Hello Everyone, for the past few years like many of you, I have been unsatisfied with with the state of some of my favorite races and their place in the story. The Night Elves who from WC3 were a mighty empire in the forests now suddenly no longer had control of their territory come WoW and the Horde has been so aimless since Legion that when I made the post a few months back asking how the Horde actually works now, and the general consensus was: who knows.
I wrestled with why there seems to be this inability to tell stories that move these races forward in a satisfying way until I realized the problem wasn’t with the races, it’s with Kalimdor. If you look the leveling path in the EK you tend to see that each race is relatively isolated. the Stormwind campaign starts in Elwyn and goes to westfall, redridge and duskwood. the Forsaken with Tirisfal, silverpine, hillsbrad, Eplagelands. The dwarves with most areas of Khaz Modan ect. Each race has multiple zones that flesh out who they are, and the state of their nations. Kalmindor by contrast is claustrophobic. The Orcs only really get Durotar before joining the Tauren in the Barrens which as a zone is well Barren or going to Azshara which is a Goblin zone before being thrown against the night elves in Ashenvale. This is also exasperated by the Horde story being about newcomers so all existing infrastructure is nothing more than small outposts unlike the races of the EK of whom have significantly more infrastructure developed.
The Night Elves on the other hand only really get Darkshore before running into the Orcs and having to split their questing experience with Horde players and for a race whose story is so deeply tied to their land it is deeply disheartening to lose it so Horde players actually have somewhere to quest. For both groups there is no room to tell their races story or build a good base of who they are without running into each other or being defined by the conflict between them.
This was apparent in the Night elves from day one but didn’t really come into focus for the Horde until after we lost the Warchief. See for much of the games history the Horde itself at least the Orcs, Tauren, Trolls and Goblins to an extent had a very defined identity. The Horde was 1 nation it was unified and connected. It’s races sharing zones in Kalimdor was a differentiator from the multinational Alliance, they were one people. But now with the loss of the Warchief and Horde reforming into a Security Council with independent factions, it is no longer in a political union and we lose that cohesive identity. With there being no room to tell racial stories in the Kalimdor questing experience there is simply nothing to fall back on.
The good news is that this can be fixed, the bad is that it will require a full Kalimdor revamp. A Revamp that sticks to the following principal’s:
- cross faction questing enabling full racial control of zones
- commitment to building infrastructure and growth oriented content (no one likes seeing half built bridges for years)
- Tell local meaningful stories, you can’t build identities without a solid base of who each race and faction is
TLDR: Kalimdor’s confined nature doesn’t give the races based there any room to tell non conflict related stories building up the race or expanding on who they are. Until Kalimdor is revamped both the Horde and the Night elves will suffer inability to build compelling narratives exploring the race in its current state or in a way that ties positively into the main plot.
