MoP’s main theme was answering that question.
It is okay to fight to protect yourself and those you care about (so basically self-defense is okay). Fighting out of selfish needs and desires leads to more selfish conflict.
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A message that expresses opposition to a war in general or to the conduct of a specific war.
Fighting off a zombie/demon/Cthulu apocalypse is different than fighting armies composed of fellow sapient mortals that are portrayed as having actual families, feelings, a culture, etc. Especially when they’ve been significantly characterized in the story.
WoW tends to be more okay with the former than the latter. That’s why the Horde/Alliance can wipe out scores of monsters and be praised left and right, but can’t burn down a Horde/Alliance city or camp without the game playing up how sad it is and ultimately pointing them towards the bigger threats.
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Pretty much what the alliance does.
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The pre-Dazar’Alor raid quest for the Horde comes to mind. I can’t speak for everyone but personally I felt very little sense of glory in cutting down Blademaster Telaamon.
Now granted maybe that was my meta knowledge of the raid and so I figured correctly this was all a misdirection. But fighting alongside the Lightforged is a pretty recent memory.
This Blademaster guy is some great warrior that battled the Legion across worlds - only to get cut down in a dead Loa’s den by characters who had no reason to hate him outside the war. It felt very wasteful. Like we just killed someone who until very recently was a powerful ally against a common threat.
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My thinking is about the same as yours. There never is truly a winner in war and I can tell you from experience that combat leaves you beat down and exhausted once its settled and the adrenaline is gone. I’ve loved the Alliance side of the war campaign and have taken the story as such, especially the way its ended so far.
I don’t mean to dismiss your experiences, but why does this apply to the faction war, but not the other wars?
Why should an alliance character feel more exhausted fighting the horde than the legion or old gods? All of them are hell bent on murdering the faction.
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Oh I agree completely. It’s more them giving points at convenience than giving us a truly cohesive story now.
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I imagine there’d be more of a psychological toll. With the Legion and Old Gods you can’t really make an argument for coexistence. They’re force of nature villains hellbent on the destruction of all things good and beautiful. Peace isn’t an option it’s either war or extinction.
With the faction war though - I mean you know we could work together we literally just did to defeat the Legion for like the ninth time now. Plus that Orc you killed, unlike say G’huun, probably has parents who are sad now and maybe a worg who’ll never understand why it master never came home.
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That kinda falls flat when you realise that in WoW’s lifetime, the Horde did more damage to the Alliance than any of those forces-of-nature combined. Deathwing might’ve left Stormwind on fire for a while, but the Horde obliterated Theramore and now Teldrassil.
It’s hard to pity the orc warrior and his sad swine-smooching pigface parents when he’s dropping blight bombs into Arom’s Stand much like some Scourge minion.
What’s the point of working together with the Horde to stop the big squid next door or space satan from ending the world, when the Horde themselves seem to inevitably turn on us and inflict as much if not more damage than the cosmic threats?
Maaaaaybe if this was the first time, and even then, Teldrassil was way beyond anything we’ve ever seen. But this was the second time? Third? Blizzard kinda drove the idea of the Horde and Alliance ever being at peace again into a bottomless well. Of course, the story seems to be going to proceed as if it was entirely on Sylvanas. Much like how they did with Garrosh, except even worse.
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This is another reason I’m sad the Horde had almost no characters present on Argus.
Imagine if Telaamon was fighting with a Horde character who’d fought in the same campaign? They could have such interesting banter about how things changed and reasons why they fight. I like Rokhan, and he could still be present, but a character who fought alongside Telaamon would have been so great to have there.
Or if they added Thalyssra, and had her and Telaamon trade their reasonings for what they’d hoped for when joining their respective factions, what changed with the start of the war, and why they stick with their factions even when it asks them to fight.
I think this is a consequence of Blizzard getting shiny new abilities and trying them out in an inopportune way - the people who made the War of Thorns, with phasing, in-game campaigns, etc, likely would have made something of a similar scale for a Scourge or Legion invasion.
But, unfortunately, the Scourge and Legion invasions did nothing remotely as visible to players as what the Horde did. And so, even if in lore the Scourge and Legion caused more destruction, it absolutely does not feel like it.
And it’s thrown the tenuous Alliance/Horde/World Threats balance way out of whack.
