What if bfa was a faction war expansion

Wyrmrest Accord
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OK yes there was a war. But honestly, 8.1 was the only patch which actually focused on the faction war. The war was then ignored in 8.2, hastily concluded in 8.2.5, and by 8.3 we’re all just supposed to be over it.

As unpopular as the war was, do you prefer this path? Was it for the best to rush past the faction plot and go adventure with robots, naga and squiddly men? Or would you have preferred a more MoP-like arc with ever increasing tension between the factions culminating in a final raid against some faction leader?

What if each patch was more like 8.1, with new warfronts in 8.2 and 8.3 and associated war campaign questlines setting up whatever conflict the warfronts focus on?

I’m also a little curious if this was the intended path of the expansion in the first place. So much effort went into those Saurfang cinematics, and there’s no comparable story featuring the expansion’s actual big bad, N’zoth. Was the war supposed to last through 8.3 and they wrapped it up due to player feedback, or what?

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I was pretty sick of the war even before BFA even dropped but it should have been front-and-center since all the hype and build-up was focused on it to begin with. But I also would have preferred it had, um, been written differently anyway if they were going to stick with it.

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Horde would have lost, Baine would have been given refuge, and Sylvanas would have been purged from this planet.*

*Unless Ion had a say about his MoRaLlY gRaY waifu.

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Who battled for Azeroth?

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bfa already took a hatchet to both factions and made the horde a bunch of genocidal maniacs and the alliance a bunch of wishy-washy failures so honestly it’s probably good they didn’t spend more time on the faction war, since they might’ve made the entirety of the horde demon worshippers and the alliance actual toddlers if they had

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diaperbabies happened

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It depends. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with faction war plot lines necessarily, or anything wrong with the faction war in general.

But they just don’t seem capable of providing two, necessary components at the same time: a good reason for the war to continue in spite of the Horde and Alliance accomplishing so much together, and a way for both factions and their player experiences to feel cool and rewarding.

As I see it, that’s probably the reasoning they keep getting caught in. They ask, “Shouldn’t the Horde and Alliance be fighting?” “Yes!” “Okay, why? They were just working together.” “Uhh… okay. Someone needs to hurt someone else.” “Okay, and who’s that going to be? Which, of the two, is going to strike first?” “Oh. The Horde!”

And the rest is history.

If they can’t do both, I’d rather they just stop, and make the faction war something that persists in the form of some new mega-battleground content each expansion like they used to, one that’s largely unrelated to the major plot.

Alternatively, if they really think they can do it, if they think they can make this fun by pouring more energy and devotion into the expansion’s plotline, it would probably behoove them to at least ride it out and finish the story rather than abort stories halfway through.

But, at the same time, I have a hard time believing, even when they say so, that they ever had plans to do otherwise. I don’t believe for a moment that they had plans for anything beyond what they actually did, and maybe a few warfronts besides. I’d be surprised if they actually had alternative patch ideas or anything.

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I think the Faction war could’ve worked, if they didn’t force personalities to suit it. As much as people dislike certain characters and what they do, it was obvious a lot of people changed to suit the idea that we’d all go to war again. Full out war, mind you. Total War. (Great franchise)

But what was the reason we received? I honestly don’t know. While I know it is obvious the factions don’t need to like each other, that doesn’t warrant all out war. I don’t like my brother when he takes my cookies but I don’t Blight his room or he Davey Jones’ my room with a magical ship. Supposedly Azerite was to be super powerful but then it wasn’t, and then it is–and hey the sword is still in the world soul but good news we beat back an eyeball…

I think if Blizzard remained true to some of the characters (Like Saurfang, Sylvanas, Rexxar, Lilian Voss,–and a plethora of others) people would’ve been more on board. But the problem was the characters we did like suddenly changed, and the ones we didn’t like also changed.

Now if I want to be giving BfA some credit on a changed character, I’ll point to Jaina. Her arc was believable (mostly. I wasn’t too fond of the war campaign dialogue… Especially freeing Baine. You’ll know what I mean if you played it.) She went from feeling guilt about her father (which I assume could’ve always been there, so its not too much of a stretch) into realizing that sometimes there is nothing you can do.

Her being by Arthas’ side might’ve stopped Stratholme, but it also might not have. Helping Daelin might’ve helped push back the Horde. Regardless, her change was believable. She finally forgave herself, took a stand for her beliefs at the time, and reconnected with her mother.

Compared to Lilian Voss, who hated the Forsaken but now feels sympathy towards them out of the blue? Or Rexxar, who fought for the Horde but only to protect it, now saying “Heccin’ Yuckin’ Jaina was my homie now she’s a normie tide pearl is not here mounted on my wall”.

I could go on but blarg blarg blarg. Honor. Sadly, I checked out of WoW officially at Legion when it came to the overarching plot. Zone-stories are where I get most of my enjoyment, and BfA have some good stories for their zones, like Nazmir, Drustvar, and Zuldazar.

