A Cold War of border skirmishes, espionage, politics, working through third parties, and of resource acquisition/denial like we had from Classic to Wrath is fine. Open warfare like we had from Cataclsm-MoP and BFA is not.
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Coincidentally, a few people in my raid were memeing about Crug last night.
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Pretty true actually. Blizzard has spent so many years making the players on either side ****ing hate one another, neither side wants to lose because they know the other side will be unbearable about it.
The only reason it hasn’t happened so far is because the two faction wars have been done so badly both sides came out of it feeling like ****.
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That’s true too. The Faction War has been done well. If it had always been an unmitigated disaster, that’d be one thing, but the fact that it’s worked before means it can work again.
It’s not like the Vanilla/BC/Wrath-era writers were some rare collection exceptionally talented storytellers the likes of which we’ll never see again. Or that old WoW wasn’t full of goofy dialogue, retcons, camp, references, etc.
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Cold wars are so boring though.
What are we supposed to do? Settle for minor disputes over who gets logs in a forest and call it a day? Yawn, I’ll pass.
I guess full Teldrassil is a bit too much, but Theramore wasn’t a capital city, so more of that will do just fine.
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Oh come on! 
CRUG is in all of you!
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I’d an odd mix of factors.
The faction war or at least faction rivalry is a good idea for the broader Warcraft franchise. But if tends to suffer when put into WoW because of the requirements for this specific game. For instance, previously the faction war could be a vessel for genuine change in the world by destroying nations and allow new empires to establish themselves. Now? Well now you always have to have your two factions, roughly of equal strength at all times. The idea of the Alliance or Horde being on the ropes, or just flat out on the run like in the earlier games, is potentially interesting but probably too volatile an experience to keep people sub’d for months on end. To say nothing about how you represent that in a persistent world where every single change to every single thing down to the blades of grass costs you time and money.
So if the game doesn’t support that old kind of foundation shaking faction war you’re left with two choices. Either leave the faction war behind as a concept, maybe keep a few personal character grudges and side-eye glances but otherwise it’s all hands on deck for Cosmic Threat Tuesday, or change it to fit the new limitations. So far Blizzard has chosen neither of these options. Instead just using the faction war in the exact same way it was used in earlier games but with the structure of WoW itself holding it back from delivering the impact it used to. Leaving everyone feeling anxious, tired and like it was all just a big waste of time and energy. Mostly because that’s exactly what the faction war was, is and will be until Blizzard figures out how to write it for the game they actually have.
Or they just release another game using the Warcraft IP already.
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And you think they will ever get any better?
Oh, my sweet summer child…
To be fair some of the quest arcs and non faction related story content was done pretty competently this expac.
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It’s amazing to me that Blizzard’s been hammering away at this faction war for so long that people have forgotten the factions had clear identities while working together for years prior to when things heated up in Cataclysm. Vanilla, BC, and Wrath all had the cold war or even outright working together all while the two factions remains quite distinct from one another.
Dranosh charging into battle with wolf riders as they shout as one “For the Horde” to back Bolvar up at the Wrathgate has more Horde vibe in it than most of the last three expansions combined.
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Horde vs Alliance has always been one of my biggest selling points for me. I enjoyed every min of the attack on Darnassus because as Alliance it was a long time coming.
Sadly, Blizz has ruined faction conflicted for me. Alliance will always be the lawfully-stupid faction it has always been, and the Horde is NOTHING. The Horde isn’t ‘muh honor’ it isn’t conquest, it a big pail of NOTHING. I would like nothing better but to have faction conflict, but I lost hope for that.
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I 100% agree with both you on these points and the OP. I agree that BfA’s events were nonsensical and destroyed both factions at an intrinsic level. The Horde I have loved for 15 years is gone, completely wiped out thematically. The Alliance has been completely subsumed by Anduin’s story and aesthetic.
But on some level I do think faction conflict is a good thing and it can be handled well and written well and Blizzard is capable of doing it well if they would only put some effort into it. There are any number of reasons why they dropped the ball in BfA that these forums have covered extensively. Saying that faction conflict which is the fundamental defining feature of Warcraft should go away is just too reactionary in my opinion.
Removing the faction conflict basically turns Warcraft into a vapid, weak, soulless Elder Scrolls without the intricate foundational lore. No thanks.
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You contradict yourself.
Are they the lawfully-stupid faction who won’t do the sort of bad things you want them to, or are they guilty of such monstrous misdeeds that Darnassus was somehow “a long time coming?”
Seems like an awful lot of the very players who keep moaning ad nauseum about the Alliance never being villain-batted are the same people who will line up at a moment’s notice to declare that the Alliance is already so evil it deserves every awful thing that’s done to it.
The faction conflict does little more than breed hateful toxicity and encourage players to never empathize with anyone who’s not on their “side.” It’s the worst forms of politics in fantasy game form, promoting the mindset that “my side” is always in the right, and “the other side” has earned any and all torture, suffering and extermination it endures.
