Review of War Within Story: No hope for faction conflict?

Lore Story Forum
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Ok, so having finished the main War Within campaign, and all the zones and sidequests, I think I have a clearer picture of what I think is going right and wrong with WoW.

If we go back to the beginning, Vanilla was made it seems to me with two chief inspirations, the other two biggest MMOs of the time, Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest.

I was a DAOC fan, and also a fan of Everquest but to a much lesser degree, I thought the idea of PvP and everything was just more interesting.

And so Vanilla had both, factions, and a lot of PvE content, and the lore sort of matched that.

Nowadays, in War Within, I really feel like it’s the tail end of a 20 year effort to smooth out the DAoC part of WoW and just make it Everquest 3.

Everyone is on your side, everyone is ok as long as they are nice, the strongest sense that there are real differences is that you can still speak racial languages and have the other side not understand.

That’s a pretty far cry from the Alterac Valley days, and it doesn’t matter how hard they push the end of faction conflict angle like with Turalyon and the Orc commander with the Earthen supposedly representing the “modern, correct” attitude of “oh how could you possibly be low as to fight with each other this way.”

Well, look, it’s a video game, and it’s just fun to take sides, and it introduces gray area into the lore.

The most successful PC games have always been the ones with the most ability to take in competing sides, and have tension and conflict.

I feel like War Within is just a solid like 7.5/10 or something, because it’s so well crafted and stuff, like Everquest was, but just generic villains instead of real Horde vs Alliance ideas is just not as compelling.

On the upside, modern WoW has pushed the kind of, we’re these rock and roll fighters… but we hear you, we listen to you, and so the melodrama of Khadgar and Alleria and stuff is, well, pretty nice.

It’s just, it’s got to be a game, and as a game the prospect of a massive war between horde and alliance with all the allied races is just a lot more interesting to me.

For a lot of those 20 years, it really wasn’t even Horde vs Alliance but third parties like the Scarlet Crusade or the Nightborne or others that “dared to be different” and not be generic do good paladins that provided intrigue in the game, but having been through TWW’s 4 factions, I honestly can’t even say if any of them are really pro Horde or Alliance or pro anything, they’re just like, honest nice people trying to get by.

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WoW was at its most popular, objectively, when the faction war was a cold war, not a hot one. When there was tension and skirmishes and proxy wars, but also working together against mutual threats. This was also when the lore was the most nuanced and complex. It’s a bit too nice and cooperative now for my taste too, but I prefer that to the alternative, and they can ease back to a cold war status over time if they want.

We’ve done massive faction war, we did it twice. Not only can the writing team not tackle it in a good fashion, but the playerbase flat out cannot handle it. This forum still has not recovered from BfA.

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All I can say is that the entire time I’ve played (since WoD) the faction war has been a dumpster fire. I am convinced the Blizzard is capable of anything other than a war based on villain batting one side…

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The thing is, factons conflict lost its apeal now, there was a poll made on twitter not so long ago by Nobbel87 asking if people cared about the faction conflict, and the poll ended up being a 50/50 while everyone guess was it would be a big majority in favor of the faction conflicts.

Its just how things are now, people are just not interested in the conflict anymore, and with good reasons : Because it will always be a dead end, since you cant make one faction be removed from the game so it will always end in a weird stalemate…

Well, you have to admit that, even the “tension” between Turalyon and that orc were…childish? Like it sounded to me like if 2 kids were saying that their football club was best than the other…

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Anyone who knows me from 2019 knows I enjoyed it. But at the end of BfA and SL it just broke me. Now a days I just want to get as far away from it and all the arguing I did about it mentally exhausted me. And with everything going on in the real world I don’t want to add more too it.

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By the way, here is the video i always link when people tell me “Please can we have more faction war?” :

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSYG7bjitn4

Thats just how it was, and it will never get beyound that…

Thats another point, i feel that, people are bit weird to want “war” in their game as if it was “cool” but its not good ><

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Every time they’ve tried to do faction conflict it’s been awful. They’ve proven they can’t do it well, so I’d rather they not do it at all.

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Wut

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I have had quite enough whiplash of going from World Savior to Genocidal War Machine to Rebel Without a Clue to World Savior. I do not need another faction war to give me more whiplash.

Blizzard’s best efforts with the faction conflict ended with Wrath, and have never recovered. I do not need or want another attempt to “get it right this time”. Third time is not the charm. Third time is just a triple-loser.

We do not need the Horde to be a triple loser.

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Oh gods don’t remind me of the Icecrown airship battle

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God the break downs and melt downs of people after Teldrassil burned was a thing to behold.

As some one who chose the Loyalist side, the hardest part was beating up Eitrigg and dragging him around. That part bummed me out.

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You know what they say ; "Never two without three” I am just joking here, i hope it wont happen!

