I can see a true evil faction playable in WoW, but it kinda needs to follow a few things:
smart enough to realize to keep their targets, and the world to do their evil in, they need the other faction/s to remain in some decently powered form,
Pragmatic enough to see factions like the Legion would end them just as easily, and willingly, as they would the other faction’s
to really be evil, they can get a story about joining the enemy faction (say the Legion) only to pull the classic backstab (think Kefka to the Emperor in FFIII/VI)
In essence, the only way an evil playable faction might work in WoW is if the faction can take the “I hate you, and want to end you, but I want to be the only one to do so” and “I’m evil but these guys are even worse then me, as they went to end me too”.
So your argument is ‘the villains aren’t effective enough’ which, fine, one could make that argument. The problem though is they are still going to lose in the end, because we need to have a world we can continue to expand in the future. It’s why Arthas went off to Northrend in TFT and didn’t touch anything until Wrath, and Illidan self-exiled to Outland and we had to find him. Hell, modern villainy has a higher body count than the classics; who’d Arthas kill in Wrath? All I remember is he showed up like Dr. Claw and promised he’d get me next time, then we blew up his sword and stole his horse. Illidan? I was, in fact, prepared for his idiot attempt. Kael’thas? Let’s see if death is a setback.
Villains are destined to lose, full stop, and I can’t imagine being forced to lose as an ‘evil’ character would feel any better than being forced to lose Darnassus as an Alliance player or Undercity as a Horde player.
Did you feel like Arthas could actually win in Wrath? Everyone knew it was his time to die and he did his duty and promptly dropped dead.
There can’t be stakes because the narrative has to allow the world to continue existing, and if Arthas had somehow won the Horde and Alliance would be destroyed.
Flailing around and going ‘no but this was REAL evil’ is apparently ‘dunking’ nowadays. How droll.
All you want is an evil team which is not going to happen, and WoW is not a narrative where villains win. You’ve never been a villain unless you literally had zero choice in the matter, you always become heroic in the end.
Because if there’s one thing I know about man’ari and Sylvanas fanboys, it’s that they’re great at cooperating!
So… what has Arthas done that every WoW villain hasn’t? I mean, he killed a bunch of people and made some vague threats and talked in a ridiculous deep voice, all clear signs of evil, but not really things that stand out from the crowd.
He’s a legacy character that had two expansions (TFT and Wrath) and influenced the base game of WoW. He’s had exposure and time to build up hype.
Yes, there is a problem with WoW’s narrative that villains can’t easily establish themselves because they immediately run up against the Big Heroes and get crushed within a raid patch, but that doesn’t mean their destiny and Arthas’s destiny were any different from one another. Both were always destined to lose, because the world depends on them losing.
Maybe more try to destroy a kingdom, say Stormwind, and while they might succeed at that, they only do so in the sense that the physical kingdom is no more but the people survive to rebuild.
