Hello, the truth is I felt Warcraft lost its way a long time ago but the game was fine and I should just accept the story for what it is. The gameplay has always been very enjoyable for me and I think that made me just brush the story off as oh it’ll get better later on.
This was not always the case however in original WC1 and WC2 the stories were fine and had so much to be expanded upon and, that’s fine stories should evolve. However it seems to have evolved into a very generic fantasy story. Not to say that it was some sort of Game of Thrones before, just that it was originally conceived as a war story.
This is a game originally about genocide, racism and colonization. I’ve always felt it should mirror more of our real world rather than pull away from this disney-esque everyone gets along baloney.
Not saying that genocide is what I want, but the rage that comes from that is interesting to me. I want the NE to be incredibly hostile to the Horde and to follow a cycle of hatred that leads to us both just decimating each other (In an entertaining way).
However it has to be entertaining for both sides and this where Blizzard has always failed. The faction conflict which should be the center of this IP has to be seen as a tit for tat situation. At this point it doesn’t matter who hits first even though it would be nice to see the Alliance mess the Horde up first and then the Horde hits back etc.
If you can see it as a boxing match as opposed to one side literally going into constant civil wars because thats the only way you can make a “satisfying” win. It would do better than whatever bull we have now.
The Horde betraying itself because it was going to win has literally been a staple since WC2. I imagine the authors did that because they wrote themselves into a corner but its not good story telling.
Anyways Im ranting at this point and maybe I’ve missed somethings and that’s fine just want to open the discussion on this because even though the story in dragonflight is fine. I want to be proud of the Horde again, FFS we don’t even have a Warchief anymore.
tldr: Warcaft is about genocide, racism and colonization and it should be more included in the narrative, if you fell different let me know.
I think the majority of people agree with you on the majority of your points, hence why DF is so well received. Going back to uniting against a common enemy, having lots of levity with some soul searching… it’s good. If future expacs lean more into this than the BFA/SL model it will be a lot better.
I’ve never been a huge faction-war person. Garrosh probably did a few things wrong. But the level of schmaltz between the Horde and Alliance adventurers within the Dragonscale expedition is just off-putting.
I like both sides, I play both sides. An uneventful three year gap isn’t nearly enough to heal the wounds between the two sufficiently for everyone to be sitting in Valdrakken just appreciating one another.
It doesn’t have to be open war. It’s better if it’s not, watchful peace/cold war is where this game has been at its finest. But this cross-faction canoodling just makes my skin crawl for some reason.
There should always be tension when Horde and Alliance are occupying the same space. The threat of war should weigh on every misspoken word and every misconstrued action.
I would argue that the Horde/Alliance barrier has never been lower and now that that is the case, is wherein lies my problem.
The Horde and the Alliance should be proud of each faction and the argument of who is stronger should be hotly debated by a show of what’s in the game.
I say this because if you have any sense of armies or history you would know that the Alliance is miles ahead of the Horde in literally every sense because the Horde have had TWO civil wars and weren’t in the best spot to being with. Thrall was happy that the Orcs settled in the desert so they could pay for their crimes. Thrall actively worked against Orc prosperity because he thought they didnt deserve it.
That’s not good story telling for a faction conflict but it doesn’t matter cause we’re working together to kill Dragons.
Well what if I remember what the Horde was… a juggertanaut. What if I remeber what the name HORDE means? In Tides of Darkness Orgrim Doomhammer looked out of the balcony of Blackrock Spire and saw a sea of Green with Trolls and Ogres peppered in. A true Horde, of soldiers ready to fight for the land they were going to live in.
The Horde should be wanting to reclaim its glory, a glory that was only denied to them by the traitor Gul’dan.
But NONE of that has been addressed. Instead we have Thrall’s wishy washy bullsh!t that has collectively made the Horde weaker.
That’s not even getting into the Alliance part of the story. The Alliance’s restoration of Gilneas, of Lordaeron, of Stromgarde, and of Alterac should be in their MAIN priority. Those are military campaigns they can take and there can be a multitude of stories behind that.
There were SEVEN kingdoms in the Easter Kindoms and now there are what… 1? 2 if you count Dalaran floating.