I am always confused why Teldrasil triggered so many people compared to Theramore

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There’s a special word that comes to mind, one that one of the authors decided to make use of. And one that Blizzard approved of introducing to the story. Can you guess which one it is?

I’ll give you a hint:

When Garrosh dropped a bomb on Theramore, all the civilians had been evacuated, and the city was only filled with minimal named combatants.

When Sylvanas ordered her ICBM catapults to aim for Teldrassil, the combatants were all present on the mainland, while only civilians were left in the tree.

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Not to mention theramore was a military base being used by the alliance to stage attacks into durotar against the trolls and orcs.

The other was an unprovoked slaughter of innocents. People, and I was one for different reasons, were rightfully angry about it

But that’s just my take on it

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Because ultimately it’s an apples to bananas comparison, even if it doesn’t seem so on the surface.

From a player perspective, nobody’s first experience with a major city was coming off the boat to Theramore. Nobody can tell the story of how they went from questing around a tiny little village to suddenly Theramore, without having already been to Stormwind, Ironforge and/or Darnassus (and later the Exodar). By the time a player first encounters Theramore, they’ve already been to their first capital and had that big first moment of seeing how big the world can get.

And then after you do find Theramore that first time? You’re not going there all too often. There’s no AH, no bank (I think?), only some class and profession trainers, and very few quests beyond level 40-something. You don’t go there beyond rallying for Onyxia.

So players are just not going to feel the same connection as they will with Darnassus.

But then there’s the in-game reasons too.

With Theramore, we’d already been in the middle of a faction war. This wasn’t an opening salvo; we had all of Cataclysm to come to terms with the idea the Horde and Alliance were warring. And anyone with a passing knowledge of what was up with the Southern Barrens knew Theramore was actively involved in that war as a part of the supply lines. Bombing Theramore makes sense, because without it, there’s no resupplying the Barrens warfront (little w for warfront).

Contrast with Teldrassil which had no build-up. We just logged in for the pre-patch and suddenly we need to go murder some elves and trash their land because Azerite. And then we’re going all the way to the coast to blow up a tree because Sylvanas couldn’t kill hope.

This isn’t an act in the middle of a war to hinder an enemy that’s invading your land; it’s the start of the war, we’re the invaders, and we don’t even get told why we’re doiing this until an expension later.

Theramore had some outrage, but it was always very tempered because people largely understood why.

Teldrassil never got really explained until after the war and Shadowlands has to happen.

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After BfA they can’t do a faction conflict anymore because anything the Alliance does is justified and anything the Horde does is unjustified. It’d basically just be a BfA 2.0 but even worse.

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And I think blizz knows this. Which is why they been easing everyone away from the factions since Dragonflight

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At frist i thought you meant “moraly grey” (which they used back then) but reading fruther in the post i think i got what word it is haha :sweat_smile: i get it now.

But is it truly the reason? I mean, i felt more like people felt angry because they lost a capital, than the whole civilians being killed thing?

I think i understand, yeah that makes sense. I will also add that, Garrosh was always very warmonging agaisnt the Alliance ever since he was in place in Cata, while Sylvanas did it, mainly because she was convinced by Saurfang.

I think, there was a change of plan, because, to me, the reasons given by SL was a bit “meh” and i feel like it was created later on.

Because if you read the books that were given with the bfa collector (and are also free to read on official website) the reasons are already given as to why Sylvanas attacked the elves, the reasons was that Saurfang basically convinced her that the Alliance will eventually use the elven zones as a launching point to invade the Horde lands.

And i think that reason was good enough, Sylvanas then burning the tree was mainly out of pride and ego and loss of temper, which is a real thing, we did have example irl of peoeple actually pulling the trigger out of a loss of temper. And Sylvanas losing her temper is not new.

I feel like giving some kind of cosmic dimension to the thing was unneeded and a mistake.

And i think its a good thing, to be honest, the faction conflict brought more problems than anything.

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This felt like another instance of too many hands in the pot. Sylvanas was portrayed as cunning and collective. Then certain writers got a hold of her, next she’s running through the woods screaming, and beheading animals and drinking their blood and killing her own people.

Some things Christie wrote felt like it was completely out of left field, but I feel like BfA set the tone for mustache twirl era.

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Why the hell are people so desperate for the “faction conflict”? Everything that could possibly done with it has been done. Every time we’ve seen it crop up again, it had to be because one side was incredibly evil or incredibly stupid, because at this point there’s no logical reason for a full-scale war between the two sides. It also almost always happens when there’s a bigger, more powerful and dangerous threat the two sides should be focused on.

At best maybe a tense cold-war style standoff could work, but forcing another major war just for drama or conflict would be incredibly lame, frustrating and unsatisfying.

If you really want a in-game excuse for everyone to fight each other, just make a big Gladiator tournament. Like the Argent Tournament but even bigger. Make it like a football game rather than two kingdoms trying to wipe out each other’s culture, history and populations just to score points.

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