It’s a cost-cutting move. If both sides are working together you only have to write one storyline rather than two.
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It failed because we’ve ended the conflict like 3 times now yet it keeps reigniting and following the exact same story beats.
Factions at relative peace > horde leader decides the world just isn’t red enough > both factions team up to stop them.
We saw it in WC3 with Grom, MoP with garrosh, and again in BfA with sylvanas.
That said, I think we’ve now swung too far in the opposite direction, the factions being nonexistent isn’t the solution. I want conflict, I just don’t want all out total warfare.
Honestly I miss that. I miss having two storylines to explore. Seeing one side of the story then getting on the Alliance toon to see the other. See how they fit each other and fill certain holes.
I’d chalk it up to a few things
1: Writer burn out and just folks wanting to write different stories for a time
2: Lore wise both factions were on their last legs when it came to having soldiers to fight
See that was annoying in BfA because as a Horde main. I had no idea we had San’layn helping us out. I didn’t know about that til playing an alliance alt. That felt weird
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Alliance-players always felt insignificant due Ion Hazzikostas’ bias for the Horde. They are the “default” faction who gets neglected all the time in the gameplay department. The Horde is always preferred and they didn’t help the other players to lessen their pain, especially when the Horde racials were clearly stronger.
It took a massive negative feedback loop to ruin not only the faction war but also raiding. Blizzar did this on purpose, so they can strengthen the Horde even further, which resulted in a mass exodus to the Horde and leaving the casuals on Alliance, only furthering the faction imbalance to a tipping point, where nobody wants to have something to do with either “war” or “factions”, because it was irreparably destroyed.
Horde bias, simply put, killed the Alliance over the years.
The Horde was always written as an aggressive villain, which was “misunderstood”. If the Horde really was more “outcasts”, then it would also have reflected in its design in Orgrimmar but it didn’t. The idea behind the Horde was and still is manliness, bravado, honor and so on - something, the developers believe they also have in RL.
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You can never have an actual winner in a faction conflict game like this. Can you imagine the absolute meltdown on the internet if, say, the Horde were declared the winners of the big conflict?
its been played out, there is no real reason for the factions to be at war anymore after everything that’s happened
Truthfully I think blizzard never did a good job supporting the faction war well. Oh they tried they just weren’t good at it. To maintain something like that in game you need solid story that not only keeps enforcing the faction war but it’s consistent over the long haul.
Beyond that beyond cosmetics there’s nothing different between the two factions. Pvp racials we’re a strong reason a while ago why horde originally flourished. Look around the forums here …pvp isn’t so hot with many anymore.
I also wished blizz stuck to their guns way back when pally was alliance only and shaman was horde only.
There was at least some real tangible reason to play one or the other more than “I don’t like how the other side looks”
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Bingo. The “faction war” still exists between player and non-NPC game characters. Each side has breakaway sub-factions, such as the Shattered Hand and Dark Iron Dwarves. All out clashes between the Alliance and Horde have been suspended while each faction tries to get its population back under the same umbrella.
The only TRUE faction war is, as you said, PvP. And its dwindling participation (for myriad reasons) is the embodiment of that conflict. As PvP wanes, the concept of “faction war” diminishes accordingly. Open world PvP (harken back to the days of 40-man raids on the capitol cities of each faction) is all but gone except for individual encounters. BGs were probably an attempt to keep PvP alive, but even that feature is losing traction.
For me any battle always seemed so onesided that it was never fun. Which was made worse by sharing.
No world objectives with meaningful rewards. Even now you can get trophies for good rewards but people go out get their 100 weekly sparks and then leave. That tells me they’re doing it for the reward and not because it is fun. You should have a world pvp rank and give conquest+gold when killed and enough to make it worth doing!
No one wants to help you or group up to make a defense on the world. If you queued you solo shuffle you can’t group up. There should be an auto pseudo group former in the world where you get all the UI elements and chat of being in a group but you’re not for purposes off queueing or signing up for m+ groups. You can’t heal unless you’re in a group.
For obvious reasons. The most outstanding of which is: in a game like this, it can NEVER have any meaning. And if it can never have any meaning… why bother???
WC3 is a totally different game where the object is to just “win the map.” It technically doesn’t matter which side you play. Or even on “historical” maps, you are forced to play one side or the other, being able to win is just the condition of the map: you play Alliance or Horde, you don’t have a choice.
That’s not true in WoW. And it’s why it just DOESN’T work.
Does NO ONE remember what it was like to try and get your “collect 8 Bugbear pelts” only to have someone from the opposite faction tagging all the mobs?? I am REALLY the only one that literally jumped for joy the day they removed faction-tagging so I could just PLAY??!
Keep in mind-- there will ALWAYS be “Factions” in World of Warcraft.
They only removed the FACTION DIVIDE.
That’s an important distinction that most people drooling at the mouth over Factions continue to ignore. We still have the THEME. It just not an impediment to PLAYING THE GAME. Who in their right mind wants to limit PLAYING in a GAME?
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And as we see with the upcoming patch, that story will always be an Alliance-heavy one.
(Not like that was under ANY question after Legion/BfA/Shadowlands had already shown us.)
Those that get off on tagging all the mobs to keep others from playing.
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The people who been huffing years of what Blizzard was trying to sell them in the back ally while wearing a trench coat with questionable stains on it.
There’s still an annoyingly high number of people who only play a single faction of the game or worse a single race, and view players on the other side of the faction as subhuman. Not to mention every time a faction post gets made you have the usual bleating of x favoritism and Blizz hates x because xyz.
These are the people who will scream “WARcraft!” and then get upset when the logical conclusion of a war can never happen because it’s a bloody video game.
Oh give it a rest.
Nobody looks at other players as “subhuman”.
People who paint others with a broad brush and have a massive persecution complex, and make annoying posts about how they only want Alliance stories about Alliance characters written by Alliance fanboys & fangirls? Absolutely. Subhuman? No.
I think it failed because the writers were afraid of giving out actual losses. Instead they’d use cheap tactics, different cut scenes or story narratives, to pit the players against each other.
Legion opened with the Alliance seeing the Horde betray them and having their king die. BFA had Horde seeing Alliance purge squads burning down not only Vulpera caravans, but the neutral Vulpera themselves.
It’s lazy writing and eventually people see through it.
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Actually, Legion started with the Horde facing off alone against the Legion’s starfleet (and being decimated) while the Alliance did nothing but have a staring contest with some demons.
But it’s a good example of how separate narratives not only generate more storytelling, but create a deeper setting for the game as a whole.
It was little things like that I loved. I want more of that. Give me a reason to get on the opposite faction and play through their story, to see through their eyes.
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Yep. It was the multiple viewpoints on the game that made it so much more interesting to so many people.
For many of us, if we just want a generic fairy tale castles, knights in shining armor, and humans/dwarves/elves setting… we can get that from many other sources, in games that are actually better than WoW.
The difference that Horde put into the game is, for many, what made WoW appealing above others. But ever since Legion, the new writing team just has zero interest in writing a Horde story. (Not that it was good in MoP/Cata, either. The last really good Horde stories were in Wrath, like the Taunka and the Hand of Vengeance.)
Blizzard is throwing away the big thing that made their game unique, and appealing.