Nothing special. Just the classic case of changing the brand.
/offtop
Story time:
Once upon a time I was watching a youtube channel called Zooming Gaming. Just a “top whatever” and gaming news channel. But the thing that was “special” about the channel was the “mysterious voice over lady” who in the same tradition as GLaDOS have very monotone voice which made jokes funnier and added some personality to whatever topic would be covered.
And then… instead of the VO lady they started using other ones people. And the channel (with 1M subs at the moment btw) went from casually having hundreds of thousands views on their videos, to occasionally getting over 10k.
So, here you have it. Yeah, the devs do not have to continue the old themes and ways of storytelling. But also the users are not obligated to continue supporting the new direction.
I pointed out maybe just for argument sake however, if anything the current Alliance theme was always the ideal version of it. The Alliance, even back in Warcraft 2 was suppose to mean more then a defense pact. It was suppose to be people of various kingdoms and creed uniting for a common cause.
Even the novelization of Tides of Darkness points out Lothar wanted an Alliance that would exist long after the Horde was deal with. An Alliance that didnt care where someone came from and treated everyone with respect.
And the users might just end up bored is the old theme keep repeating. Ultimately, there is always a balance and personally, I prefer an Alliance that actually grew and became closers. Not one that would crumble over petty things like burnt forests.
Frankly, this is why in my opinion, the advancement of the Alliance’s story should revolve around its return to the northern Eastern Kingdoms. Yes, including their relations with the Forsaken, and yes, including how members of the Alliance in Kalimdor would perceive such a thing.
To the Alliance, matters pertaining to Lordaeron are not just a geopolitical affair. They are a family affair, with all the warm love and cold hatred that family affairs can prompt.
All I can imagine out of a scenario like that is Blizzard ending up telling a story about how the horde’s no good for the forsaken and that they only way they can become better as people is to rejoin the alliance. And that sounds… less than appealing.
The Horde’s always been no good for them. Their entire rationale for being with the Horde in the first place was “convenience” from the get go.
I agree with what you’re saying but that’s a problem that stems from the decision to put the Forsaken on the Horde at all and then play up a “people of Lordaeron” angle post-WotLK. It’s a colossal conflict of identity that I’ve been saying was a mistake for a decade.
I think what gets under my skin about the idea is how it seems like a common sentiment among (usually alliance) posters about how the forsaken are the ones that have been no good to the horde, because they’re too evil and dragging down the rest of the faction, etc.
If they were to hypothetically turn around and suddenly start getting positive stories by having them join the alliance in some manner, that would be pretty chafing when the horde’s already at a severe deficit when it comes to having any value to the overall game story.
Well… the Alliance of Lordaeron is as much ashes of the past as the Kingdom that spearheaded it is. The Forsaken should play up that; it is the core tragedy of their nature. They are a visceral reminder of a terrible chapter in history that humanity would VERY MUCH like to forget, yet they cannot because here it is, smelling of decay and talking to you.
I would say this has been a bit of an issue since about cataclysm? When the Forsaken got all blight and mass raising of the dead happy. But I do not think this is something they are doomed to deal with forever. The cult of personality that drove them to do such things has collapsed; even if Sylvanas were to return, the Banshee Queen is gone and the Ranger General is seemingly back.
I don’t think they need to go Alliance by any means; I dont think they could. I think they can grow beyond what they were into a true and fully fledged society on their own terms; not Sylvanas’ whims.
I think that’s because the Horde has never actually been anything but enablers for the Forsaken, who played up lip service about wanting to heal the Forsaken and followed that up by letting them do literally whatever the hell they wanted so long as it benefitted the Horde. In that sense, the evil of the Forsaken could be considered another aspect of the “sickness” in the Horde that Baine talked about.
Especially since their membership in the Horde provided the excuse Sylvanas needed to keep the Forsaken alienated and isolated from any kind of peer support network other than her.
It isn’t. The Alliance is still around. Lordaeron’s legacy remains.
This would be a more credible angle had it not been for BtS demonstrating that humans and Forsaken can in fact co-exist and that the chief obstacle keeping them from doing so was Sylvanas.
Individuals in the Forsaken who most strongly identified with Lordaeron, such as Parqual Fintallas, were also the ones who sought to rejoin the Alliance when they realized that was even an option.
The Gathering served to undermine a lot of the things that Sylvanas had been telling the Forsaken, including the notion that the living reject them, and perhaps more pertinently, that the living don’t understand what the Forsaken went through. It turns out, the Alliance does understand what the Forsaken went through because they went through the same thing. They just went through it a different way.
