I’m always in favor of rehabilitating the Scarlets into interesting antagonists.
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Rename them to the Lilac Inquisition (they’ve been beaten and bruised a bit over years and lost a lot of members) and scrap the Queen Menethil bit and I’m at least partially on board.
I mean hey they stapled her on to the plot I’m just trying to figure out a good use for her.
She could be utilized to bolster the Forsaken’s soft power. Considerable potential for propaganda and diplomacy. Also have her make frens with the Scarlet Risen so I can get my damn undead Paladins already.
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Is there even a lot of Scarlets at this point? They seem more like a weird fringe group than people with an actual threatening force of fanatic soldiers.
My problem with using the Scarlets again is that it insulates Stormwind too much, and those bland poster tin cans desperately need some moral greyness.
I mean I thought I gave a decent enough explanation for their sudden population boost, and that’s barely even necessary. There’s always just enough of any given race.
And A. I really don’t think the Alliance needs like overt racism, have you been on the internet? We know exactly what sort of trash that’ll attract and I don’t want that garbage on my porch in general.
B. My objective here is to try to get Azeroth back to a functional status quo. From Cara onward every expansion has been about flipping stuff upside down. Chaos stops meaning anything when it’s just the norm.
Getting back to an uneasy peace, Cold War vibe between Red and Blue is a good idea. The faction war as a main plotline has been an ongoing disaster. The meta of the game assures it will always end in a bewildering stalemate.
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Cold War will just be a waste of everyone’s time.
Especially because it will just continue the current vibe from Night Elves especially of “you deserve them hating you”.
Also how are the Alliance not going to be absurdly idealistic if it just comes across as the Horde races just needing to be friendly to the Alliance and everything would have been fine? What reason would there be for future tension other than the stuff the Horde did?
Bruh did you read my post lol.
Where is that even vaguely suggested?
You mean stuff that has happened every time we fight the big bad?
Even if we don’t go full faction war again, the continued hostilities are still going to be super dated and petty feeling.
And just lightly dipping into moral greyness with the “bit of scarlet aid” won’t amount to much if it still comes across as the Blues being super nice and when not it’s in response to the evil of the Reds.
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Actual “numbers” don’t really matter. There will always be as many members of X group as is needed for a plot to work.
But the Scarlet Crusade currently has an emissary in the Cathedral in Stormwind, so it’s not like they’re on the worst of terms. They’re also currently running a pamphlet campaign that rebukes Anduins legitimacy as king while also pushing for the reclamation of Lordaeron and eradication of the Forsaken. Not exactly the most unpopular opinions at the moment 
When the story demands it, I very much expect their numbers to swell with new converts.
And yeah, it pretty much is a means of being able to distance actual Alliance from any responsibility and provide us with some baddies we don’t have to feel guilty about beating up when they ultimately turn on even their own allies. At this point though? It’s at least a step in the other direction, considering Scarlets could just a easily go the way of the Dark Iron and Void Elves and Worgen and simply have their image softened by way of allying with Stormwind/the Alliance.
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I mean yeah but they already are. The faction conflict is sort of a core concept to the product. It’s not going anywhere, and I’d rather it just be on the back burner than being used to do WC3’s morality play again but dumber.
The Horde and the Alliance are core to the franchise.
They don’t have to be defined by how much they hate each other. It’s like viewing Warcraft 3 as just players doing Orc vs Human in online play for the thousandth time.
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To the extent of dominating the storyline in its entirety, they were only ever core to one game, WC2.
Nelves, forsaken, belves, draenei were only hammered into factions due to dev laziness
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And my idea actually has the Forsaken and Worgen at least coming to a sort of reconciliation in the face of a mutual and merciless foe.
For the express purpose of setting a stage where they can work on their own themes and don’t have to just exist as an antagonist.
The Worgen especially need this. The Forsaken are like this core facet of their tragic origin story but the Worgen don’t come up after Silverpine until Stormheim. It’s the most one sided hatred I’ve ever seen. They’re Victorian werewolves Blizz you can have them do more than change they form, eat fish 'n chip and hate undead.
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Which would be well and good, if the premise wasn’t still a Cold War.
Which is what happens when two powerful nations want to destory each other, but because it would be too mutual to directly do so (which nearly happened), they fight proxy wars instead.
