You need to unpack these lines with a bit more context.
The Horde was founded by demonic deception and manipulation. A machine of outrage was constructed of lies. (rather apt paralell to American politics of the last few years)
As to the last sentence, Saurfang points out the vast cultural gulf between the Horde and Alliance the Draenei lived on OrcWorld for thousands of years, yet they were not able to make a bridge between them and the Horde either.
But that point is contradicted by the fact that the Alliance and Horde do have a bridge when their common interests are at stake.
I’d love if the players were effectively a third faction. Then the Alliance and Horde were just reputations and quest hub lines we could run.
Basically we’d be mercs running campaigns and doing the odd jobs mercs do. While the Horde and Alliance are off doing their thing we are free to walk away from BS like the War of Thorns and the whole garrosh mess.
Players would still be free to be angry about the story but we’d no longer be shamed for daring to play red side when we have no control over the story.
Sorry to say that the Warcraft 2 “stupid evil” Horde is the default mode for the horde faction sinde Cataclysm. Similar to the “stupid good” Alliance, but with an extra dose of dev copium that their preferred story line for the Horde is a rehash of the intellectually and morally defunct Warcraft 2 era Horde.
This is what happens when the writing room can’t think beyond black and white, but still insists they can write moRaLlY gReY stor lines somehow.
If you really want to “honor” Warcraft 3 they you shouldnt forget Grom was still itching for a fight and attacked the Alliance/later gave himself up to evil forces to be used as their pawn. If anything WoW has honored that legacy.
It was always possible to write a Horde that did not continue to embrace genocide and constantly get hit by the egregious villain bat. Warcraft III and Lord of the Clans had sown the seeds of that.
The fact that several horde players are in fact, unhappy about playing the franchise’s dedicated villain faction is probably a sign that the writers should have tried to go in the direction of a reformed Horde of outcasts and desperate people banding together and attempting to make their way in a hostile world, like they were originally presented in vanilla.
If you really want to “honor” Warcraft 3 they you shouldnt forget Grom was still itching for a fight and attacked the Alliance/later gave himself up to evil forces to be used as their pawn. If anything WoW has honored that legacy.
It’s almost like Grom was the exception and not the rule in Warcraft III.
Threads like this seem to always go the same way, with Horde players saying that they are upset about their faction constantly being written as the designated series villain and being saddled with characters who consistently make horrible villainous choices, and then a bunch of smug alliance players come in and say “well, your faction did a bunch of villainous things” as if that’s supposed to be a rebuttal?
And Blizzard said that a non-majority ever followed Garrosh/Sylvanas.
Yes it did. You are just upset WoW ended these dangling plot threads of the Horde’s crime by actually punishing them.
Because it is. Like this has been a faction that since Vanilla did morally dubious if not outright evil things. What did you expect would happen as the end result of experimenting on the living or invading someone else’s lands?
Are you being deliberately obtuse? You understand that these things are writing choices. And writers could have, at any point, made different choices? Right?
No, he really doesn’t.
Blizzard has been dabbing on Horde players since Legion at the latest with “the horde will be stupid sheep that jump off of the cliff at Sylvanas’s order as she laughs as crows eat their corpses.”
-Ogmott’s Dream Journal.
They were looking directly at the Horde player character and informing the Horde player character that they were wrong to choose the Horde.
They have done nothing but demonize the Horde.
They do not in any way build the Horde up for the Horde player character. Just tear it down. Again, and again, and again.
But they didn’t. And like it or not that has fueled a great deal of WoW’s story telling. Not to mention a certain subset of Horde fans gleefully enjoyed being the “bad guys”. Well they got their wish as well the inevitable ending for all villanous characters in Warcraft.
No, he really doesn’t.
Blizzard has been dabbing on Horde players since Legion at the latest with “the horde will be stupid sheep that jump off of the cliff at Sylvanas’s order as she laughs as crows eat their corpses.”
-Ogmott’s Dream Journal.
They were looking directly at the Horde player character and informing the Horde player character that they were wrong to choose the Horde.
They have done nothing but demonize the Horde.
They do not in any way build the Horde up for the Horde player character. Just tear it down. Again, and again, and again.
You seem to be saying they STILL were trying to put “playable Scourge” into the game after WC3 came out. But the quote makes it clear that they realized that wouldn’t work.
You also said they clearly wanted the undead to be a third faction, and the quote makes it clear they were always envisioned as part of the Horde. It’s just that originally the Horde was going to be “the evil side,” and when they decided not to do that, they changed the Forsaken to fit with the new version of the Horde.
I appreciate you saying “a certain subset.”
I’m also betting that a certain subset of Alliance players would enjoy getting their hands dirty if given the chance. Some of them are regulars on this board.
You’re going to take the word of a character that’s presented as an obviousy insane Twilight Cultist as Blizzard’s statement on the Horde and the people who choose that faction? Really?
Horde players outnumber Alliance players globally by 2 to 1. A company that wants to make money would be insane to purposely go out to insult two thirds of its customer base.
Now I can understand that Horde players were not happy with BFA… Heck I wasn’t happy doing the Horde side for BFA for the overall part but there were stand out stories there such as the Voss Zelling quest series and the Alliance NPCs don’t come out looking well in it.
A while back we had Alliance players complain that Cataclysm was nothing more than a stage for Thrall. And BFA has to be viewed with the context of what was going on at Blizzard creative during the time, a s it seems that the major player was a person who had it out for Sylvannas or strong female characters in particular. And up to that time, Sylvannas was THE strongest female presence in WOW by leagues.
That’s me, sort of. I primarily play Alliance characters and would really prefer it if that faction had a little more greyness, political instability and double-dealing thrown in. I don’t necessarily want to play ‘the villain’, I just want interesting conflict to happen internally within the Alliance instead of everyone getting along and always being the good guys all the time.
I never went in to World of Warcraft expecting to have a simple good guys versus bad guys story told, not after the shades of complexity introduced by the end of Warcraft III into the faction conflict.
But that complexity has slowly been eroded (and then very quickly eroded after the end of Legion). Leading to a faction conflict where one side mostly feels bad and demoralized because they’re the villains that always lose, and one side (or me, at least) is bored out of their minds because they’re the good guys that always win.
I appreciate you attempting to make me feel better, but I don’t think your reading works.
The old Horde was, sure. But not only does Saurfang not acknowledge any break between the old Horde and the new Horde, but the context of this line is him enumerating all the flaws of the Horde up to and including the present day. The context is that he’s saying the Horde was rotten to the core from the very beginning and that poisoned everything that came after.
It seems pretty clear to me that he’s specifically talking about how he perceives the virtue gap, not the cultural gap.
At the end of an expansion which is the least faction based in recent memory. There was no Allliance vs Horde theme going on. in fact we got stern “play nice” messages from Alexstraza and the Dracthyr.
Most, if not all of the anti-Horde bias in this expac comes in fact from this subforum with the NEPA brigade having their hissy fit over the fact that after puttin their sweat in bringing Amirdrassil to Azeroth, Horde players weren’t awarded with arrows to the face.
The next three expacs seem to be continuing this trend with the possibile exception of Turalyon becoming Grom 2.0.