Those factions are interesting and should be more featured in WoW than random centaurs and Tuskarr.
Although Tuskarr I admit are adorable and love any time they’re fit into the story.
Yeah and this is the problem. We still talk about Blood and Honor and we put spikes on everything. But remember Orgrim’s Horde also had the Shadow Council for a good bit, Gul’dan, and so much more.
We gain far more in peace than in war.
We also see this, straight from the beginning. In Waking Shore both Horde and Alliance have a quest to go help the other sides representative. Both of them show that they are proud of their own strength but respect their opponents strength.
100% Agreed.
I’ll be the first to say everything post MoP I haven’t been a fan of. The Horde was walloped and tried to start another war. We are a shadow of our former selves.
What I hope is that at a bare minimum we regain our strength to a point. We don’t have to invade the Alliance for that- if anything trading with the Alliance is just as good.
But a global cold war similar to the Empire vs Republic at the start of SWTOR would be grand, and we used to have that here too.
Please keep in mind that not all Horde and Alliance are working together. It’s the more… intellectual people who are. The average citizens and grunts back home may still hate the other side. Stormwind Guards absolutely were guarded around the Dracthyr for instance.
Some of the Alliance (especially on the lore forums) seems to think we are the same, or even if they don’t the Horde’s actions in past years seem to indicate that we are close if not the same. Orgrim used the warlocks and the Shadow Council as any political leader would to a party that had control of a large support of the military/population. Orgrim Doomhammer was not Blackhand. He was a proto-Thrall who had more of spine than Thrall ever would.
I do agree we gain more in peace than in war but, the Alliance has never left the Horde alone and nor should they because even if a benevolent leader were to be ruler of the Horde there is no guarantee that the next one would.
What I meant about being proud of the factions in both ways is seeing them vanquish their enemies but also keep it open ended. Let the dread that that foe is never gone and you need to be ever vigilant.
that particular story should stay in the rts games.
at this point we’ve bound together against a common foe so many times, there’s no way we should be even hostile to each-other anymore.
It’s why they had to break Sylvanas’s character in order to have BFA
This is the reader’s interpretation but it has never been true. It has always been a facade that created this impression for anyone not too familiar with the lore.
You could argue “But if the Horde did not fight amongst themselves they would have won!”
Ok… maybe but thats just not how the Horde has ever existed. What you see is just the natural fallout of how the Horde is organized. It’s all balanced on a knife’s edge and propelled into a single direction in the hopes of an easy victory and quick victory.
Horde’s problems are the same as the Nzi’s… I am only speaking militarily btw. The Germans never had the resources to compete with the Allies or even the Soviets. Their “Brilliant” strategies were the results of brilliance of a few commanders at the right time and sheer dumb luck.
However, after a little organization from their opponents, no matter what Germany did they could not fix their broken command structure that rewarded nepotism and self-interest or their insane leader who changed strategies at a drop of a hat.
No matter how much of a juggernaut the Germans appeared early on the truth is they were always destined to lose. There was no path to victory.
The same is true about the Horde and we can go through it if you want.
Again. The Horde never had any glory. Blackhand could never win against a single Alliance kingdom and Orgrim only achieved victory with deception and subterfuge.
Orgrim had an army of demon possessed savages who had to fight something otherwise they would have killed themselves. Guldan’s betrayal was inevitable because the whole invasion existed for him to reach Tomb of Sargeras.
No Guldan. No invasion. And if Guldan was successful none of this would have mattered with Sargeras running around and no guardian to stop him. Orgrim balanced on a knife’s edge almost made it to Lordaeron but thats just one location he still had to fight the others. And he only did this because he knew he just couldn’t win a prolonged conflict. He was running out of everything and this was his desperate gambit to get lordaeron in the hopes of shattering the Alliance by fracturing them otherwise the orcs had no chance.
The glory of a victorious Orcish horde is the demon blighted dreanor that could no longer feed them which necessitated the invasion to begin with.
First, if we play out genocide, racism and colonialism as a “tit for tat” situation while simultaneously making real-world parallels, do you realize that’s saying “both sides had problems”?
