Along with it not meaning they do it well, it doesn’t even mean they necessarily are favoring that faction either. As many times when writers talk about characters they enjoy writing they bring up some villains, and just from a sense that it can be fun to dip into that angry side or write up some stage chewing behavior.
Robot cat was a tough spot for them as it was trying to figure out a way to give the Alliance access to quests that were really needed to sell the horde on a civil war. It fell flat and wasn’t that creative (although, unlike a certain ungrateful elf, Alliance did get to insult Vol’jin to his face in those quests if they wanted) but, it’s not like the Alliance needed much motivation to raid Org.
You can make arguments for both factions for this. The ways people feel the horde is ahead are pretty well documented. But if you look at it, in many ways the story is centered around the alliance viewpoint, especially Humans. I think this is just mainly as they’re more confortable writing from that perspective and have trouble getting into the headspace to really write the more alien races of the Horde.
I feel like there was a quote something like that, although it may have been “we love writing for the Horde” rather than “we prefer writing for the Horde to writing for the Alliance.” But it was a loooooooooong time ago, like more than a decade. I don’t see any reason to assume that the current writing staff feels the same.
I’m just saying that I really doubt that you really want the Horde story from BFA.
We all want better stories, and hell, the Alliance could do with being more proactive I agree. But what’s come before was bad for everyone, and I think we all get the whole greener grass thing. I mean, I’d much rather have had TB hit exactly like Teldrassil rather than the horde story. I really did not like the way the horde WoT/UC questing felt like the writers shaming me as a person for playing horde and denying any sort of excuse in UC of protecting anyone but Sylvanas. The narrative just completely took away any reasonable reasons for Horde characters to have done what they were forced to to participate in the content.
That’s the problem with this whole fictional world thing. It’s all completely at the writer’s whims. No matter what happens, no matter who gets their wishes for so long, we’re in a world where anything the writers want is possible. Just as the we had to do another ‘soul searching’ story for the horde because someone didn’t like the last one, no matter what happens to the Horde in the story will never stop the writers if they want to do it again.
Where did Alliance players even come up with this meme? The Horde’s one tangible gain in BfA (Darkshore) was reversed by the Alliance, and it lost the only other power grab it tried to make too (Arathi).
It’s also because you inexplicably get lands back that you lost in the war even though the Alliance “won.” Tirisfal in particular, where apparently every Alliance soldier who died to reclaim Lordaeron and was sent to the Maw to be tortured as a result, died for absolutely nothing.
Essentially that was the gist of it. They had a preference for one faction, finding the Horde to be more interesting to write for.
Indeed. Like I said, Christie Golden hadn’t officially become an employee of Blizzard back then.
Ehhh… Nothing has really changed as far as the quality of the Alliance’s narrative is concerned, so I can’t say they’ve developed any greater interest in writing it. That said, the Horde has certainly felt a dip in the quality of their writing so maybe they’re just sick and tired of both factions these days.
I think Golden views classic Horde as representing toxic masculinity. Likely not just her, tbf.
Orcs depressed, peacenik Tauren, Forsaken have all but lost the world rejection angle (which is hilarious to me since they have been utilized as mad lad villains most recently). Granted, Afrasiabi shoulders a lot of that burden for always bouncing back to wanton slaughter as the default setting.
I feel like the Horde should be written as Chaotic Neutral, but we only get them bouncing between Chaotic Evil and Neutral Good. Alliance still pitching that tent in Lawful Stupid, though, so I definitely understand the frustration from the blue side of the aisle.
No not all players are not. Wow as a game has been built around factions, going back to vanilla. We quested under our given faction banner, and when we did team up for world threats we did so under factions. When we did share a questing zone or chian, both factions were equally present. As a player we are either part of the alliance or the horde. Legion was the first expansion where I saw characters from one faction mostly missing. While the other were almost all active, we for the first time quested under racial leaders or important character of a single faction for both the alliance and the horde. As a horde player I should be questing under horde character or natural characters. If I do quest under the opposing faction then someone from our side should be there, unless it is just a dungeon or a raid.
Ehh… most of it wasn’t awful, but the story premises taken were pretty meh. To be blunt, the Alliance’s stories in Cataclysm were meh in general. Most of it was unchanged from Vanilla, and then what zones did change were either chock full of media reference (CSI: Westfall and Rambo in Redridge), or it was just one long depressing slog without any payout or satisfaction (Darkshore).
Yeah, Alliance did get shorted, but that was still when they had a bit more trouble with biting off more than they could chew. So in the expansion when they were fixing running out of time in vanilla and putting out the game with a massive lack of horde stuff, they made sure to get the horde stuff done first and history repeated itself.
As for the Horde, wish they had stuck with more of the moving in after the more natural style disasters caused by Deathwing instead of starting the whole villain batting stuff.
The alliance retreated out of Tirisfal after siege of the undercity. I can make these claims as well, darkshore where horde soldiers died and went to the maw to be tortured for absolutely nothing. Why are you having a double standard here? Neither side lost or won any land, one side lost unnamed npcs while the other lost it’s 3 of its main characters going in to BFA and those 3 were not the only ones it lost.