If by deal with you mean they were losing until they allied with some of them, sure.
If the Night Elves continued to fight the Alliance and Horde, the Legion would have just won.
Not sure what you consider my ‘in the box’ thinking here.
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So are you arguing the Horde is unsalvagable so screw the Horde or are you arguing the Horde can’t be a Hero faction without the Alliance curb stomping it into paste?
Cause in the first case, then WoW is screwed anyway because half the playerbase is screwed and in the second, then I don’t see how the Horde getting it’s butt kicked by the NEs in any way changes anything or opens up any avenue to the Horde to progress forward as a faction or become a hero faction. That just seems like a cheap empty argument to justify Alliance players getting their revenge fantasy at the cost of the Horde.
Don’t see how this is relevant to the narrative. Would Alliance players really feel better with the exact same story and a couple of extra fancy cinematic? I think asking for a balanced treatment for narrative tools is perfectly justifiable but that really is a second issue to what is actually being asked for.
Everyone has bias so I don’t really give the ‘I play both sides’ claim much value. I certainly am bias. However, the horde has hardly benefited from this. The Horde got jack all out of this war too and lost a city and two of its racial leaders and the only long standing developed forsaken character from prior to this expansion. The Forsaken would be completely screwed if they hadn’t shoehorned Lillian Voss in an retconned her character to suddenly be ok with raising undead.
Only for people who don’t give a crap about the story. Naratively the Horde has been a joke for years. It is incompetent, hypocritical and self destructive. Blizzard seems to have had the goal of reinforcing every negative claim the Alliance has made about the Horde since the put Garrosh in charge. They even proved Daelin Proudmoore right.
Horde players don’t deserve this. We shouldn’t be punished because because of the faction we chose. We shouldn’t be punished even more trying to fix the fact they screwed up the other side too.
I have never claimed the situation was one sided. I have claimed that it can’t be fixed by letting the Alliance have their revenge fantasy. Frankly I don’t really think it is fixable. The whole thing is a wreck. The only thing having the Horde actually contribute to something positive will do is maybe improve future narratives.
Isn’t going to happen. Sucks to be us. Neutral content is easier for them to make. The alternative is effectively trying to make two completely separate versions of an expansion or having the canon go completely to crap.
I am not trying to defend the Horde’s morality cause it is pretty defensible and shouldn’t be. Blizzard’s writers forced this situation on the horde. I am pointing out that if they wanted to throw stones and make blanket statements they should probably at least look at the lore history they are working with. They slaughtered all the human camps too.
Did you even bother to read what I said. I said that for her to claim my issues are irrelevant because I chose to play horde while her are valid in spite of the fact she claims her choice race are the eternal victims is hypocritical. I never wanted the NEs wiped out. I think the Burning of Teldressil was stupid from the get go. The horde has never been given a reason to want to fight this war.
I have said, consistently, that both sides got screwed here, just in different fashions. I am not even saying the Horde had it worse because that is subjective and I am definitely bias. What I am saying is you don’t screw over one side more to try and fix the other sides issues.
And for the record, yes, I would be annoyed if they just made the NE’s villains. That would be just as stupid and disrespectful to Alliance players as forcing the Horde endlessly in to the antagonist role is for Horde players.
Which makes me think your bias, regardless of your claim to who your main is, is not towards the Horde. Or maybe you just play the Horde when you want to be the bad guy, regardless of the line Blizzard constantly feeds horde players.
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That would be the ultimate goal but at least with the movies I would get something.
Remember Horde’s movie started immediately started after what the Horde did while the Alliance was completely ignored.
This I think indicates why you dont get it why one side has it worse than the other.
You get the movies and I get nothing.
Even if we assume both factions got horribly mauled with War of Thorns event.
Its kind of like being forced back into an abusive relationship.
Thats why I want to cut Horde presence completely from my own experience.
I don’t want to follow another Horde character and the Horde player should not follow around another Alliance character.
All this talk of fixing the story, have any of us considered that blizzard doesn’t think it needs fixing? Their recent interview amounts to waiting it out since we don’t have all of the pieces.
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More than half. Globally Hiorde players outnumber Alliance two to one. It’s why Horde battleground queues are so long compared to Alliance. I’s why the devs have to bribe Alliance players to go into War Mode.
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My guy can beat your guy in the masterful strategic analysis I’ve dreamed up at a level of concern and detail leagues beyond anything Blizzard has ever bothered to even think of putting into their story, let alone in a consistent manner.
All bullcrap aside, Team Blue needs to flex a little without destroying their core themes (for example of what that latter bit looks like, see: “Horde”)
In that regard, they could do this on the cheap with a scenario or two. Have the Night Elves driving the Horde out of non-specific positions in Ferelas and Ashenvale. Let them kill a few made-to-die NPCs. I’d say let them kill the Undead Night Elves, but apparently there’s plans for them, so meh. Let them cleanly win against and drive off named Horde NPCs. We don’t have to blow up Razor Hill (lookin’ at you, Garrosh) or anything extreme.
