And it is unfair the Alliance lost Nethergarde, Theramore, Southshore and a whole host of other towns without the Horde losing something in exchange. So dont start with this fairness nonsense!
9 Likes
It should probably be noted that the Alliance started out with just so much more content than the Horde in classic, and Cata was meant to offset that. The only other alternative I’ve seen proposed was giving the Horde all new zones to offset that massive discrepancy, but I highly doubt that would have flown either. You’d have just as many people screeching Horde bias because the Horde got all these shiny brand new zones; as there were people enraged we picked up once neutral zones in our Capital’s backyards.
Frankly, any way to balance out the leveling experience between the two factions probably would have felt like Blizz was favoring the Horde for Allies.
23 Likes
To add on to this, where would the faceless npc jabs take place? Lordaeron? Gone. Zuldazar? Done. Goblin city? Where? Darkspear capital? Where? Org? Raided already . Thunder Bluff? Sure, Sylv was gonna do that already. Quel’thalas? Never fixed after Arthas. High Mountain? I guess. Suramar? Sure. Voldun? Not the foxes!!! AU Draenor might be the best bet…oh wait did that in WoD.
Anything else and it’s another Camp T or Dalaran esque incident. Easily down played.
1 Like
Feel free to take the Horde equivalent of those places.
You destroy those seven buildings and feel better.
11 Likes
There seem to be a lot of issues with the Horde starting out with far less all those years ago.
Like, I seem to recall there being quite a kerfuffle about just how many Alliance areas were wrecked by the Cataclysm when compared to the Horde; even excluding the Garrosh invasion. But, I’m like … yeah? Like, the Horde canonically controlled like 5 zones b4 Cata? Durotar, the Barrens, Mulgore, Tirisfal Glades, Silverpine Forest. We picked up two more with the BEs in BC, but so did the Alliance with the Draenei. We had nothing really to lose, and even Org burned to the ground due to Fire Elementals. Of course the Cataclysm was gonna hit the Alliance harder!
7 Likes
I’d certainly agree the genre is fundamentally better suited to world based organic storytelling.
So is the faction war, honestly. I love the faction conflict because I love WPVP. Some of my best ‘I cannot believe that just happened’ moments in gaming come from WoW’s open world PvP. It’s so unbalanced, chaotic and random that I’ve more glorious and hilarious moments than I can count.
Seriously the best PVP in BFA came from;
A. The natural conflict that emerged in 8.3 content over the scarcity of mobs, rares and quest targets.
B. Going off script for the invasions. Flying up to the Horde zeppelin in Kul Tiras attacks to throw an additional challenge at the Alliance is a lot of fun, and it amazes me how many people don’t know know how perilous fighting a Priest near a ledge is.
So the best PvP for me, in this expansion about the Horde and Alliance being at war, was when I did my own thing or when the story was no longer about it.
Seriously I’d say 7 out of 10 times the invasions were just a curb stomp with one side easily overwhelming the other, and were paradoxically only sort of fun on the losing end as you’d have to move quickly and use clever tactics to complete the objective while dodging roaming packs of Alliance.
The other 2 times it was so sparsely populated you’d just go about your quests ignoring the enemy faction. And I think, maybe a couple of times in the whole of BFA did I encounter what felt like an actual battle where the player numbers were similar. Those were really fun but so rare I’d consider them a happy accident rather than a feature.
So the faction conflict is better done by just letting players into that do their own thing. But what I found really interesting about Classic is I think the lore characters are better presented there than they are in modern WoW.
Take Slyvanas. In Classic you do not even speak with her until you are about level 53. You don’t even talk to Varimathras until your mid 30s for the Scarlet Monastery quests. By the time you speak with the Banshee Queen herself it feels like you’ve really earned her attention.
Compare that with the Cata experience. Where the Banshee Queen is calling you a cool dude and going on exposition dump poney rides with you before you reach the Sepulchre because you’re just such a special boy.
The hero characters should I think always be part of the narrative but it should contain them, not be about them. I’m here to have adventures in this world and look at the gorgeous environments. When a leader has something for you to do it should be a Ish just got real moment, not your average Tuesday.
Seriously how much lesser does Rexxar feel now that he was my own personal attack gopher for the mission table rather than the giant orc who just wandered around Kalimdor who you had to personally track down if you wanted to talk to him?
15 Likes
And I can easily counter by noting the amount of notable characters the Horde has lost compared to the Alliance. Would you be willing to off your favourite character for that win you so badly want?
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I’m not so sure I agree. Especially when it comes to PVP, which has always been a really weak story thread. Like, truly, it was a really shallow story invented to justify PVP on a story level and never really evolved beyond that.
It is just an ugly mass of contradictory player expectations; vile responses to a war having tangible consequences; and people conflating their enjoyment of a game mechanic for “good storytelling”. On top of that, the Horde only started evolving into an actual threat for the Alliance by like … WotLK? Horde Pride? What that? We almost got wiped out by a single Alliance admiral in WC3? A perpetual cold war where one side could easily stomp the other into paste without even trying is hardly a good settup. SWTOR hit that mark much better.
As for sandbox narratives. Exploration is great, until you have nothing left to explore. Like the Horde PC did around the time they hit lvl 40 in Vanilla. They truly had no relevance in anything going on, and had no reason to be involved in most of the end game. Character driven stories aren’t bad, and generally they are easier to write around long-term. The issue is that Blizz doesn’t always have the best balance between “Character” and “Exploration” based stories; but they do hit that mark from time to time. Zandalar was a very nice balance between the two.