One of my favorite parts of BtS was when all the tension between the living and the undead vanished in an instant when everyone realized that simple truth. Nobody was really afraid of each other. They were afraid that they’d lost each other.
Even individuals who it turned out didn’t get along were able to converse with one another and tolerate each others presence with relative ease. Just like anyone else.
Which is how we got to where we are now, where pretty much the only reason that the Forsaken haven’t straight up rejoined the Alliance is because of gameplay. The only viable solution I can think of going forward is a schism in the Forsaken between those who identify as humans (who would rejoin the Alliance) and those who don’t (who would stay Horde.)
I guess that what I’m saying is that even now, 20 years later (real time), the Alliance still hasn’t properly closed the book on the events of the Third War, and I’d suggest that as a principal means of story advancement, one way or another.
I’d also add that, regarding complaints that the Forsaken moving closer to the Alliance would have irritating implications for the Forsaken’s relationship with the Horde, that this already happened in the inverse. The moment the Forsaken started to play up a “people of Lordaeron” angle, it made the Alliance look worse for those very same reasons, because it implied that it was the Alliance that failed the Forsaken which prompted them to defect and framed the Alliance as such a failure that not even its founders wanted it.
The modern Grand Alliance and the Alliance of Lordaeron are not the same thing. The Alliance of Lordaeron formally collapsed with the fall of Capitol City and the slaying of king Terenas Menethil II. It lingered as a resistance movement under Garithos as he tried to reclaim Capitol City but once he died what was left of that Alliance fell apart.
The modern day Grand Alliance was founded on the basic ideals of its predecessor, with Stormwind and the Wrynn dynasty taking up a position akin to that that Lordaeron and the Menethil Dynasty did in the old Alliance of Lordaeron.
According to the Forsaken perspective, the Alliance did. The diplomats they sent into human lands were never seen again, and are presented as being killed by humans. The Tauren had compassion where humanity didnt.
We’ve been over this again and again in this forum. It isn’t true. Metzen outright stated at Blizzcon that the Alliance of WoW is the Alliance of Lordaeron. The power structure has changed and the centers of power have changed, but the institutions are the same and have historical continuity all the way back to the prelude of the Second War.
That just furthers my point though. The Alliance has already been (falsely) painted as callously abandoning the Forsaken so I’m not as sympathetic to the Horde being subjected to the same narrative as I might otherwise be.
I think this would be the worst possible time to do any sort of alliance-forsaken reunification story, though. It’d be one thing if there were never any faction wars, because you could argue that tensions have died down enough that people’s fears start to mitigate, if not through exposure, then at least from time.
But thanks to Cata/MoP and now BFA, I think the alliance ought to have more reason than ever before to distrust any of the horde races, let alone the forsaken who everyone’s quick to point out was the darkest race of them all. I think they should absolutely not get any sort of start at reconciliation before the horde itself starts getting more positive stories and intra-faction relationship building of its own. Otherwise, I think all that ends up happening is the alliance’s story cleaving off any remaining potential positive horde bits and taking it for themselves.
I guess that this is a point where we’re just at an impasse based on our own tastes and experiences, because one of the reasons I’ve always resented the Forsaken’s presence on the Horde at all is because I felt like they cleaved off a substantial part of the Alliance’s post-Warcraft 3 potential by framing the Third War and the Scourging of Lordaeron more specifically as something that happened to the Horde rather than as something that happened to the Alliance.
The betrayal and zombie-induced trauma narrative 100% should have been an Alliance narrative, but it was shifted to the Horde and with it, most of the emotional impact of the events of Warcraft 3 from an Alliance perspective.
I feel similarly on a meta-level about the alliance getting demons, werewolves and their own zombies while simultaneously screwing with the horde’s appeal as a hero protagonist that just so happens to be of a monster race.
I’ve sardonically joked before about how the alliance now does the horde better than the horde itself at this point. Throwing redeemed forsaken into the mix just makes it seem like it’d be official.
You have that with worgen already, though. They basically speedran a cliff’s notes version of the forsaken in their starting zone.
I don’t want the cliffnotes version though. I want the version that was presented with depth, thought, and care and that cut to my emotional core because it affected something that I was strongly attached to.
If Blizzard had actually kept the betrayal and zombie-induced trauma narrative on the Alliance where logic dictated it should have been, the Horde probably would have benefited from it as well because groups like the Scarlet Crusade probably would have ended up being overtly Alliance, because that’s what the sorts of things that the Alliance suffered in Warcraft 3 does to people.
I’m also on record that even if the Forsaken remained literally exactly as evil as they ended up being in WoW, they still should have remained Alliance. That’s how strongly I feel about how what I perceive as a usurped narrative.
