If I had to guess, I’d say that there is a certain percentage of people who are True Good - they will not vary much from that course.
Then at the bottom end, there are people who if not truly evil, find their thoughts and actions result from low empathy and remorse, grandiosity, impulsivity, and sometimes aggressive or violent behavior (technically your psychopaths). But even that is a gray area. According to Psychopathy Is, as much as 30% of the population displays some degree of reduced empathy, risk-taking, and overly high self-regard, though the percentage of people with high degrees of these traits is much smaller. Studies show about 1.2% of U.S. adult men and 0.3% to 0.7% of U.S. adult women are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. Those numbers rise exponentially in prison, where 15% to 25% of inmates show these characteristics - and (maybe not surprisingly) you also find a large number of those with clinically significant psychopathy in the corporate boardroom and other ranks of business (and military) authority - where about 1 in 5 is “psycho”.
So if you figure that on one tail of the bell curve you have 10% goodie-two-shoes “hero/champions” and another 10% are “villains” then 80% make up the middle and many of them can be swayed by a charismatic individual who inhabits either one of the two tails… or they just muddle on without guidance, flitting between what might be objectively considered good or bad based upon a whim, level of education and experience or whichever way the wind is blowing.
So now consider that if everyone playing WoW is piloting a Good Champion Hero - that leaves about 90% of the population out!
So what do they do to compensate? Well, some studies hint that this dynamic helps create fertile ground for griefers who are rebelling against being painted into a good boy or girl corner and desperately want to assert their inner complexity:
This is frankly one of the strengths of playing a tabletop game like D&D vs. a video game MMORPG. Production costs dictate that a video game will always have imaginative limitations that the tabletop game doesn’t possess, although the Warcraft experience has always been “on rails” more than its been a sandbox. I hope if there’s ever a WoW 2 they’ll make it more of a sandbox environment to make it possible for players to expand upon the RPG elements.
I’m very hopeful that blending artificial intelligence into RPGs can permit players to experience different paths through the storyline based upon their “alignment”. I understand that MMOs need to offer similar experiences to a large degree - but I think that the leveling process at the very least could offer multiple pathways to the same end-game environment.
That IMO, would permit the people behind all these avatars we play to have a more cerebral experience rather than just kill 10 boars, pick up 5 apples till you hit max level, go to your favorite site to see how to allocate your talents, spam M+ till you are blue in the face, then start on an alt.
Just imagine if every time you leveled, the decisions you made were meaningful and resulted in potentially opening up a different “next chapter” of the story. I, for one, would want to replay the story several ways - with different alignments - just to see what changes I might make in the journey.
Not everyone wants that (many will always just blast through content, gear up then play something else), and this kind of complexity might have been beyond a studios abilities in the recent past.
But I really hope that ai can help bring the cost of additional complexity down to the level where this game and others like it have the opportunity to become a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience.
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children’s gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot’s outcome.
With Faction Wars being put out into pasture, DF would have been a great time to allow players to decide to join the Primalists to fight the heroes or the Djaradin to hunt dragons with them getting rep for their hard work.
And not just make it a complete PvP affair either, because I can see people complaining about content being gate keeped or having PvP is unfair, but actually have a PvE quest line that parallels what’s happening in the zones good guys story line.
Yes, the bad guys will loose at the end. Or sorta loose so they can come back. But since no one knew the player character was a minion, they have an out on why they can still be seen a good guy to other NPCs.
I “beta tested” this in guild RP with my blood elf but being true to my new RP characters’ internal nature I didn’t really intend to support her - just claim I would. I thought she was weak/ineffectual and wanted to figuratively stab her in the back and take her place. It was kind of an RP dead end, sadly as nobody wanted to play my reindeer games. They demanded my predictable and less chaotic normal RP persona come back and heal them - not scare them.
I like how everyone tends to look at things differently. My BE is for the BE’s so whatever Sylvanas wants is lower than what the BE’s need. She is a Paladin so didn’t much like Sylvanas’ darkness anyways, lol.
My Forsaken followed her blindly so whatever she wanted he did it. Even fought Saurfang for her and he liked him. He changed his mind after she kill Saurfang and than turned her back on the Horde. Can’t betray the Horde. That is a no no. You can betray Baine because he’s not in the Horde but Sylvanas was in the Horde so again . . . no no.
See… I LOVE this - the idea that Warcraft could evolve into a game where people who like developing a persona for characters of various faction/class/race combos and percieve those toons as living a storyline differently - can hope to one day play out all those variations through (at least) the leveling process.
Then multiply that by all the varieties of personal good/evil alignment (and everything in between).
I know that as an MMO we’d all end up fighting the same bad guys in EndGame (for varying reasons) but our paths there might all be somewhat different.
