If there’s anything that stands in very stark contrast between people’s renewed interest in the Classic world through Season of Discovery and Dragonflight thus far, it’s the state of Factions and Races throughout the years. It’s been a journey of multiple world ending threats since Classic, of course, but the result has been this watering down of faction and racial identity, creating this amorphous gray blob where no race really stands out for any particular reason anymore. There’s not really any way to point out where this began, because everyone will have a different opinion – for some it began in Battle for Azeroth with the end of war midway through the expansion, for others when Cataclysm forced a rework of the world, or Shadowlands when neither of these things really mattered at all. Out of all of them, however, I would say Dragonflight is a safe bet on the time period where it’s the clearest.
The Races
None of this is to say that the only way races and factions can stand apart from one another is through war. In fact, personally, the two were at their most interesting during the starting zones of each race, be it in Classic or Cataclysm. These zones highlight what is unique about each race, allowing the player to become enamoured with their choice through a mix of quests and presentation, be it the environment itself or the ambience. These zones still exist, but they now have three major issues: they’re slower than Exile’s Reach, they’re not what a new player sees anymore, and they’re extremely outdated. This isn’t just a massive disservice to the race, it’s also a disservice to the class of choice – but that is, admittedly, a whole other can of worms.
I would say there is no core race where this is clearer in than the Tauren, which have been represented almost exclusively by Baine since Battle for Azeroth – a character that despite presenting itself as opposing the war’s escalation, went on to be stripped of just about any value with such inspiring quotes as “For the Shadowlands!” after sitting in Oribos for the duration of Shadowlands. The Tauren have previously had these issues with their culture being all but assimilated into the Alliance’s races: Legion dismissed the roots of the Sunwalkers’ faith with An’she by turning their (supposedly) most devoted character into merely the Light’s, Shadowlands with its Grimoire directly discredited their shamanistic practices as purely “hallucinations”, and Dragonflight, with its large focus on Elune and druidism in Amirdrassil, refused to acknowledge the potential differences in the Tauren’s practices, instead lumping them in with the Night Elves and featuring Hamuul for a few brief quests. It’s a continuous deconstruction of what makes the race interesting and unique, instead playing second fiddle to an almost entirely Alliance-focused world-building.
The Factions
Exile’s Reach was a promising alternative at first; a romp through an island exclusively with people of the faction of the player’s choice. And on the surface, it fulfils that purpose, but it’s quickly evident that it’s very shallow, and that it only exacerbates how much the Horde has become like the Alliance, with only the gnomes and goblins really gaining a shred of individuality. The player then gets a very quick intro to their race upon leaving the island, and they’re off to BfA (and soon Dragonflight) with very little to go off of.
This only became a bigger issue in Dragonflight, which refused to feature the Factions with any particular relevance. Shadowlands being what it is, it was at least understandable that the champion would be the only one to venture past the veil, but Dragonflight opens with a contradiction: a world-ending threat is emerging, but nothing more than explorers are allowed to give aid. The isles, much like the story itself, is practically devoid of any semblance of which faction the player has chosen. This has another effect, which is the cheapening of the perceived threat of these enemies (The Primalists and The Primalists, the narrative and the dissonance) as, surely, they cannot be such a big threat if little more than explorers are needed.
The setting then goes the extra mile in further dispelling any notion of Faction, creating the (personally, very unnecessary) Dragonscale Expedition out of the Reliquary and the League of Explorers, previously staunch rivals with a history of aggression. They join a collection of already familiar neutral organisations that players hold close and would be far more relevant to the elemental troubles ahead, and chooses to leave by the wayside, cheapening the impact of the whole thing as a result: the Earthen Ring and the Cenarion Circle, both of which have been very noticeably absent in DF (Shaman Narrative in Dragonflight) outside of a couple of token NPC’s.
This isn’t an isolated case either, as the Tyr’s Guard is made in spite of and with the same explicit purpose of the Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade, both of which were left forgotten even after Shadowlands made it amply clear that the Scourge would become a greater problem than ever. Not much new is accomplished by way of replacing one with the other, yet both examples come off as a way to “surpass the old” with a new that is billed as superior without so much as acknowledging what came before. This has another consequence: it creates unnecessary bloat, causing things to lose cohesion – and in the case of the Tyr’s Guard, forces the same Human-based concept of faith upon every other race, resulting in homogenised cultures that lack any unique features.
This lack of cohesion in faction identity only grows larger when these neutral organisations come into play – not because they don’t have their place in the world, which they do, but because they are barely acknowledged as “the third option” or their consequences to what is often a two-sided conflict. The Argent Dawn served this purpose well, as it did later on as the Argent Crusade, but come Cataclysm, we see the factions wage war while simultaneously working together amongst the Argents. The world building is poorer for the lack of exploration of these dynamics.
There is a case to be made that the advent of cross-faction guilds are the cause of the growing homogenization, but an ability to sometimes form an allegiance with the other faction for raiding, or Mythic+, or even PvP really, shouldn’t mean that there should be nothing to set them apart. There’s no need for an all-out war to display these differences – arguably, an all-out war is actually worse, because it means neither side will ever win in a conflict of increasingly higher stakes, resulting in unsatisfying outcomes for both sides. They are displayed best when these conflicts are small scale and mainly feuds between the races, which is where Season of Discovery’s return to the Classic world made the contrast all the more stark.