Which is true for the majority of conflicts in human history (eg; the Conquistadors were better/less bad than the Aztec Empire), just letting you know that would likely trigger the ideologues who currently dominate mainstream media and their supporters. Which I don’t care about, but just want you to make an informed decision.
Second, you do realize that the Horde has a far bigger rap sheet than the Alliance?
Any Alliance attack on the Horde will have historical or current grievances so it can’t be said the Alliance are completely wrong in that situation. Even on AU Draenor, Yrel’s Light group have valid reason to be sore at the Orcs for what the Iron Horde did to them first despite the story wanting to pretend it’s “poor, innocent Mag’har vs big bad Light fanatics.” (Yrel doesn’t even come close to matching AU Grom’s laundry list of atrocities).
This game has spent the better part of 12 years doing everything they could to piss that out of the playerbase.
In those 12 years, if you were a Horde player, the only way you could “feel good” about being Horde was one cartoonishly evil atrocity after another, only turn on your obviously evil Warchief.
Meanwhile if you were Alliance, you spent those years getting your teeth kicked in, despite all the cards always being in your favor, until a new deus ex machina pops up and rolls you to victory. But until that happens, be prepared to lose and lose constantly.
So after players on both sides get their teeth kicked in over and over again, we end the expansion by working together to kill some sort of big bad, relearning the lesson of Warcraft 3 about how we are stronger together than apart and maybe we won’t waste time killing each other this time.
So frankly, I’m glad we’re at a point where the two factions are able to interact together like they do on the Dragon Isles. It is significantly more interesting than just running into another dwarvern or blood elf camp and then listening to “ooooo those dirty [Alliance/Horde]!”.
I fundamentally disagree, at this point. Truly, ever since Cata any nuance the Faction Conflict might have had has been stripped from the game for lazy writing. With what few “Grey” Acts the Alliance are allowed being constantly whitewashed into a sterile shine, and the Horde being rendered little more than a unhinged, nonsensical plot device who doesn’t even need luxuries like “means, motive, or opportunity”. Frankly, the only people who seem to enjoy the “Faction Conflict” these days are those that either just ignore the story beyond the barest surface level; or those that like Steve who revel in the WC1/WC2 visions of the Horde … with zero understanding of the consequence of those Horde’s. Especially for the Peoples that were a part of them.
Its why Garrosh getting the only “For the Horde” moment in Shadowlands was mind numbing. Especially given how many people were celebrating it. That’s the effective equivalent of a Grand Dragon of the Clan pronouncing he “Loved America” and people cheering for him. Like, yeah, Garrosh “loved the Horde”. So long as you weren’t a Troll, a Tauren, a Forsaken, an Elf, a Panda, a Orc who didn’t follow him mindlessly, or a Goblin. The last of which he’d use, but he held nothing but revulsion for; and its implied many times that eventually he’d wipe out even the Bilgewater from his Horde. Even before SoO, throughout all of Cata and MoP, this was made apparent. And by SoO, the Korkron were somehow largely just ex-Vanillla Dark Horde & Cata Dragonmaw.
There is no “Compelling Story” in WC1 or WC2 if you just ignore the catastrophic costs of those Hordes on both their victims, and those that participated in them. The types of consequences you truly cannot have in a Two Faction Game where Two Factions must always exist. And that reality is one of a thousand things that are SO frustrating for both sides from the Garrosh War and “Fourth War” Era conflicts. The writers reveling in those WC1 and WC2 visions of the Horde, while having no understanding or care for “consequences”; but still using that WC3 vision of the Faction they clearly hold with contempt as a “Get out of Jail Free Card” from their WC1/WC2 Fun. Not that either the WC1 or WC2 Horde’s ever made sense to build a player faction around to begin with…
My limited take on this topic is as follows. Wow stories were actually doomed because they simply cut and pasted WC 1-3 into Wow without any meaningful consideration of organic narrative continuity. Jaina and her expedition ought to have been the focus of the ‘alliance’ because they were pretty much all that was left. Warcraft 3 was apocalypse for the human race and the high elves. For the most part wow has ignored this apocalypse and narratively has refused to even contemplate the notion that the alliance might actually have been destroyed in the eastern kingdoms. The horde for its part ought to have changed to a more complex society once they put down roots in Kalimdor. I believe this has lead to a lot of detrimental hand waving as far as wow narratives are concerned.
