I agree… I mean after that even if we recue Anduin how do you write that down in a story going foward? Is he getting the “Thrall treatment” after Cata after being the Chosen One were he gets depress and goes off with Valen to rehabilitate in space heaven?
I’m partially joking and being a bit cynical but I kind of worried how these Main Story characters are being push forward … or if at all.
It just feels off. Even if its true the battle between pets with writers. (IMO)
Not that I would know anything about that… obviously btw.
It’s because the Horde isn’t the only entity with which the Alliance has a thousand and one grievances. Compared to the other big bads that the Alliance reacts to, the Horde in WoW has typically been a footnote.
One of the reasons the Wrathgate happened was because Blizzard wanted faction conflict, but Alliance players for their part were just not interested in it, preferring to focus their ire on the far more pressing threats of the Scourge and the Burning Legion. So they did Wrathgate and Battle for Undercity to get Alliance players pissed off, and even then it didn’t really work until after the fall of the Lich King.
I’d say this is one of the biggest differences to me in how it “feels” to play Alliance versus how it “feels” to play Horde. If you’re Horde, the Alliance is constantly looming over you as your primary antagonist and the entity with which you measure your faction against. As Alliance, you barely notice the Horde at all. In Vanilla and even in Cataclysm to an extent, Alliance questing deals with the Horde far less than it deals with the myriad of other PvE enemy factions, especially when compared to the Horde, which has multi-zone narratives almost entirely focused on the Alliance.
Which is honestly hilarious. I think the only Alliance race that deals with the Horde in any reasonable amount before late Cata leveling is the night elves, and that’s because they have to deal with the Horde going straight into Darkshore. Any Alliance questing in the Eastern Kingdoms don’t even see the Horde really until Wetlands or Arathi I think.
Even in Cataclysm, aside from the Worgen starting area, Alliance did not encounter any Horde whatsoever until Arathi, and they encountered no significant Horde presence until WPL or Swamp of Sorrows.
And even in places where you DO fight the Horde a bunch, like WPL and Ashenvale, it tends to be almost a side-show compared to all the non-Horde stuff you do (even in non-neutral content)
Like in WPL, the first phase of Horde questing involves killing Alliance and raising them at a bunch of farms, while Alliance first phase questing involves putting spirits to rest at Sorrow Hill and searching crypts for spare weapons.
And this is in Cata, where there was an active faction war happening. Pre-cata, I don’t think the Alliance fights the Horde at all in the Eastern Kingdoms. You kill some apothecaries in Arathi I think, and there’s an endgame quest to kill Nathanos, but that’s pretty much it.
In Kalimdor it was pretty much limited to Eastern Ashenvale.
There was a time when these things were not treated like separate games. Sure, PvP participation was optional, not unlike raiding, or dungeons, or questlines. Excluding it as a lesser part of the story is bound to lead to an inaccurate analysis of the game. BGs and world PvP are not arenas. The League of Arathor, the Defilers, the Stormpikes and Frostwolves are legitimate lore factions.
Yes but please pay attention to the context of the discussion. We aren’t talking about canon, we’re talking about the difference in questing experience between Joe Alliance and Harold Horde, and how it impacts perception of the opposite faction.
The fact that Horde questing frequently involves multi-zone narratives about the Alliance while the Horde is barely present at all in Alliance questing is indisputable.
The focus is on questing because it’s by far the most universal experience that all players will share in WoW.
Need I remind you that this conversation has run the gamut of lore sources from comics, books, novellas and short stories, in-game cinematics, cutscenes, quest text, in game literature, to the trpg and RTSs (Drawing on the TRPG more as a roadsign directing the conversation to confirmation in game, but an inspiration to certain lore positions nonetheless).
You may have suddenly decided that your new argument revolves around the low level quest experience, and there is merit in that argument, but you don’t get to exclude other huge parts of the experience (especially when many players choose to level exclusively through BGs).
I found the discrepancy between how the factions were used in the other sides’ content super interesting myself when I went back and played some Classic.
Because if you roll an Orc or Troll, you’re dealing with the remnants of Admiral Proudmoore’s fleet and Alliance attempts to destroy Orgrimmar and the Horde from about level 5.
And if you’re a Tauren, you have to contend with Dwarves strip mining in Mulgore and when you get to the Barrens, you find out they’ve been doing even more strip mining to the point of wiping out entire Tauren tribes.
But Alliance side-side, you’re dealing with Murlocs, Frost Trolls, Gnolls and the likes of the Defias Brotherhood. Not even the Night Elf quests bring up the Horde as some sort of threat until the player reaches Ashenvale in their 20’s.
The Horde wasn’t presented as some kind of existential threat to the races of the Alliance in the same way the Alliance was to the various races of the Horde. Even when you get to battlegrounds and PvP areas, people are fighting over local territories and resources.
But somewhere along the way, that dynamic flipped.
It flipped in WotLK because Blizzard wanted more faction conflict, but the Alliance didn’t care enough about the Horde to get into it. Alliance faction pride at the time was virtually non-existent because the Alliance was essentially the “baseline PvE” faction and its playerbase considered groups like the Scourge to be the Alliance’s archnemesis, not the Horde.
It honestly wasn’t until MoP that the Alliance finally got on board and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s also the first expansion that didn’t have an obvious overbearing PvE threat looming over everyone.
