As an original Horde player since the beginning (played the stress test right before the game released onto servers, although I have played Alliance a bunch too), why would anyone at all choose to play Horde at this point?
I don’t mean this as like, a divisive “A vs B” thing. I’d think it has to be obvious to anyone watching that you’ve not done crap for Horde “lore” in several expansions. And I think that a lot of the complaints I see throughout many of the forums about Horde just basically being “Support cast #9” is absolutely true. Blizzard, you absolutely have the metrics for how many people play that faction, and to just more or less shelf them to be supporting characters is pretty crap.
It’s so bad that going into The War Within, with the MoP Remix I rolled a whole ton of Alliance characters, knowing that there’s simply not any Horde story in the The War Within. Now, while I’m sure I’ll get a lot of people responding that it’s not faction-specific; and that’s absolutely fine. I want to steer clear of the faction-divide as much as anyone else. The problem is that you left the Horde in a crap spot and kinda/almost/maybe filled in the holes in novels, but not really.
I’m honestly cool with playing Alliance characters for the next expansion (Female Draenei Monk, let’s gooo), but. I mean, let’s be honest. If anybody gives an F about the story at this point, they’re sure as heck not playing Horde for TWW.
I feel your sentiment. However, the horde has been dominating in pve content for the past 5+ years. Do you recall the hall of fame and how quickly horde fills up versus alliance.
I understand not everyone cares about leaderboards. This applies to pvp. lore, and visuals. Some people prefer one over the other. Others prefer a combination of sorts.
We shall see where the story goes in this trilogy. Remember the expansion hasn’t even settled in. We do not know what to expect.
I mean, that’s fair at least partially. Although I do think it’s a bit disingenuous to talk about leaderboards because a big part of that had a lot more to do with racials and what not than the actual Faction being anything at all story-wise.
I do know we’ve reached this point where we’re all really cross-faction anyway. Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for. I think I’m just trying to say that, if you take a look at the story/lore that the Horde has, like, at all moving forward… It’s pretty minimal. Which, again, we’re stepping a bit back from the whole faction thing anyway. I’m just trying to point out that Bliz left the Horde in a pretty crap spot, I think.
Granted, going forward, I do think it’s not going to be very faction-specific anyway. We’re probably going to see more from the Planteteers (Jaina, Thrall, Anduin, Baine).
And you’re right, we will see. And it’s not like I’m hating this direction, anyway. I think I just wanted to point out that when I logged into my Horde characters, there’s definitely a sense of being a supporting role.
We love surprises. Time will tell, if we get some action for the horde.
Granted, our main character cast is lore appropriate.
Since we are fighting against a void villain. It is only natural that they would ask aid of a void expert such as Alleria. She’s definitely not the only one, but she has proven trustworthy.
And who knows, I might end up in your group. Hahaha!
I really actually am appreciative I get to do these raids with Alliance folks when I’m playing Horde, though. Probably my favorite change in like the last ten years is being able to, as an example, defend Amirdrassil with Kaldorei on my Orc or Blood Elf.
I honestly dont think Horde is getting that much less content compared to alliance, but who am i to tell, i dont play horde, but trying to look on a very objective basis here, BFA was very much evenly split. Shadowlands was pretty much faction neutral, with some covenants focusing more on alliance characters and some focusing more on horde, and then the final content had a Cleaning lordaeron for the forsaken, which gave stuff to the alliance but was a majorly horde storyline.
Then Dragonflight is pretty much faction neutral as well, with the exception of the amirdrassil stuff and the retaking of gilneas, which are both just plot threads left from previous expansions that were addressed just so they can be free of them.
I’m not denying TWW has more alliance related characters at the front, but thats just the start of the expansion, and then we also have a expansion after that set in a horde capital, and if helping dragons protect a world tree that would become a night elf city is alliance content, then doing anything in silvermoon to help their people is horde content.
wat.
why does that matter?
for the past decade the story has focused exclusively on the alliance, save for when the horde was needed to be the villain that the alliance exclusively defeats.
Because PvE is literally the core component of this game? So the fact that the Horde has been dominating the PvE scene for years is relevant?
The Horde has been dominating the PvP scene too for years, ever since EMFH was nerfed.
Every single BG favours the Horde side too.
Lore is literally the only aspect where the Horde aren’t outright dominating (though they are still the centre of every expansion) and Hordies cry immediately. Hilarious.
Now you got me. I better delete all those threads were I celebrated and bragged about the Night Elves heroically defeating and getting justice against the genocidal Horde
Horde players aren’t a unified monolith (no faction’s players are). I’ve seen a number of sentiments from Horde players about Midnight which write it off as just another Alliance expansion.
“Blood Elves are just an Alliance race anyways.”
“Horde content is Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, Goblins, etc… Quel’Thalas is Alliance content.”
“It’ll be all about the Void Elves/High Elves anyways. Guaranteed Alleria will be MC.”
“More hand-holding around the campfire nonsense. If we’re not killing Alliance, it’s not Horde content!”
About the only critique I feel holds merit is that the Horde needs content focused on the Orcs, Trolls, and Tauren right now. They’re the races most left in the lurch since the faction conflict expansions. Now, we just had some stuff for Tauren in Dragonflight, but it felt… tacked on. Sure, that was, “Horde Content,” but it did nothing to address the elephant in the room, which is the state of the Horde and its peoples.
It literally was. The quest designer responsible for the storyline said they had looked at the then-finished Ohn’ahran Plains and thought that maybe some tauren would have an opinion about a zone full of centaur.
Which, nice that someone thought about it, but it also revealed that there was originally no plan in the first place to involve them.
Player related victories don’t really matter to the lore, because it’s not canon. What is canon is Blizz’s love for the villain bat for the Horde and the Alliance winning the conflict. Which undoes them changing the Horde to Thrall’s Horde to begin with. Why do all that work to end up in the same place anyway? It’s not like the story had any great pay off.
They just completely killed faction fantasy for one side. And their answer to that was unity that made us do Alliance quests. Which feels like a punishment after all the damage they’ve done to the Horde. I guess killing off or removing our leaders after completely degrading their stories wasn’t enough.
Now Horde, go and enjoy your councils and don’t forget to go do your Alliance chores!
On the other hand, a lot of the overarching story of Shadowlands revolved around helping Anduin, Tyrande, and to a lesser extent Jaina, while Baine sat on the floor in Oribos and Thrall had a minor arc about meeting his mom (again).