Tl;dr: A story is insulting when you betray characters you’ve grown to actually like to suit a plot that makes no sense given their views. The story should be made by the characters, not the characters made for the story.

An example of this is Principal Skinner in the Simpsons apparently being an AWOL soldier who was never Principal Skinner to begin with and ruining the character people enjoyed for nine seasons.

-End MOW rant-

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If BFA happened before Legion. It could have worked.

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If BFA was a war expansion the Vindicaar would have flew to Dazar’alor and cut it in half with a laser beam.

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It used up its batteries on Argus and it takes a long time to recharge, ok?

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I liked what I thought the BFA faction war was going to be in theory…unforyunately how it was carried out in practice was wnderwhelming and disappointing, to say the least.

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BfA taught me one thing.

That Blizzard tried pandering to too many people, hit the mark with only the far ends of them and left everyone else annoyed.

The only good thing from this ordeal is that Blizzard is setting up to provide genuinely more interesting looking things down the line, which frankly is more than I expected after the reveal for this expac was actual false advertising in so so many ways.

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The only way I would have enjoyed BFA is by not making it another “Horde does an evil for the sake of it + Evil Warchief betrays the Horde” story again.

I don’t see much of a way to get around that with BFA’s setup. Mostly because of Sylvanas. She just does not work as the Warchief unless you want a story of a genocidal, evil Horde. She’s too cold and heartless, too hardhearted to change - to even try to change her would be like if they had legit Lighforged Illidan into a holy good boy instead of being the world record holder of “Smugest Night Elf.” Garrosh had more nuance and capability to believably change.

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I was pretty hype at the announcement for BFA thinking it was going back to the Cata days of just Horde vs Alliance for lands/resources.

Boy was I wrong.

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Back in other MMOs you could gain and lose rep with pretty much any faction. Ogres were friendly with Trolls and Dark Elves, but hostile to Wood elves and High Elves.

Multiple human kingdoms had different allegiances. Western humans were morally righteous and were hostile to ogres and other dark races, while eastern humans held a town that was known as the neutral hub where ALL players hung out to find groups to do content with any other players.

You could gain and lose rep with any of these factions. If you killed orcs (which weren’t actually playable if I recall) you could gain rep with the wood elves, even as an ogre. Kill gnolls and gain rep with western humans.

Kill minons of Cazic’thule to gain rep with the Erudites, etc.

I want to see that happen. You start off with default reps friendly and hostile as they are now. And add more reps to the game. I want to see groups of humans killing stormwind guards to get rep with orgrimmar. Tauren killing thunderbluff guards to get rep with a new Blood horde faction that is pro war. (for this change we can make vital NPC’s simply, not flagged such as townsfolk, vendors and quest givers so all people would be killing are guards)

I want to see battlegrounds be able to be one pool queue that puts you on either side with any player, mechanically it would be the same red is dead blue is crew. War strikes up again from a thousand different grievances perpetrated by both sides across the world.

Little things that by themselves mean very little but together just make all out war happen again, and neither side is the victim, both have fault cause both have been doing little things against the ceasefire.

Make the war a little more free for all and organic.

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Ask not for whom the Azeroth battles; it battles for thee.

I can kind of respect just going “okay, that was wildly unpopular, here’s something completely different.” It’s a poor state of affairs when something like that is a gigantic problem, but we have to wait literal years for it to get fixed because it’s central to an expansion.

It also doesn’t help that the plot essentially being “watch one side get war crimes’d by the other while they ineffectually try to find some semblance of comeuppance or justice” makes it the fantasy story I am least interested in participating in. If I wanted to watch people be pointlessly cruel to others on the order of a leader who can only play at charisma, I’d look outside.

So I guess I’m glad they pivoted away from it. I just wish they actually wrapped it up first, instead of leaving it fallow for months and then just going “well, guess that’s over, then” after blowing the entire budget of the storytelling department rendering individual strands of Saurfang’s chest hair.

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This expansion was marketed as a war expansion and frankly should’ve been a war expansion. The naga/old god stuff felt… different. Like they tried to squish two expansion arcs together and got a general mess.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if it were intended to be two expansions but that when they realized how badly received MoP2 was they compressed into one expansion so they could pull out all the stops with Shadowlands.

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Honestly, I think they planned it this way from the start. Not necessarily the specifics of each patch, but the overarching story as a whole. They probably came up with the title before anything else, saw it could be a double meaning, and filled in the blanks from there – oh, not only are they battling for control of Azeroth, but they’re battling to save it! Aren’t we clever?

The signs are there. There’s naga and old god stuff littering, and sometimes integral to, the leveling zones. They gave Black Empire stuff and war stuff about equal air time from the beginning, even if they didn’t do a great job of presenting the frame story from patch to patch.

I kind of see it like the Star Wars prequels. On an individual level they don’t make a lot of sense, but if you take a step back, squint, and look at everything together you can kind of see what they were hoping to accomplish.

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