If you want to upscale a bit, have Anduin be on the losing end of a coup and driven in to hiding (in my headcanon scenario, he would end up co-leading the Defias with Vanessa as a resistance group that the player first is sent to put down, but possibly joins instead). Have the E.K. Alliance build a new military base at Southshore and re-take Dun Garok, and have them secure Gilneas and start a genocidal purging of Silverpine alongside Gilnean forces. Give the Horde something to shoot at as resistance.
When the evil McWarpants is inevitably put down, the Alliance loses anything taken in Silverpine to the Horde, but gets to keep the secured Gilneas and maybe a phased version of Southshore and/or Dun Garok. Night Elves should get some up-armored Ashenvale settlements, or a phased version of retaken land. All of this is obviously considerably more resources than a scenario or two though.
Does the Alliance need to flex a bit? Yeah, it does. Because it seldom gets to, so it feels like a perpetual case of “prepare to lose something, sometimes to the Horde”, with no return swing.
But we don’t want to flip off the Horde experience either. You don’t want to make the Horde experience feel like the Alliance one has at times. (And vice versa. The Alliance doesn’t need a full on BBEG bat.) Do it as side plots, the way Sylvanas’s aggression in Cata kinda was.
Then we can spawn one million story forum threads and claim how our side is right for YEARS with that kind of material. I mean, the Camp T horse has been raised and beaten so many times even Kel Thuzad thinks it is weird.
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I still don’t have an answer for you, Tamanii, but, to be clearer, these are my feelings as well:
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I understand the desire not see any Night Elf be placed into the role of antagonist. There’s always an outcry from fans of a character/race whenever they or members of the race take on generally antagonistic role.
But somebody has to start trouble. There has to be something motivating us to perform quests and go into instances where the best solution to the problem is “beat it up”. That’s just a demand of being an action oriented videogame.
But we’re clearly in this whole mess because Blizzard has kind of been reluctant to spread that role around. The same handful of races keep producing our antagonists and the same handful keep producing the heroes that lead us against them. It’s now to the point where the story is starting to paint an image where individuals of certain races as being incapable of any actual wrongdoing and others as incapable of actually being good.
If WoW is going to change. It has to actually change. People who we thought were bad are going to have to start doing good things and people we thought could do no wrong are going to have to start messing up.
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Or WoW could change to remove the faction barrier and this would be less of a problem. Blizzard is more interested in exploring the WoW cosmos at this point and problems beyond those coming from Azeroth, hence going into the Shadowlands to start that.
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They don’t want to. I don’t know if they really believe the faction divide and war is healthy for the community, or if there’s some gameplay aspect to it. Maybe they like to keep the tension in the background in case they need time to develop better expansions.
True that. But I hope they change their mind one day.
I’m one of the people who does enjoy the faction conflict. Not in all it’s executions, but in general, yeah.
At its most meta, the faction conflict serves as a means to diversify Warcraft’s stories by forcing it to pursue different plotlines from different points of view. This is what got WC3 it’s wide acclaim and really put the franchise on the map to begin with. When you have to tell two stories, then you have to look at things from multiple points of view. And you have to deliver on things with a bit more nuance than if you were only going with one singular story. You have to create unique assets to help distinguish the factions.
The best stories and experiences in WoW tend to come when the Horde and Alliance are split up and going through their own things i.e. Zandalar and Kul Tiras. And because the characters and conflicts are ‘human’, they can also reveal a lot about their respective cultures. Would the story of Talanji and her father really have had as much impact in terms of lore or emotion for most Alliance characters? Would Horde characters have really been invested in Jaina reuniting with her family and freeing Kul Tiras from the influence of the Ashvanes?
Without the conflict, would we even have had those two stories to begin with? Or would one of them been nixed? Which one would it have been?
It’s when WoW goes cosmic/neutral that you see the least nuanced and laziest writing. Where they keep going back to the same well for world ending BBEGs. Where motivations for antagonists are reduced to “I want to destroy everything to save everything” and the heroes are always fighting for nothing less than their very existence. The stories very rarely add any richness to the world and its characters because the focus is on Azeroth as a whole.
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There is no reason why the Horde and Alliance couldn’t have gone to Zandalar and Kul’Tiras respectively without the conflict. Having two stories does not mean that the stories have to be interconnected.
Such as Shadowmoon Valley and Frostfire Ridge.
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While not in open total war with one another, the Horde and Alliance were explicitly not cooperating with one another in Draenor and actually skirmished throughout the expansion in quite a few areas. Vol’jin and Varian didn’t even seem to be on speaking terms.
Which is not relevant to my point. The Horde and Alliance do not have to be on speaking terms for there to not be any conflict.
thats not true at all lol
You don’t have to be actively attacking/destroying major cities to be in conflict. Refusing to cooperate with one another, pursuing separate goals- occasionally at the expense of the other, and getting into skirmishes all constitutes a conflict as well.
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The latter two of which are superfluous to pursing separate goals.
WoW doesn’t do character vs nature, so yes it is.
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The vast majority of WoW’s conflicts are characters versus nature.