Hello all,
I have been wanting to play a horde character, but I kind of hate being the bad guy in games and was wondering what race/class/whatever has the least morally reprehensible storyline
Thanks!
2 Likes
As far as I know, your only option is to play a Vulpera. Everything else comes with the assumption that your character has been through BFA. There’s no avoiding it unless you literally play the only race that chronologically comes in afterward, and even then it’s still weird because your character willingly hooked up with a faction that went through all of this twice.
1 Like
Can you even do that? Don’t you have to unlock them first?
I don’t care as much about the bfa storyline, and just rationalize it, but what are the rest of the expansions like? I feel like maybe the tauren are nice people?
Your race isn’t supposed to dictate your character’s personality. You aren’t (or shouldn’t be) automatically be evil just because you play an orc or a forsaken. There are no racial storylines, just the overall expansion plots to go through.
If you can write off BFA then I don’t think it really matters what race you pick. Just go with what looks neat. At worst, you’d probably just want to avoid the warlock, DK and DH classes because of what they are, but those aren’t faction-related dark acts.
14 Likes
No, you’re right. I wasn’t really saying the horde was evil or anything, just they do some messed up stuff and wanted to get the perspective of someone that’s played through their leveling experience.
Thanks for answering!
The Horde, historically speaking have been written two ways. And it’s kind of a case of Blizzard trying to have their cake and eat it too.
So WC1 didn’t really have a plot. It was a Warhammer game that lost licensing, but did well.
WC2, Metzen comes in, and this is kind of when Warcraft really became Warcraft. Trolls, Goblins, Ogres, Dwarves, High Elves, Gnomes, Dragons, etc. A lot of the early framework appeared here.
WC1 was basically “evil demon orcs attack medieval Christians maybe?” (Retconned, obviously).
WC2 Horde is evil, but not purely. They are now lead by Doomhammer, who intends to win the war and will use Gul’dan’s Shadow Council, but he’s not their puppet like Blackhand was.
The orcs lose that war, and 20 odd years pass.
Now, at the beginning of planning WC3 and WoW, the Horde were going to be villains like in WC2 (so a bit more nuanced villains).
While in testing and development of WC3, Metzen and others had the realization that while some players liked playing as evil villains, a surprising majority loved the idea of a faction of monsters who aren’t villains. Thus, the transition to Thrall’s Horde was made in the writing of WC3.
This news, as I understand, came a bit late for WoW itself though. At this point, the Undead (Scourge) faction were meant to be a part of the evil Horde, hence why the elves were in the Alliance.
But, this complicated things.
So the Horde are good now. That’s fine. Some developers and players liked them evil, but most players seem to like them as good more.
But now the WoW faction is tied to the undeniably evil Scourge faction, who were supposed to be the evil faction for players who like playing as evil.
At this point, Chris Metzen invented the Forsaken - a less evil version of the Scourge - to represent the playable faction in WoW.
If you look at early Forsaken quests in WoW, the Vanilla ones are pretty ruthless and kind of evil. But the Burning Crusade quests have them explicitly being good guys (because BC was, in many ways, the first expansion to really tie to WC3… though they definitely tried to force too many characters as bosses to fight).
That said, there are still people and developers who want the orcs to be evil villains (and you need look no further than WoD for this), while at the same time trying to maintain that the Horde isn’t evil.
And these issues are even more exacerbated for Forsaken, who alternate between being part of the WC3 Horde and being part of the WC3 Scourge narratively, though many Forsaken players want their race to be villainous.
So yeah. You’re gonna find lots of examples of both good Horde and bad Horde, and Blizzard often doesn’t seem to like confronting the fact that they do this. Quite controversially, the Horde’s Exiles Reach questline and leveling experience through BfA content for new players will make no mention of Teldrassil (while leveling).
BfA’s not-leveling content was arguably the first time they really addressed that this was what they did in… basically the last 10 years of writing… but they did it by retelling MoP’s story, which honestly wasn’t necessary. It’s nice that they’re hopefully going to actually write the Horde as the faction that they sold it as to players, and not “surprise you commit genocide”, but they honestly could have just picked the story up from the end of MoP instead of retelling it.
On a personal note, I’ve had a lot of RPer friends leave the game permanently because of this. There’s a big question of “can we trust Blizzard not to write MoP a third time?” and they said “no I can’t.”
