It kind of begs the question why we had to wait so long for this. They could have put that quest chain into literally any xpac between Cata and now. I had hoped they were saving Gilneas for something cool, but I guess they just finally decided it wasn’t worth using.
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If they’d had us retake Gilneas, and the Gilneans had extended the Night Elves hospitality as they once did for them after losing their home, then the Horde could have kept Undercity, we still could have had a faction war, the Night Elves could have still got Bel’amath, and everyone wins.
There are two inns and numerous trainers (which are also there in the starting zone), but otherwise you are correct
Teldrassil wasn’t even an ‘inch’. It was a setpiece that got taken away and Undercity joined it. Players weren’t able to determine whether Teldrassil or Undercity got saved or not, it was just ‘welp, Horde, you get to be monsters, Alliance, you get to be victims, now ~action~!’
‘Serious losses’ are impossible for either faction, because logistics are irrelevant in this game. It doesn’t matter how badly a side gets pummeled; they always have enough soldiers to drag things back to the status quo. Because there’s no player input as to whether or not a city or operation falls or stands, there’s no player investment in whether or not it succeeds either. Teldrassil burned, and I, as a Horde player, got mad, because now I’m on a team aligned with Sylvanas who was pretty plainly evil at that point. I didn’t ‘pump my fist’ because Teldrassil wasn’t offensive to me. I didn’t care because it’s pointless to care about the faction conflict in this game. But being made evil or the aggressor for the sake of a faction war? That was infuriating and turned me off Horde.
Neither side can win or even deal grievous blows to each other, and players aren’t incentivized to get invested because we can’t affect the outcomes. We’re always on the sidelines, because actually letting player actions dictate the faction war would mean the death of at least one faction and I don’t think I need to explain why that is a complete non-starter for the game as a whole.
I’d be happy with a Flight point myself…
Yep.
At least in the old days one had about 20 levels to care about their respective homes.
Noob start skips that, and with portal changes to have only 2 portal rooms in the capitols long ago blizzard had all roads lead to Org/SW.
Didn’t like that road…well they’d sap you over the head an dragged you till you liked it.
I never got why dalaran got nerfed. city of mages to make portals…was the lore they didn’t pay the bills so it got shut off?
It’s been blatantly obvious, going back a long time, that the faction conflict routinely evoked more passion than any other story. You act like no one cared about Teldrassil in the plot because, what? It wasn’t widely used as a capital city? Neither was Undercity. Both were recognized as having plot significance. The gameplay mechanics of the most efficient city hub aren’t the measure for how much a plot point matters. Then you write about being “infuriated” about being on the bad side with Sylvanas, undermining your point again by showing that it evoked a passionate response.
I saw a lot of Horde players angry about feeling like the bad guys with Sylvanas. I also saw a lot of people relish in it. I saw an almost endless level of Night Elf anger posts. In the Night Elf story, it was indeed considered a very serious loss. The notion that something can’t be a “serious loss” in the story “because logistics are irrelevant in this game” just sounds ridiculous.
You’re arguing some weird role-playing purist stance, like people won’t get invested unless they have complete freedom to determine the outcome of the story. Most games barely give players agency to change the outcome of a story - you either win the game or lose, but if you win, it’s usually a set-in-stone plot. In the case of WoW, non-player factions just lose excitement and generate apathy because WoW never took the time to properly make them dangerous and lasting. After nearly two decades of that, it’s hard for anyone to take a non-player-faction threat seriously.
My initial point that WoW really missed the window on the Gilneas return stands that they should really have done this during BFA when it could’ve been tied into the more exciting faction conflict, and it’s unclear where you’re even trying to land there, other than having some grudge against the faction conflict.
You’re mistaken in your reasoning about Teldrassil. You think Horde players got shocked when Sylvanas went rouge and forced everyone into a massive conflict. This isn’t it at all. Horde players (the non Garrosh-worshipers anyway) were furious because they weren’t given an opportunity to try and stop or at least hamper this clearly villainous action, and Alliance players were always doomed to fail in one of the most idiotic ways possible. So Teldrassil made Horde players into monsters and Alliance players into morons and nobody but the ‘For The Evulz’ players actually enjoyed it.
This wasn’t a ‘rallying point’ for either faction, it was pure frustration at being forced into alignments that absolutely did not align with our characters to that point. Those NE players were basically forced to the forums to plead with the DM, Blizzard in this case, to ‘make things even’ with the Horde. And that episode, Undercity, wasn’t satisfying for anyone. We essentially suicided the city and the Alliance wasn’t allowed to have a win.
