With the horde and alliance getting closer and closer to becoming “friends”, so to speak, I think it would be interesting to see a new faction setup evolve. Light vs dark. With this, all races can be playable as either light or dark, but maybe a quest down the road to make you decide which route to take. Of course, classes like warlock and shadow priest will need some reworking. Maybe they can only be dark due to their shadow damage spells. Same goes with paladin with their holy light. Instead of races being determined by faction, we have classes being determined.
I don’t know, just an idea. Maybe this is only possible with a whole new game being created.
It is a fairly fundamental assumption for all the game logic you are either Horde or Alliance. They can play off it to do some simple logic overrides for things like Mercenary mode, but adding a full third faction would likely just melt Blizzard’s servers like a five gallon bucket of thermite.
I would play a “dark” or evil faction. In fact it’s probably the only way another faction would work as there would be no point in having another Horde or another Alliance.
Give me a path of accessing races, experiencing cultures and following characters that we are generally blocked from.
Sounds more like a reputation farm than a faction idea. Also this was somewhat already done on Starwars where there was the republic vs the empire, but characters on both sides could either be light side of dark side of the force and their appearance changed if they went deep into the dark side.
The best time for a new faction to arise would have been during Battle for Azeroth with a bit of a fracturing in the Alliance.
Said third faction would have been comprised of the Night elves and the worgen.
The worgen already had a staunch hatred/mistrust of the forsaken and would have easily been able to pull the Night elves to their side given the burning of Teldressil along with Tyrande being blinded by grief, rage and becoming the night warrior. Given Stormwind’s hesitance (initially) about launching an attack should have helped widen the fracture.
While this third faction wouldnt have been an enemy of the rest of the alliance, it would have been a case of “we aren’t your enemies, but don’t try and stop us from doing what is necessary or there will be trouble”
If Bliz were to go with a third faction (and the indictions of that are like minus 20%) they would want the numbers to be fairly even vis-a-vis player base.
So you really couldn’t split the Alliance (assuming realm pop numbers mean anything). So you are going to need BEs in one faction and Orcs & Trolls in the other.
Then you divvy out the less popular races. Forsaken to Blood Elves would let you make an Eastern Kingdoms-Kalimdor split.
They’ve already kind of done that. Elves and humans are the most populous races on Azeroth and we just met a faction of half human half elves from a faction called the Arathi Empire. Let us join them.
I think Pandaren, but thats ok, Blizzard forgets them too.
I dont think its a matter of Horde and Alliance being friends I think its more the writing is just inching away from being faction-based at all. I see people claiming Horde gets no story and its all Alliance when it reality its only Alliance characters and not necessarily the Alliance as a whole that get focus.
If I had to guess Blizzard is slowly distancing themselves from the faction focus altogether.