4 Likes
Zul’dazar failed cause the Alliance players didn’t give a hoot about Zul’dazar or Rastakhan. Sylvanas was the Big Bad for the expansion for Alliance players.
Also Zul’dazar was meant to inflict a loss on the Horde, not be a victory for the Alliance. To the Alliance it had all the same problems Seige of Lorderon had.
8 Likes
Most of Warcraft is really shallow stories invented to justify things. We’re wearing different primary colors and don’t look or sound the same. You don’t need much else to convince people to attack one another. [quote=“Droité-tanaris, post:29, topic:668139”]
We almost got wiped out by a single Alliance admiral in WC3?
[/quote]
A fledgling Horde that hadn’t really found it’s footing yet, and didn’t even have all it’s WoW nations yet. Throughout Vanillia and BC the Horde and Alliance are presented pretty equally. In every contested zone one has a town that answers the others. Conflicts like Alterac Valley certainly show the factions on more or less an even playing field.
I’m just confused by this. You have the Plaguelands for the Forsaken, Blackrock for the Orcs (Rend is a false Warchief at war with Thrall), and admitably the Tauren and Trolls didn’t have much until Zul’Gurub and the Silithid attacks really picked up but I never felt like I was irrelevant to the story.
In an MMO they kind of are. You’re here to experience your story. I don’t care about Disco Magni and his marriage to a planet, and I only knew who Wrathion was beforehand because of a chance RP event at his crib in Pandaria I attended.
It’s even less fun when the character’s decisions override your imput. Like at Teldrassil where I guess every heroic Horde character was on lunch break and really invested in a good book or something because they didn’t do anything to mitigate the firebombing of a defeneless population center.
7 Likes
A story without any driving force or framework is just a sandbox for headcannon. And everyone thinks their headcannon is “the best”. Even by the time of WotLK, Blizz started to drift more towards character driven narratives, which is inherently not a bad thing. Part of what makes good worldbuilding is creating and developing characters worth caring about in that world. Its also not inherently a bad thing to make a developing world; that changes over time.
The Vanilla experience can never truly be recaptured. The goal should be to find a balance between character driven stories and exploration driven stories; rather than prioritizing one over the other.
2 Likes
A developing world is fine. I actually liked a lot of Cata’s changes and was extremely let down when I arrived in Outland and discovered it was exactly the same.
I’d, perhaps foolishly, thought most of Azeroth had been incrementally updated overtime and didn’t realize for awhile that was just Cata content. I’d like if they moved the story forward on a lot of zones.
The hero characters however I don’t think should be much more relevant than they were in Legion. Khadgar and Illidain turn up here and there, give you world quests and pop into cutscenes to give you the Ish just got real plot updates.
Slyvanas just torching Teldrassil and players being unable to react to it in any meaningful way was bad. I still remember just awkwardly standing in Darkshore, and felt like the admitably very cool Undercity Plaguebat they handed me was almost an apology for being in that low point of video game storytelling.
4 Likes
The Hero characters were probably more relevant in Legion than they were in BfA. Provided you exclude the cinematics, which was a new phenomena. Anduin, Sylvie, Saurfang, and Thrall were almost non-existent for the majority of the expansion. Magni was … frustrating, but really only locked in a single zone (and had awful WCs). Outside of that though? The War Campaign, where the majority of important lore characters showed up, comprised a shockingly small amount of the actual story content. Which … honestly may have been more of a problem than it being character driven, since that was the most important story thread.
The issue with Blizz is that they are awful with juggling their large roster. People would notice far less “character driven stories” if Blizz was just more proficient at putting what characters would work best where they need to be. Rather than oversaturating the stories with a small, select, mostly Alliance few … so we grow sick of them far quicker. Also, we’ve never been able to stop the major story beats. Ever. Teldrassel burning was not an exception to this, it was very much the rule. We are truly just along for the ride in those events. If anything, I would say the most blatant infringement on player agency in BfA was probably forcing the Horde PC to give Sylvie Xalatath.
3 Likes
Yes. I will trade the entire alliance leadership to kill Sylvanas.
That was a game balance issue because the alliance had more zones in vanilla. This actually balanced the zones better. You’re essentially asking for the alliance to have more than the horde.
15 Likes
They could’ve done that without the Horde waging a war. Like using the Twilight’s Hammer.
5 Likes
The twilights hammer attacks the alliance and gives the land to the horde? That seems even worse.
1 Like
The thing is I fundamentally believe video game storytelling should be done with the mechanics of the video game. Otherwise it’s just a sandbox that gets occasionally interrupted by a short film.
And what’s so infuriating about BFA was they did exactly that in the War of Thorns.
You had quests like the attack on Astranaar where you controlled how many if any civilian casualties there were.
But more substantially for me was the interaction with NPCs using the game’s typical mechanics.
There was a quest where Horde and Alliance soldiers alike were being mind controlled by Highborne phantoms. I killed one controlling a Nelf Soldier, and as she was tagged hostile I cut her down too. Her last words were something along the lines of So much for honor.
Curious, I freed another MCed Alliance NPC and to my surprise they’d give you a nod and run off.
I wanted to give Blizz a big gold star for that. You personally got to decide how brutal or honorable the war was with in the moment decisions based around a subversion of existing mechanics. I was so hyped for BFA after that.
Then we get to the end of the War of Thorns and;
10 Likes
And then in about four years they’ll say that New Evil Horde was actually behind it the whole time.
14 Likes
Honestly with the overall story of BFA, they should have been the main cause of Teldrasil. That should have been misinterpreted by the alliance and honor horde as Sylvanas’ doing. Being falsely blamed should have forced Sylvanas into doing what the Jailor wanted. And this is coming from an exclusive honor horde player