At the start of BFA I was like Alliance pride! Then slowly, can we just be done with this crap?
I mean the actual war (not Kul tiras and Zandalar since both don’t have that much faction war going on)
Sure there’s a couple good characters, but the rest is crap
A 13 year old can write a better faction war.
This is just awful, tbh, if this was my expac, I would do a WoD and put it out of its misery and forget about it
Save the N’zoth and Azshara and future stuff for later
The thing that would make a faction war good, if there was no “saving Azeroth from a big baddie” Why must there ALWAYS be a big bad guy in wow in wartime? Can we for once just have a actual war for Azeroth’s sake
It shows the Development is indeed running out of inspiration for idea. For goodness sake they are using a AR design based on one of my OCs for a spinoff I’ve had on hold.
To make it quite short and simple, they are pacing the little plot they have very thin; due to the stress they are receiving from competitions such as FF14 and Elder Scrolls.
Christie Golden is a very talented writer. Two projects she’s done such as Before the Storm and taken a role in The Wolves of Lady Death, I find her stories to become quite easy to immerse one’s self in.
However it’s the Developers who tend to poorly execute things.
They can’t have an expansion without a big bad because if it’s just faction war, either nobody wins (and all the players are unhappy) or one side loses (and half the players are unhappy). They need an external threat so all the players can win. And they’ve already done the bit about making one of the faction leaders into the big bad, so doing it again this soon would be an issue.
The thing is you cannot write a war if none of the sides ever loses. Warcraft was never designed for actual faction war. It’s like a Disney plot where it always ends in sunshine and rainbows no matter how bad it gets.
Who could they possibly hire to fix the problem? I actually think they do have some good/decent writers on staff at Blizzard/Activision and because of this it leads me to believe the problem is greater than just bad writing.
The faction war has been an absolute disaster this expansion.
Alliance side is just more responsive, boring fluff. (although actually I think the Alliance war campaign wasn’t bad at all)
Horde side is basically a Forsaken fan fiction at this point. Burning of Teldrassil is 100% one of the worst story things to ever happen to this game (and this is a game where freaking WoD happened).
Literally the only thing I liked in the Horde war campaign is Lillian Voss’ input and conversations with Zelling, and Gallywix’s part in the war campaign.
The problem is, World of Warcraft is built upon two things:
Warcraft III
The idea that both Horde and Alliance are heroes for the whole world, not just their faction
Now, the reason these two points work against them is fairly simple: in Warcraft III, we already saw Horde and Alliance members coming together to stop a major threat. Jaina and Thrall were the poster children of the heroes in Warcraft III and their interactions are some of my most memorable moments in the game.
As soon as World of Warcraft came out, however, they’re on opposite sides. Even in Vanilla, Jaina was a boss for the Horde to fight. And that meant there was no progression with her and Thrall’s story. At the same time, the Night Elves were anti-everyone but to make them playable, they gave them to the Alliance, which really hindered their advancement as an interesting and isolated race. And then they decided to tack on the Forsaken to the Horde because they wanted all four Warcraft III races to be playable and what better place to put the evil zombies than the Horde?
Which brings me to my second point: both sides are heroes. If the game launched and Horde was evil from the start, I think the faction war could be more compelling. Likewise, had the game never began the tradition of big bads bringing the factions together, the war would make sense. But in a World where everyone is a hero, no matter if you follow golden boy Anduin or pure villain Sylvanas, you just can’t justify the factions (and especially the player characters) fighting. And you have to find ways for the Horde to be “bad”, but not so bad that they overshadow what the “true bad guys” do. Because if the Horde does something worse than the true bad guys, then why would the Horde fight them? We don’t feel like heroes even if the world is calling us that. Likewise, if the Horde isn’t as evil, the Alliance should focus on the one threatening the planet since they’re the token good guys.
At one point, it was believable that the Horde and Alliance were good guys just in different breaths. But between Garrosh and Sylvanas, they’ve managed to tarnish any good will the Horde has left, and it has become a draining experience for me to watch. The faction war wasn’t believable four expansions ago, it’s far worse now. And if it still exists after this expansion, I wouldn’t be surprised but I will be upset. The writing is just so bad.
My quick take is that a faction war was necessary to let the “big bad enemy” story-trope go on CD for a bit. Almost like the faction war is an analogue to letting an under-geared and incompetent tank off tank a group of adds. It can go well, but most of the time it’s awkward, unsure, and the ending is always in doubt.
Then, when the big boss is done being invulnerable and we can get back to the real fun, it usually improves.
In sum, I think having to fight the void right off the sword plunge would have been awkward and probably garnered a lot of side-eye from the community: another big bad right off legion?
![:man_shrugging:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/man_shrugging.png?v=6" ":man_shrugging:")