Hello, Blizzard Employee I am about to link this thread to on Twitter. I am going to be incredibly critical of your company’s work on the Horde’s narrative since Legion. The intent is not to insult you, but to make a sincere, collaborative attempt to improve the story. Whatever moral-greyness or faction pride Blizzard has hoped to deliver in Battle for Azeroth - they’ve absolutely failed for the first five months. This isn’t a book. No one can expect people to wait months for the possibility of some twist that reframes the events of the story in a positive light. You have to make the story enjoyable in every patch.
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All members of the Horde are equal in my eyes, <name>. We have all suffered many burdens, and if it were not for wisdom and honor, then we would be no better than the Scourge or my people while our blood was tainted by the demon Mannoroth.
It is your duty to aid the Horde and to defend our way of life. But it is also your duty to know when quarter and compassion should be given to friend and foe alike.
Understand this well. This is the new Horde, not some demon-spawned army who lack freewill. - Thrall
When I started playing WoW in Vanilla, I picked the Horde because of its identity that emerged from Warcraft 3. Unlike most fantasy franchises that depicted monstrous races like Orcs, Trolls, and Minotaurs as irredeemably evil or stupid, Blizzard decided to adopt an egalitarian message that treated these races as having the same capacity for thought and emotion as your conventional “hero” races like Humans and Elves.
This allowed the faction narrative to shift from a clear Good vs Evil dichotomy of WC1/2 to a faction relationship defined by a conflict of interest between two groups with a heroic legacy (defeating the Legion/Scourge) and understandable goals (defense of one’s own family, nation, and the planet at large). In Vanilla, both sides largely had similar concepts of morality, and were at war only for territory, resources, and global influence. I thought this was a great idea, as it allowed for more complexity, nuance, and depth within the faction conflict than “good people trying to save themselves from bad people.”
(Obviously, both factions (mostly the Horde) still had dark, villainous characters - such as the Forsaken. There were quests to torture noncombatants, terrorize innocents, and develop a plague capable of eradicating life on Azeroth. BUT THAT WAS OPTIONAL CONTENT, and not the forefront of the either faction’s narrative or identity. It was in quests you did not have to do to level or progress your character.
This was okay. The Horde was primarily a visually/culturally aggressive and savage faction, but with laudable goals and morally-sound virtues. The gleefully evil stuff was covert and optional.)
And millions of people have paid Blizzard to keep it this way. Due to WoW’s subscription model, players pay the company in advance to develop content for them later. Like me, many people liked the Horde’s identity we were advertised in WC3-Wrath and we subscribed for the development of that faction. Should the developers ever change or injure that identity, it would feel like a massive betrayal of our trust and a massive waste in literally thousands of dollars spent on this game.
Yet, that’s what happened. The story has inverted the Horde’s relationship between their morally best and worst elements. “Evil” characters and groups now have authority and influence over the “good” ones. Despite millions of players liking the Horde’s “Noble Savage” identity from WC3-Wrath, your writing team decided to push Sylvanas to the forefront, and make the PC complicit in the genocide of nearly an entire civilization, tolerate the blighting and raising both Horde and Alliance soldiers, and actively inflict the curse of undeath onto enemy soldiers for Sylvanas’ army. Outside of the PC, we also see needless acts of cruelty throughout BFA, such as Horde troops killing civilians. This is not in line with the cultural or moral values of most characters and races within the Horde.
If the Alliance was an existential threat like the Legion or Old Gods - these actions might be defensible. But they’re not. (Regrettably, Anduin would be better a Warchief than Sylvanas, because, like Thrall or Vol’jin, he has a sincere notion of the inherent value of life, and Sylvanas admittedly doesn’t care about the Horde on several occasions and, as of BTS, thinks being undead is better than being alive. She would probably kill us all if we ever outgrew our military usefulness.)
Simply put - we’ve relapsed into a contrived Good vs Evil dichotomy, all because the Horde lost its moral fiber at the behest of an unapologetically evil and world-threateningly insane leader and her agenda. (She didn’t even care that the planet was dying from Sargeras’ sword in Before the Storm. That’s how cartoonishly evil Sylvanas is.) The Horde has simply become nonvocal, hypocritical, cowardly, inept, and/or ignorant henchmen to a leader that’s antithetical to their espoused values.
I love faction conflict, but this isn’t working. In my opinion, the Horde needs more reason to participate in this war than a notion of morality derived from severe in-group loyalty, and it wouldn’t hurt if the Alliance wasn’t near-consistently portrayed has so suffocatingly good either. I hope y’all engage more with the community and try to figure out the best way to proceed because I’ve lost faith that this company is making good decisions.
Thank you for reading,
Yag.
![:rainbow:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/rainbow.png?v=6" ":rainbow:")