There’s no excitement to the faction conflict because there’s no way to actively benefit from it like one might a villain NPC faction; because you can kill them and loot them and make it stick. It’ll be reflected in the narrative that ‘yeah you bumped this threat off’. So there’s impact and weight. Killing Moira or Tyrande honestly doesn’t matter unless it’s a Blizzard employee that does it because oh, look at that, they’re in the new cutscene, going un-killed.
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This is the opposite of reality. It’s not hard to see what evokes passion vs. what evokes apathy. The faction conflict got people fired up, the NPC villain factions don’t get anywhere near the same traction. That’s exactly how it played out on the forums day after day, month after month, year after year.
Which makes total sense: the opponents who never do anything but get their butts kicked and annihilated (NPC villain factions) have no partisans and evoke no dramatic tension because we know they end in total defeat. It’s that approach vs. the player faction conflict - opponents who you have to continue to share a world with, build grudges against, and have taken and lost territory to.
What’s clear is that you were very upset at how the faction story went, so you’re attempting to downplay it as something that carried no sense of stakes or excitement. Just another vector for attacking a plot that made you feel forced to help a villain. But the argument here is not about whether the faction conflict is written well, it’s about which type of story creates more excitement vs. apathy. It’s not theoretical, we already know the answer because it played out in front of us.
Undercity fell, Teldrassil burned, Theramore was wiped off the map, Zandalar got raided and had its king killed while forging an alliance with the Horde, Dalaran got purged of the Horde way back when, Southshore got plagued. Players would get worked up over these events centered around Horde vs. Alliance, even ridiculously tiny things like Camp Taurajo. No one gets worked up over Players vs. Void God servants (next expansion). Or Players vs. Primalists (this expansion). Or Players vs. Scarlet Crusade (this mini-patch joke).
WoW’s story really hobbled itself for the foreseeable future. I don’t think there’s really any path back for them. They could have taken a different path from early on, made the Horde and Alliance much weaker against the various villain NPC factions, not given us the total victories we got through raids. But they rejected that path a long, long time ago, so the situation is what it is.
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Considering the rewards and being a Horde player I was happy that it only took a few minutes.
You’re assuming all excitement is good excitement though. You’re also again, assuming getting ‘worked up’ is also a good thing. It’s not, in this case. It would be akin to the Tauren losing Thunder Bluff to an earthquake and becoming homeless. In fact, Cataclysm was hated for how hard it shook things up, but you can bet your buscuit everyone was ‘worked up’ over the Cataclysm.
Again, stoking the playerbase to utterly hate itself (and if you don’t think that’s happening let me introduce you to the likes of Brewa and Naughtymoon) is anathema to a healthy game population. Now the game runs on spite, people buy into conspiracies of faction bias because ‘my side doesn’t get that’ and there is a perpetual ‘grass is greener’ effect.
People got nervous and worked up over Teldrassil because no one knew what the response would be. That’s not excitement and anticipation, that’s dread and fear. Why? Because we, the playerbase, can’t influence what the ‘war path’ will do, we can only go and do it. I can only follow repugnant orders as a Horde soldier. I can only lose the battle as Alliance.
Because that’s what must happen to have faction conflict. One side of the playerbase needs to be designated winners and the other side needs to be designated losers, with no input or agency. Just ‘ha ha, it’s your turn to be the victim’. Yeah, people are active about it, because they don’t want to be the victim. Or they’re tired of being beaten with the ‘loser stick’ (Night Elves). Imagine if, despite all of your best efforts, you just lost every effort you made at, say, a raid. No matter what, you lose. But the other side, why, they faceroll and win. They AFK and win. They literally ignore the mechanics and win.
That’s what the ‘faction conflict’ feels like and why so many people check out of it at the first sign of it rising.
Cataclysm was where the faction war heated up. Sure, people also cared about the terrain getting changed everywhere, of course. But most people found Deathwing himself to be a boring, one-note villain, who mostly got shuffled aside until the last raid where he dutifully showed up to die. They got passionate about the gains / losses of the Horde and Alliance against each other in Cataclysm, and you could see that during that expansion just by looking at the routine forum threads about story that got people posting a lot.
In fact, this all just goes back to my original point. I saw someone say this in another thread: Losing Gilneas in Cataclysm felt more exciting and fun than regaining it in Dragonflight was for the Alliance. Gilneas being lost was a Cataclysm event, it was one of their big opening arcs as the Forsaken won there.
If Gilneas had been retaken during BFA from the Horde, Alliance players would have felt a lot better about it than the quest to retake it now. And Horde players, playing through a defeat, would likely have not felt bad at all. I play both factions. Losing Gilneas was a fun series of quests. Losing Undercity also felt fun in the questing.