There’s nothing beneficial about it, and its continued celebration is frankly dishonest and malicious coming from the same company that goes out of its way to prevent inter-community toxicity in other games while brazenly cheering it on in WoW.
Insisting that WoW can’t work without the faction conflict is just an admission to lacking the imagination to see an entire fictional universe as anything more than an empty-headed team sport. There’s nothing necessary or organic about the faction conflict. Every time it comes to the fore, it’s forced and artificial as they have to struggle to make two irrelevant and superfluous factions suddenly become the center of a world and universe that’s long outgrown both of them.
It’s like if they tried to make the Star Trek universe suddenly be all about continuing the struggle for dominance between Athens and Sparta, while the Borg and the Dominion scramble to get out of the way of their unstoppable phalanxes.
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They are lawfully stupid because they continue to never further punish a faction they have defeated twice (MoP and BfA) now and treat the burning of a thousand people like family dog was ran over.
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We’ve plenty of reason for conflict to cease, storywise. This does not mean cast aside the political bodies of the Horde and Alliance, but it does mean things, like, not breaking out into skirmishes, and maybe trading.
Gameplay wise, it’s an antiquated system that I think does the game a disservice.
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Factions, Horde and Alliance still exist because its caked into the game’s architecture and its probably too difficult to undo it.
Story wise it is increasingly bonkers that at least the Horde still exists and the Alliance’s existence is fairly well set but exists only because the Horde exists.
The Alliance’s core position is the demand for Justice for the atrocities of the Horde, the Horde’s existence is to protect races that seem to habitually do evil stuff from any real consequences or culpability for those actions. Orcs in particular have essentially built an empire to avoid responsibility for the 1st and 2nd Wars, or the Genocide of the Draenei, or destroying a planet (Not even talking Nerzhul here, just the draining of life from MU Draenor).
Thrall in his infinite wisdom seems to have had no concept of what apologies are or making amends are, and or gratitude for the mere fact that Humans, after defeating what was a magic alien invasion by green murder monsters that worshiped space Satan opted to actually show mercy to the vanquished and put them in holding pens till they chill out instead of doing the perfectly rational thing and annihilate them… which by the way is a mercy that Orcs would not have given at all. So Orc’s major claim of mistreatment by the Alliance depends on a comically insane level of forgetfulness on their part.
Finally, thanks to WoD we can confirm Orcs would have done all that 1st and 2nd War stuff for some shiny toys and a good speech so really the Horde persists for inexplicable reasons, I guess to ensure Orcs never pay a price for being evil or have to ever be held accountable for it. the Alliance exists because well, there is a race of bonkers murder creatures out there whom don’t comprehend what apologies or culpability is and that is just straight up dangerous.
THE STORY ISSUE is why faction conflict is so unsatisfying. Because nothing is ever resolved, nothing is ever changed, it never leads anywhere. We know how the script goes. No matter what the faction the starts the conflict won’t actually be punished, it will be some rogue actor or coup. The faction that was on the receiving end of atrocities won’t get justice of any real sort. It’s a really dull story; and even BfA we knew going into it that it’d be an Old Gods expansion anyway. Faction Wars are only good if they result in something.
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I loved Nazmir and Zuldazar for Horde and Drustvar for Alliance.
False. Garrosh achieved everything Kil’jaeden had (short of appearing as dead ancestors) because his time magic enraged the elementals and the ancestor spirits. He managed to show Grom just enough of the future before he killed the shaman who had seen all of it.
People love removing context. Like Draenei refusing to stop using that “sweet Eredar magic” and refusing to prepare any race on Draenor (a planet they stole and named after themselves) for what they knew was coming for them. That onus is entirely on them, wholly and completely. The orcs had no way to defend themselves against the Deceiver. They were an idiot barely iron age race. The Draenei were super advanced space aliens. Everything that happened on Draenor via the Legion entirely falls on the Draenei’s shoulders.
No excuse can ever lift that sin from the Draenei.
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The joy of being an Orc is that nothing is ever Orc’s fault, nothing. Orc’s are like children I guess with zero capacity for decision making. It is now the Draenei’s fault Orcs can’t comprehend what an apology is, or their fault Orc’s don’t get that genocide is bad. Everyone but the Orc’s are responsible for Orcs.
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The Draenei were luring their brothers and sisters, who love corrupting worlds and killing babies, to a planet wholly unable to defend itself from them. These brothers and sisters are fully capable of mind control as well as illusions, corrupting the literal genetic code of entire races to make them more hostile and less restrained.
The Draenei decided they’d rather live the rest of their lives in opulence than spend time preparing the orcs, ogres, and arrokoa for what they knew their presence would bring. They knew the planet would be corrupted. They knew babies would die. They knew entire races would become demons.
Actions speak louder than words: They did not care.
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