The recent decisions with the awful Reclamation of Gilneas questline which is far from a rare sentiment further bring this into question, as Gilneas, a city that is decidedly Alliance, even by the characters’ own admission, is marked as friendly for the Horde, who can quite literally make their home at a Gilnean inn. There is an element of environmental storytelling that the narrative team is conveying, consciously or not, where Gilneas is suddenly a neutral city, akin to Dalaran. It has even less safeguards than Bel’ameth, which at least had the presence of mind to make those NPCs neutral to Horde AND add a debuff that marks the Horde player as being under careful watch by the guards. There continues to be a push towards a friendliness between these peoples with great differences that isn’t in any way earned yet.
Battle for Azeroth shone a spotlight on the war between the factions (and then veered completely towards something else but that’s besides the point), but rather than explore the outcome of this supposedly massive war, especially for a people as utterly fractured as the Forsaken, Shadowlands followed up exclusively on the Night Elven plight, and then doubled down during Dragonflight, where inexplicably, five years later, the matter continues completely unaddressed. At what point should the story begin exploring the rest of Azeroth and the playable races that players are so invested in, as opposed to bringing even more races with shallow backgrounds such as the Niffen into the mix?
Allied and Neutral Races
This may yet change if the story of The War Within truly manages to provide a sensible reason, but the track record for races such as Earthen Dwarves joining both sides as neutral is… not great.
Pandaren were the first example of this, granting both factions access to the same race. The result has been an outright dismissal of the race since Mists of Pandaria first featured them; they’ve entered a limbo where they could not really be featured in the faction-centric stories of BfA, but also have not been featured in any other way beyond occasional cameos. If we were to consider leaders to be representatives of a race’s “screen time”, then Pandaren are close to null, as Ji and Aysa offered but a couple of lines of dialogue. It becomes even clearer when one considers that the introduction of Zandalari, which were featured heavily as antagonists in Mists of Pandaria, held no fanfare from the Pandaren of the Horde – quite the opposite even, as the Rajani were featured in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms of 8.3 without so much as a word from the Pandaren. Their representation began and ended with Chen and Li-Li’s presence.
Allied races followed, with mixed representation on both accounts. Some didn’t require any introduction: Nightborne, Light forged and Highmountain were heavily featured in Legion, much the same as Kul Tirans and Zandalari and Mag’har and Dark Iron Dwarves. But we then get to void elves, mechagnomes and vulpera, the former two of which at least benefit from their cousins in terms of developments, while vulpera continue to feature a practically paper thin background and culture, having been absent in Shadowlands to instead be relegated to what is essentially only a cute race used for one-off comedic characters (though this unfortunately also applies to gnomes and goblins). Is this really all that the players of these races should expect to be?
But even while vulpera have been mostly the rear end of jokes, all of these races suffer from the same issue: their development since their introduction was entirely stunted.
Dracthyr were the biggest example of how neutral races have thus far been awkward introductions. They have enjoyed a very extensive development throughout Dragonflight, which hopefully is a sign of things to come for other races, but their presence in the factions is almost a courtesy. Unlike Pandaren, which have very different philosophies to set the two apart, dracthyr weyrns are essentially indistinguishable. They’ve no stakes in either side, even with the Alliance’s demonstration of (with good reason) reticence about their presence.
Dracthyr do, at least, feature an aesthetic that neither side really had – the same can’t be said for Earthen Dwarves, which awkwardly introduce dwarves to the Horde in spite of being billed as similar to run-of-the-mill dwarves. Again, perhaps this will change come TWW and its introductory story. But, again, the track record doesn’t inspire confidence. Earthen likewise suffer from the issues of the Lightforged, Highmountain, Mag’har, void elves and arguably even Dark Iron Dwarves, in that they have been introduced as a new race when they would have been a perfect fit for simply customization options, once again denying other, already far more established (and arguably more fitting) races from being expanded upon further, while also adding little to nothing to the factions they’re being featured in.
The Direction
The question I’d wish the narrative team would answer is “what’s the end goal with factions and their races?”. Is the goal to wipe the slate clean to build off of later, or is it to make the choice of faction/race as irrelevant as possible to appeal to a gameplay oriented design? It’s difficult to not think this is the case when any trace of animosity between the various peoples are being quelled, sometimes with baffling solutions, such as the Gilneas Reclamation, or when the depiction of these characters differ very little from one another. I’m sure the team is aware of this, but when there has been no content related to these races in almost a decade in some cases, a race will inevitably be seen through the lens of how their leaders act. I bring back the example of Baine, a lethargic character who only recently showed some spine during his small questline in 10.0.7. This sort of question doesn’t need the revelation of spoilers to answer, but I do believe it’s a question that needs answering, because it’s a core part of the game’s world that has felt completely directionless for a long time in a myriad of head scratching choices for direction.