It’s guaranteed-winning that destroys dramatic tension, which is what the non-player villain factions offer. The game solidified this template over two decades: Nothing can stand against the Horde or Alliance except the Alliance or Horde.
I’m not saying I think where they are now is fixable by re-igniting the faction war. At this point, it’s too far gone I’d say. But my whole point in this thread to start with was that Gilneas being retaken should have been done in BFA, and would have been far more exciting and meaningful to Alliance players if it had been. I think that’s absolutely true.
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The whole thing was entirely emblematic of every Dragonflight experience.
A bunch of girlbosses boss around a weak man, then a brief moment of underwhelming gameplay, then women cry about their feelings.
Lather, rinse, and repeat.
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Lingxiu and Torvald, I think you both have good points.
Personally, I want to get invested (and sometimes do) with the faction conflict stories when they occur. The problem lies almost entirely with how well it’s executed. When i’m forced to hold the idiot-ball or the villain stick, though, i’m definitely NOT a fan. I’m also okay with Blizzard being forced to keep things balanced in terms of gameplay, as long as the story doesn’t have to suffer for it.
One of my complaints in Cata was that the Alliance had zero quests where they triumphed over the horde, and even had a whole zone (Ashenvale) where the player actively quested and were beaten back. At the end of it, we were told “Good job, but we lost. Report to Stonetalon and see if you can do some good there.”
That felt pretty bad, especially as a NE player. I get why the horde quests were added to Ashenvale in Cata (they zone parity from vanilla was pretty alliance-favored), and I even like that they used it as an opportunity to highlight the faction war, but why was there no alliance equivalent in some other contested zone where they could experience that same triumphant feeling over the opposing faction? Or why did the Alliance storyline have to take place at the same time as the horde one? What if cannonically, the Alliance quests happen before (or after) the horde ones, so both player factions get to taste that feeling of victory?
And on the subject of NPC factions, Blizzard has a bad habit of making them also be completely inept and stuck with the idiot ball a soon as the PC shows up. The reclaiming of Gilneas would have felt a lot more satisfying if there was some ebb and flow to the battle. Adding just a few more quests would have made a huge difference in how this story felt.
- Add a quest in the beginning where we’re scouting the threat and looking for captives, (UD and Worgen alike) and find that the Scarlets aren’t really taking prisoners. We find one Worgen/UD pair that stayed alive by feigning death and watching each other’s backs, and they give us the location of where to infiltrate the city.
- (Not Scarlets-being-inept-related, but add a quest where we try to help convince Genn to work alongside the UD. No matter which options we choose, he’ll still refuse but allow Tess to take over instead. This makes Genn’s decision feel like it has more wieght to it, and gives us some insight into Genn’s thoughts-- especially as he tries to refute our reasoning with his own).
- Add a vehicle quest where we’re only able to put a dent in their numbers before we’re overrun and our vehicle is destroyed because the enemy is protecting themselves with The Light. The fact that most vehicle quests are a joke and impossible to lose gives us a different expectation than the quest’s actual outcome, and shows that they are indeed a threat.
- Add a quest (or change the last “kill X mobs” quest) where we have to disable a shield to enter the cathedral - Make it engulfed in The Light and we take ticking damage until we can kill the bishops channelling the shield. Every time we kill one the shield shrinks, and we have to kill 3-4 before it goes away completely. Make Voss required to kill the bishops (her magic swords she got from SM allow her to destroy the Bishops’ protection or something) but she suffers greatly while inside the shield, so its a big deal that she’s helping.
TLDR: Whether it be Player-Faction conflict or NPC-Faction conflict, Blizzard should try harder to make things feel satisfying, and live up to the in-game narrative that is tryng to be told.
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No, it wouldn’t because any victory in Gilneas would be compounded with ‘and now we destroy Undercity right?’ Because unlike Gilneas, Teldrassil was a beloved capital that’s been around since the game’s inception. So Gilneas already has far less value than Teldrassil. I suspect it would be more ‘so we’re getting the scraps of Gilneas while Horde gets to keep Undercity.’ Which would be entirely true; Horde would be getting to keep an established and beloved captial while Alliance would get a shrug and go ‘well here’s Gilneas, a place you haven’t been in since you dinged 20 on your Worgen back in Cata and maybe did a warfront or two on.’ The two aren’t even remotely balanced in terms of offering, and I suspect it’s that same lack of parity that made Gilneas’s reclamation so milquetoast (well, that and lingering hatred for Sylvanas but that ship sailed for both Horde and Alliance players).
Also, what’s the difference between an NPC faction and, say the Alliance in Teldrassil or the Horde in Undercity when it comes to a ‘guaranteed win’? Or the Horde in SoO? The players still have no input on it. They’re still the ‘designated loser’ which, I’m sure you can understand, is extremely damaging to the heroic fantasy that WoW is trying to go for.