The benefit to Blizz might be that a certain sub-population of players would want to sample every flavor of the story - thereby building engagement. IMO it might also help resuscitate the struggling RP community here… badly damaged by neglect over the years.
What ruins it for me is that most classes don’t get any thematic skills/abilities till later on in the leveling so classes don’t feel like they should early on and into mid level. Some even don’t feel good with all their skills/abilities for me.
And than there are toys. The toys themselves are great and theme with certain classes. Leaving leaves behind as you run is great for druid and so is the planting a flower and other such things. Copy of Daglop’s Contract can be great for a Warlock. All the Legion themed stuff for Manari.
Problem is they give toys a 5min activation time and than a 2hr CD. Really? How is that even fun? If they had a CD as long as it was active I think more players might use them. They really are quite fun and fill in gaps Blizz hasn’t addressed as far as themes for classes goes.
But frankly the number I’ve collected has become overwhelming.
The times I see them being used now are when fellow mount-farmers are bored waiting for a spawn pop a toy/mount to show off their collections. There’s nothing wrong with that - but spamming rare toys and mounts doesn’t add as much depth to the game as these things offer the potential to be.
This would be glorious. After the Man’ari race was created, it dawned on me that Blizzard has given us races for all six of the major alignments (Light/Void, Order/Disorder, Life/Death), which of course opens up a lot more options for RP, but it’s still seriously hampered by the necessity of the Horde/Alliance division. As a member of a race who has Faction changed twice, and is very likely to not be loyal to either one of them in the end, diversifying the game’s Faction system would be a huge leap forward in making the Warcraft universe more interesting both for storytelling and for playstyle.
Even within the context of the game as it exists, it would be a lot more interesting if not every other Alliance race or every other Horde race was friendly to me from the outset. I was genuinely surprised when I started playing that if I was Friendly with the Dwarves, then the Night Elves who lived on another continent were good with me, too. There are often conflicts between races even within the Horde or the Alliance, and I thought MoP and BFA did a great job at showcasing some of those conflicts in the story. Entire storylines of internal strife and conflict and their potential resolutions could be explored through questing. If at some point it becomes technically possible to bridge the Faction divide, this would further open up more opportunities to fine-tune one’s allegiances and what areas of the game are open to the player.
I’m not arguing for eliminating the Horde/Alliance Faction War, either, just the opposite. Unhitching the Horde/Alliance conflict from being the primary conflict of the game would be good for the conflict itself. The devs could make it the heated, focused exchange it really needs to be instead of the constant switching between HOT/COLD that it turns into when we all need to unite to fight the big bad every other xpac and then inexplicably go back to killing each other afterward. Factions should be the alignment we are born into by virtue of our race, who may or may not be on good terms with the Horde or the Alliance. We can choose to participate in that particular Faction conflict or not. If we want to, we can be recruited by the Horde or the Alliance and fight on their behalf, but if not, there are also conflicts ongoing between the Fel and the Arcane, or the Void Lords and the Naa’ru, or the Undeed and the Wild Gods in which we can participate on either side depending on our racial faction and good/evil alignment.
WoW was never done to be a game where you can be good, evil, etc… it was always you fighting with your faction against enemies.
So what I’ve learned is that sometimes expectations need to be reeled in for said product when you consider what it was meant to do, and what it CAN do. In a reasonable sense.
Sometimes I had ideas and wants that were unrealistic for WoW so I noticed it just wasn’t something I should be expecting.
This is the root of the problem, aside from the issues of subjective narratives in an MMO. The latter can at least be handled by either having a separate canonical ending, or having the player’s choices irrelevant to the outcome. Neither of which are ideal, but it’d at least be more engaging than the developer presuming alignment/role for you.
What are you talking about? We are the unwitting pawns of the old gods and in the end, we will release untold horrors upon the world as we destroy the last titan failsafe. In the darkest hour our true gods will reveal to us that everything we have done was for their glory!!!
or ya know wow is boring story outside of rp who knows?
It’s just kind of immersion-breaking if you have a character who is aligned with the old gods, for example, but is heralded as a “champion” of the light and savior of Azeroth. The concept of the epic hero is the most bland, overused device in literature, film, and gaming. What people really want is unpredictability, moral ambiguity, and character variety, but we essentially get a regurgitated story over and over again (e.g., every Marvel movie but Infinity Wars)
Since the Alliance and Horde are basically just different sides to the same coin, maybe WoW needs a “good/evil” alignment scheme that affects how NPCs interact with you… way more than just checking an “at war” box for a faction. Funny story: I used to know this heavy RP, orc warlock who had that permanently active for the Cenarion Circle. He’d massacre them all on-sight. I’m sure he’d love being forced to campaign against Fyrrak
They demanded my predictable and less chaotic normal RP persona come back and heal them - not scare them.