Story flavours. The alliance essentially lives in a benign cosmos where it doesn’t matter how bad things get the cavalry will always come to the rescue in the nick of time. The horde lives in an indifferent cosmos, one which will step on them if they are not careful and mandates pathways which are closer to real world occurrences and might be considered ‘morally grey’. When they try and mix these two cosmic views, story flavors together the hordes morally grey just gets sacrificed to blatant and stupid evil to satisfy the requirements of a benign cosmos which turns out to be less than satisfying.
There is probably more to say but I think I’ll just leave it at that.
Warcraft is a series of dungeons, raid dungeons, silly PVP capture the flag contests and PVP battlegrounds that the developers put varying amounts to sometimes no effort at all to bridge with storylines.
Most of the story effort is put into quests, most of which are not central to whatever main storyline is going on at the moment. That’s all it was ever meant to be. It’s not meant to put itself as a challenge to serious fiction authors, This ain’t and never attempted to be Tolkien or Spielberg. As game story goes however, it’s more than most.
Are you saying you think the WC3 retcon was a bad one? If so, I think you’re underestimating just how revolutionary it was for its time.
I do think the happy cooperation of DF is a little over the top, but after what happened in the last faction war, I’ll take it. The writers have proven they can’t handle a story that mirrors the real world, so this is a better alternative than what they did last time.
Disagree. “Who hits first” has been what has caused the fandom to be so toxic, arguably starting with Cataclysm.
I think the point has been made already, the narrative is better when the faction war aspect of the game simmers at a Cold War/uneasy peace.
Just a few examples/support the argument - there have been zones who go full on with the faction war as a primary motive and are beloved - Silverpine Forest, Jade Forest, Twilight Highlands, Stonetalon, Southern Barrens, but they’re hardly the primary narrative of their expansions and they themselves cannot make up for a poor expansion narrative in the case of Mists. Funny enough the best stories in BFA too were when we weren’t at the faction war - when we were putting Zandalar and Kul’tiras in order. Those quests were so fun and immersive, really got you into the zones and the peoples. You hardly remember there is suppose to be a war going on if there was not the actual war campaign to go in tandem with them.
Beyond those, the best received zones and expansions have nothing to do with the faction war. Wrath and Legion are two at the top. Mists is so well received not because of the main narrative but the zones, questing, raids, PvP, and mechanics. 5.1 - Landfall/Dominance Offensive and 5.2 Throne of Thunder were the best WPvP patches and zones I’ve ever experienced, yet I’d never ask for a 3rd MoP or 2nd BFA. It would, narratively, be an Ashran. Yeah there’s a truce, but we cant let the other people get there first. No need for a full on faction conflict when you can just have an isolated skirmish.
The only way Warcraft has lost its way is through the horrendous abuse allowed to permeate their offices, only to reward such behavior and have further repercussions not only on peoples’ very real lives that should not be understated, but the narratives and services we experience too.
I think people overthink this. Warcraft “lost its way” when The Lich King/Arthas wrapped up in WotLK and Metzen began stepping away as the primary creative behind the setting. No one else seems to have any inkling as to how to write The Horde. No one else seems to have any interest in writing The Alliance as anything other than a punching bag for the next episode of Horde soul searching.
Going to venture an informed guess that the reason Dragonflight is working (so far) is it has set aside the wildly inconsistent character ruination and dumbfounding faction storylines in favor of slice of life and standard fantasy schlock (note: that’s not a bad thing). Leveling-Questing zones for new expansions are usually one area WoW has done reasonably well at, however, so I’m going to reserve judgment for the expansion at large for when the honeymoon phase has ended. Speaking more broadly to the game’s writing/history in general, the people who were capable of writing stories in that vein are gone and have been for a while. This game and community will probably be far better served if the current team focuses on finding a new path to tread, because trying to play with Metzen’s toys has been one unmitigated disaster after another imo.
I come to find that when people throw the term disneyfied around, it’s just a term that extreme right wing individuals use to discredit anything they don’t like