This notion that ‘only the Alliance and Horde fighting each other can create tension’ is total bunk. Hell, Alliance lost one of its biggest named NPCs… To NPCs of a non-Horde faction. Horde too, but Vol’jin wasn’t as big as Varian. I guarantee Alliance was a hornet’s nest over that far more than losing Gilneas to the Forsaken, a zone introduced and lost in the same patch. There’s no ‘value’ there, at least comparatively, between losing Varian and losing Gilneas. Varian was the biggest loss Alliance felt until Teldrassil.
Gilneas’s loss was a Cataclysm event meant to shuffle them toward the Alliance, not as a means to build faction pride for either side. I didn’t go ‘For the Horde’ when I realized Gilneas fell to the Forsaken, I shrugged my shoulders and moved on with efforts that actually mattered.
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The best part was how the Alliance couldn’t ever take the city back, but as soon as the Horde showed up, it only took us an hour of quests.
“Here’s the keys, homie. Lok’Tar Ogar.”
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Maybe that’s why it was encrypted during 10.2.5 PTR because they’d disappoint us 
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I appreciate your perspective and it is well said, but you are diminishing the importance of Gilneas for a significant percentage of the player base. Darnassus was an established city and important for Night Elf players in particular, but personally I only visited it very occasionally when I had business in Kalimdor and needed to travel through it. The loss was shocking in terms of story, but it didn’t make me long to return to the place. I appreciated that it setup the Night Elves to get a much more beautiful updated zone, which they deserved.
Gilneas, on the other hand, I felt an emotional attachment to. Worgen was the first alt I ever created after my original Shadow Priest, and I actually race changed my main to Worgen before she became a Void Elf. The Gilneas questing is still some of the best that’s ever existed in this game. I don’t want to leave the zone when I level out of it. The fact that players have been glitching their way inside just to RP says a lot about how beloved it is. Gilneas is beautiful and moody in a unique and pleasing way and has always held so much potential.
Blizzard has consistently squandered that potential. I had hoped it was because they had something great planned for when they finally opened the zone back up, but as it turns out all they had up their sleeve was some token questing and no actual development within the zone. The transmog reward is disappointing, players are confused by the mount. I have a hearthstone on my Worgen that she can use to return to…I dunno, RP I guess. Which is great. It was nice that Blizzard finally, after more than a decade of players begging to return to Gilneas, gave us that much, especially since the Night Elves who gave us hospitality have lost and gained a home in the meantime. It’s just ridiculous to me that they took that long to give us this. Thanks for treating some of the best content you had in your game as a throwaway, Blizzard. It doesn’t make me excited for the rest of those “features” on the Roadmap, frankly, if this is the level of delivery we can expect.
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I never meant to say Gilneas was bad, that was absolutely not my intent. However, it is a fallacy to say that Gilneas was anywhere near as valuable or established as Darnassus or Teldrassil as a whole, or Undercity for that matter. Actual parity would have been both Teldrassil and Undercity permanently lost, and then Gilneas is reclaimed and Kezan is somehow either reclaimed or reconstructed, like a seasteading kind of operation.
I certainly won’t argue that the potential’s been squandered time and time again (seriously how do you mess up Gothic Victorian Werewolf Gentlefolk) but Gilneas simply never held the gravitas that Teldrassil and Darnassus had, and saying they’d be an even trade is laughable even now. In fact, especially now with how empty it is, but that’s the case of any city that’s not the primary expansion hub or SW/Org.
I mean, it’s neither here nor there at this point, but I would have found it interesting after the burning of Teldrassil, if Genn with the backing of the Alliance had retaken Gilneas in preparation for an assault on Undercity. We could have had the Worgen fighting Sylvanas and the Undead like everyone really wanted, Genn could have offered the Night Elves hospitality after the destruction of their home just as they did for us (there’s a Druid portal right there in the middle of Gilneas), and we could have rebuilt Gilneas properly. Kul Tiran ships could have eventually sailed up to that unused dock with supplies for the war effort.
Genn still could have had the same touching moments with Tess and at his son’s grave, word for word, because then Genn is going to General his people in the Faction war fight and he isn’t expecting to come back alive. We assault Undercity, maybe we take it, maybe we don’t, but the Warfront is a fun and exciting place to be and actually matters to both sides because it’s not as much of a tit-for-tat “we took your city, you take ours,” but is actually about a “cycle of hatred” that we must decide to either fight or end diplomatically. Teldrassil still matters and Bel’amath still needs to come about, but how we got there could have been a lot more exciting.
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