As I have complained before, this upends the normal theme of the Alliance allying with the lesser ‘evil’ (to them) to fight the bigger threat that actually threatens the whole world. But because of this horribly skewed presentation of how much destruction these antagonists cause, it feels like the Alliance should be reluctantly siding with N’zoth to wipe out the big threat of the Horde. (Sure, N’zoth will try to kill us afterwards. But after the nth invasion, why on Azeroth would the Alliance think the Horde won’t do the same thing? And the Horde doesn’t even spare civilians and children this time.)
Just… ugh. It really shouldn’t be this way. And yet Blizz looks like it’s just ignoring the conclusion to the war and hoping no one cares instead of trying to fix it.
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The expansion we need and deserve, but will never get.
I’m a sucker for the ‘two enemies banding together against a worse foe’ storyline, and that’s why this situation bugs me. It’s raised the stakes to such ludicrous levels - and then refused to even try to bring them back down - that it’s mind-boggling for the Alliance to consider ever working with the Horde again.
Seriously, who thought that starting a story with forcing half of your players to commit genocide on the civilians of the other half was a good idea?
miscellaneous angry noises
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that is indeed a problem, they present the monster of the weeks as non important while at the same time showing the horde, the playable faction that cannot be deleted as a bigger threat.
They did absolutely nothing to deserve another chance apart from baine who owned a favor to jaina, the rest is pretty much guilty and don’t deserve any trust, in fact, they deserve to be killed.
I don’t feel that’s true. We saw the extent of the Legion’s devestation. We saw Argus and by extent what Azeroth would look like if the Legion won.
This devastation wasn’t visited on Orgrimmar or Stormwind as the gameplay was focused around the Broken Isles. They could’ve had some invasions leave Moonbrook or the Xroads a neon green smoldering ruin but seeing as the rest of the gameplay had nothing to due with those areas there was no reason to.
And again - bad writing. I’m still kind of bewildered at just how easily Teldrassil burst into flames. The place survived a Godzilla sized doom dragon scorching all he flew over but some sustained fire from Orcish demolishers, and man their range has improved since Wintergrasp, torches it?
Was there some strict no fire magic laws in place there? Because frankly if it was always that flammable I’m amazed a drunk dwarf falling asleep with a lit cigar didn’t manage that ages ago.
Yeah, it was bad writing, but it still happened. Horde probably got a kill count on the Alliance greater than any other enemy we’ve faced in WoW now. Yet it’s with them we’re going to work together to stop the other threats?
It feels like the Alliance isn’t saving anything - it only gets to pick who’ll maim or kill it next: the alien demons, the god-squid, or the horde.
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I wish it had been, honestly. Then this perception issue wouldn’t be so huge.
I agree that lorewise, it’s not supposed to be a big discrepancy between what the Legion managed to destroy versus what the Horde destroyed (and which the story rubbed in our faces repeatedly). But it certainly feels different.
And after piling on atrocity after atrocity, showing full Horde participation, the story seems to have given up on showing anything more than the bare minimum of a conclusion for it. This is going to cause problems - and they’re problems that could be solved right now if more detail was added. But for some reason, it doesn’t seem to be the story’s priority.
Maybe that’s why it took so long for blacksmiths to get a forge in Darnassus…
That’s kinda a mutual problem. In what universe would the Zandalari - who the Alliance brutalized in an attempt to make them like the Horde less for w/e reasoning- suddenly make peace with a bunch of upstart pinkies who had the audacity to storm their golden city and murder their King?
Probably in the setting where the sky just broke like a window and it’s learned that everyone who dies for whatever reason is going to a special place in hell. That seems like a good enough reason to pause the hostilities as any.
Trouble is Blizz decided to have the factions kiss and make up BEFORE any of that happened.
And I fully support the Zandalari remaining hostile to the Alliance over Rastakhan.
And then what? Have 10 minutes of peace before the Horde burns another Alliance city?
We have no reason to believe it won’t ever happen again. Sure, now it’s a council instead of a single Warchief, but most people in that council followed Garrosh and Sylvanas in their wars, until they turned on the Horde itself.
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Probably. But I imagine that animosity is what will keep the conflict going, which is sorta what needs to happen as the foundation of the game’s built around the Red VS Blue system.
By design there can neither be a real peace nor a legitimate victory for one side or the other.