What’s the positive storytelling for the Horde in this?
It’s a Cold War because nobody wants to play a fantasy action RPG where the world is at peace. Animal Crossing this ain’t.
And in my idea the Forsaken look good because they always look slick as hell tearing through their fragile breather cousins. Only this time they’re affixed in an unambiguously heroic pose as they’re basically punching fantasy N@ZIs.
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There can always be local, smaller scale threats and villains without super tired, hand on weapon handle faction animosity.
Like Alliance fans are tired of getting black eyes with underwhelming returning of the favor, I’m tired of “Foul Hordie, I guess I will have to make use of you” and it feeling to some degree deserved.
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Yeah. That’s what I’m suggesting. This is a pretty localized threat that’s menacing just two factions. Which is why the Worgen and Forsaken have to sort this out themselves.
The coalitions have their own respective problems. Outside some backup from their respective elven pals they’re alone here as this is a problem facing a handful of zones. It’s not a Zooval calibur problem.
I’ve wanted an expansion like this for a long time. Lots of localised problems/scenarios where you really just get back to the roots of the cultures and people that attracted you to the game in the first place.
A new centaur khanate, Quill boar holy war, a new Hogger, Westfall declares its independence, Furbolg unite, kobalds undermine elwynn forrest in search of candles, tauren reclaim thousand needles, and a goblin vs gnome stoush on a previously unknown island over something innane like suntan oil. etc.
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Fine I will post what they should do for a world revamp for Barrens and orgrimmar etc.
Update ratchet to have like a restaurant or something, have an updated Orgrimmar with more Orc clan focus, get a train station and an infrastructure across azeroth make 1k needles into a dam, have Northern barrens have alot of smaller Orc villages that are tied to the “Main” clans. Change The shattered hand clans to be more about Gladiator rituals, have a questline about “Uniting the clans against a big threat” in Northern barrens, have Shadowmoon clan have some minor connections to Moonwells for the sake of it, have Burning blade be about honor etc, Frostwolf be the main shamanistic clans, But also a Hunter clan that they share ties with the Thunderlords etc. Warsong be a “Raider”/hun clan
Have Bleeding hollow learn potentially some connection to the “druidism” stuff of the primals/plant creatures etc given that they live in a chaotic jungle that wants to eat them up for so long etc. have the “druidistic forest of roots” combined with the plant guys from draenor want to heal the stuff from the oasises and just creates general chaos, have the Wailing caverns be updated and basically be a nest of primals/plant people
Orgrimmar: Have a goblin district above the Rogue/Warlock area where the flightmaster is, have the rogue/warlock area moved to below where the earthen ring shrine is, include Mages as well with shadowmoon architechture.
Have the Valley of Spirits become more swampy troll village. Have Goblin roads for easier transportation around the whole of orgrimmar, have the valley of strength become more of an impenetrable fortress by giving it a roof etc, increase the amount of caves, have a transportation network run by those Iron Horde Spike balls.
Hm might have missed some things.
People of a certain discord knows Exactly what I am talking about, specifically because they have seen the stuff I am talking about.
This is easily done and should take no less than a week.
At least the world building stuff.
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I can’t stand the constantly ratcheting stakes anymore. This is just getting stupid. Like multiple times they say Zooval’s forces rival the Legion’s. And I can’t believe they’d deliberately draw attention to what a direct to DVD sequel this feels like. Once you best one infinite army literally hell bent on the destruction of all creation, a second one just feels silly. You can’t really get worse than ‘Murder Everything’ as a goal. No real way to go about it in a more mean spirited way.
I so desperately want stakes I can wrap my head around. With this we have a quantifiable enemy (The Scarlet Onslaught) with an actionable goal (Reconquest of Lordaeron / Gilneas and ethnic cleansing) that has to be thwarted with direct military action.
We don’t gotta find some special keys or go dig up memories from the stygian pits. Just - there are some bad people doing a bad thing, why not stop them with your sword and sorcery skills?
And I just think it’d be really cool if you had werewolves and the living dead tearing apart crusading Paladins- and the monsters are the good guys. Doesn’t that simple but effective subversion of fantasy tropes feel like, ya know, Warcraft?
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