd Mentality of the various peoples who make up the Mega-Factions have always irked me. Orcs being the First amongst Equals led to the whole Garrosh nonsense, and Humans being First amongst Equals gave rise to a lot of mutilation and massacres of the other races amongst the Alliance so Generic Fantasy Protagonist could run in, save the day, and boast about how being the Store-brand White Bread of Azeroth made them the best.
Garrosh not being a horrendous racist and knock-off of Faerun’s Obould Many-Arrows, being aggressive for the Horde and not for his own glory and advancement. The rest of the Horde not being his enemy, both on his part and on theirs, and Garrosh not immediately dismissing other cultures and their role in the overall culture of the Horde.
Varian’s story being made in-game canon and his imperfect fusion of his two selves making him gradually unfit for leadership, hence Anduin having to step up and other Faction/Racial Leaders stepping in to steer the ship, with various political, cultural and religious tensions flaring up as a result.
Avoiding genocide for shock value.
The Kaldorei remaining unapologetically defiant due to 10,000 years of isolation, the loss of 99% of their population to the Sundering, the trauma of the Sundering influencing their shattered culture and what they passed on to their children, having to entirely re-invent their culture with none of their old resources, equipment, tools, records or techniques available to them, and not playing second fiddle to Stormwind. By all means, lose the ‘Kalimdor belongs to the Kaldorei!’ angle because, hey, you Sundered a world and they simply lacked the population or interest in empire-building, but double down on the whole ‘I used to live here. This used to be a town.’ when you come across ruins or zones where the Kaldorei Empire once stood proudly, focus hard on that ‘we once owned this world, and look what happened’. That the Kaldorei were still deeply mourning what they had had, what they had lost, and the staggering cost of the whole scenario, both to the world and their people. These are living relics of the previous Age of Azeroth’s history, lean heavily into that.
Orcs are aliens to Azeroth, as are the Draenei, and that should have been played up, the Orcs desperately trying to connect to the Spirits of Azeroth to heal themselves and finding it difficult to do so, but when they do start to make those in-roads, it offers immense spiritual and cultural relief, and that difficulty making the Orcs hyper-fixate on strengthening that bond, meaning when somebody or something starts causing issues or starts daydreaming about unearthing Old Gods or drinking that Fel Koolaid, the Orcs are the first ones to notice the ripples in the pond, and the first ones to reach for a weapon as a result.
Kaldorei should have been a neutral race, as should the Forsaken, and been recruitable by both the Alliance and the Horde, rather than hard-baked into the Mega-Factions.
Kaldorei give us Druids, both with the Allied Race, and by unlocking them you gain the ability to roll a Druid with any Tauren or Troll, or Human. Forsaken give us warlocks, both with the Allied Race, and by unlocking them you gain the ability to roll a Warlock with any Troll or Orc, or any Human, Dwarf or Gnome.
Sin’dorei and Draenei should have been neutral races as well, with Sin’dorei going Blood Elves on the Horde and High Elves on the Alliance, granting Paladins either through their race or to the Tauren on the Horde. Draenei would have been an awkward fit for the Horde but keeping tabs on the Orcs, and ensuring their spiritual re-awakening was pulled off without a hitch would benefit the Draenei by proximity if nothing else. Draenei grant Shamans to Humans and Dwarves as well as having their normal Paladin class.
Goblins should have been a neutral allied race, going to both the Alliance and the Horde, as should Worgen, with Genn Greymane leading his Loyalists and going to the Alliance and Darius Crowley leading the Separatists, those who’d been imprisoned or mistreated for refusing to stay behind the Greymane Wall or rebelling against leaving the Alliance after the Orc Wars, to the Horde.
Goblin unlocking allow any race to become a Rogue or a Warlock. Worgen being unlocked allows any race to become Druid or a Priest.
Pandaren play out as normal. Monks for all!
I CAST FIST!
- What should they have done differently?
I have written quadrilogies on this, but to condense it down?
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Horde isn’t hamstrung by pants-on-head levels of stupidity because Orc McHonor needs to compensate for the size of their tusks by bathing their axe in the blood of newborns when the whole point of Thrall’s existence is to lead the Orcs back and away from the nonsense of the Old/Dark Horde and the Shadow Council, while the rest of the Hordes’ races just stands there dribbling in the corner.
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Alliance isn’t rendered impotent by Plot-Propelled Stupidity and pre-emptively does things to fortify their borders, enrich their peoples and advance their agendas without needing the Horde to come in and raze their everything and make them remember they’re arguably the strongest military force on the planet, and has kills that include Titan Keepers and Watchers, Old Gods and Dragon Aspects under their belts.
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Internal conflicts matter just as much as external ones. Criminal syndicates. Demon Cults. Old God Cults. The Court of Nobles. The Burning Blades. Struggles for power within the nations/racial leadership structures. Droughts, floods, fires and wars causing the common people to rebel or seek unsavory aid to protect and feed themselves. Corruption amongst the Guards and Grunts. Underground slaving rings. Titanic Mystery Cults meddling with stuff beyond their understanding. Religious schisms. Different biological and cultural needs of the various races making up the Mega-Factions causing chaos and division. The Light rubbing up the wrong way against Shamanism and Druidism. Druidism and Shamanism bleeding into each other and hard-liners on both sides arcing up over it. There’s just so much that could have been done with this and us not having to rush from world-ending threats every five minutes for content could have avoided some of the rushed expansion stuff.
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Every continent has their own established races and cultures to the point even my defective grey-matter struggles to remember them all, and this is staggeringly stupid. No. We’re in a fantasy post-apocalyptic setting. Sometimes there really is nothing there, or worse yet, we roll up and its within months after the last of the citizens died from something we easily could have solved for them. We enter a vast city only to find all of its inhabitants dead from the effects of the Sundering or the Chaos War and there’s this haunting air of walking into a freshly-tended graveyard that is dead silent and cold, that we stand above corpses and mouldering bones, and the line between us joining them or not was so fine we never even saw it until after it passed. Exploration, trade and learning should have played a much bigger role in how the Alliance and Horde expanded across of Azeroth as much as steel and fire and sorcery.
- Were you satisfied over the years?
Despite my incessant nagging and re-writing, yes.
There’s a lot I rag on with this game, but that’s because it made me care, about the world, about the lore of the world, and the future of it all. If I had come in at, say, Cataclysm? No, I’d probably have been unable to get in as I was with FF-Online, and I loved that game and its classes, but the world was inscrutably impenetrable without needing to spend scores of hours trying to find info-videos online and those were full of click-bait and self-pandering that made getting an actual feel for the setting nearly impossible.
Of all the many and varied entertainments and time-sinks I’ve dabbled with over the past forty-odd years, WoW has been one of the most enjoyable and least destructive for me.