But all of that said, the Horde is a spectrum of characters with a spectrum of quests. It’s intended to mostly appeal to the players who want a good Horde, but there are still developers and players who want it to be the villainous faction. As I said, they try to have their cake and eat it too.
Regardless, the Horde is a faction that, despite it’s problems, is preferable to me because if you’re not an orc, your race still gets involved with the faction’s narrative, which is a lot harder to say about the Alliance. This is also partly why it’s easier to develop ARs for the Horde than the Alliance - they don’t need to relate to the faction’s main race, they just need to relate to a race in the faction.
If you want to try understanding them, do quest zones like Durotar or the Northern Barrens. I wouldn’t recommend leveling through it, but Horde Nagrand was also great. Note that Garrosh was explicitly not planned to be a villain character until at least halfway through Cataclysm. He was planned to have a character arc where he learned patience and became a great leader. Despite Blizzard denying this and trying to retcon over it now, there were multiple quotes from developers saying he would.
Actually, you could even do Silverpine. It’s a faction war story where the Forsaken are kind of the bad guys, but they’re written with a nuance BfA lacked, making you sympathize with them regardless.
Also, yes, Before the Storm Sylvanas does contradict this quest zone. That’s partly why it was such an unpopular book.
Personally, I remember dreading being the bad guy when I played as Horde in Cata for the first time, but not really feeling like I was doing anything wrong until Hillsbrad’s spider-mine quests or the one with the farmers in Tirisfal. Ironically, you don’t feel like a villain through most of Silverpine, just a soldier on an important mission who cares about their fellow soldiers, which is what a good faction conflict story should feel like.
30 Likes
Tauren or pandaren, probably.
2 Likes
Hi Kass. 
1 Like
I depends on what you define as moral in the context of the game. For example, the blood elf starting zones mostly have to do with fighting the Scourge in the Ghostlands, but there are some quests involving the conflict with the Amani, which might put someone off if they would prefer to side with the trolls in that conflict. As far as leveling goes, you can always just not do quests or zones that you wouldn’t like your character to be part of (which is why I haven’t leveled my Horde characters through Hillsbrad once I got the loremaster achievement). One of the big problems I had with BfA as a Horde main is that you didn’t really have an opportunity to not participate in Sylvanas’ stuff until well after the worst had been done, and some participation in the war campaign was necessary to progress your character to other questlines. There’s plenty of other Horde quests in which the NPCs are doing terrible things, but either you can skip them because they’re side quests/zones, or you have a chance to stop the bad guys later, or you’re not directly involved, or another NPC comes along and chastises them (see Stonetalon Mountains). BfA took its time getting other Horde characters to challenge Sylvanas properly, so I found the war campaign really weird and gross feeling for the first few patches. I didn’t have quite that feeling while through previous zones, but I could also avoid quests I didn’t like if I thought they didn’t fit my character.
2 Likes
It is difficult because aligning with the Horde in itself isn’t moral. Your character would of had to join with the Horde due to a lack of options. Blood Elf who did not partake in War of Thorns and mostly stuck to the EK and Expansion zones, probably has the least blood on their hands.
Alternative, play a character who criticized your leadership for joining the Horde. Like a Nightborne or non-Darkspear troll. Even Tauren would work for that.
2 Likes
You can go with w/e race, realky.
But for Cata content at least The Barrens is a decent spot to level for a morally uncompromised story. The north is just running caravans, dealing with wildlife, helping out Ratchet, and fighting off the Kolkar, Quilboar and Burning Blade.
I actually really love the caravan quests. They make the Barrens feel big.
The South Barrens is fighting the Alliance a lot but, regardless of their reasoning, they are invaders. And the humans and dwarves do some real cruel stuff to the Tauren. Also Calder Gray’s there, who is a perfectly ethical man of science and medicine - don’t believe the slanderous rumors in Orgrimmar gossip rags. That whole thing about the dismemberments was merely a misunderstanding.
5 Likes
For leveling, I would avoid Stonetalon and most of the Forsaken zones (I guess Tirisfal is okay).
They have great storylines (the best of the Horde 1-60 leveling imo), but they will probably make you feel like the bad guy at certain points. Aside from those and the faction conflict stuff in BFA, I can’t think of any other bad guy moments you might run into.
Mmm yeah that’s probably the most awkward part of allied race recruiting for the Horde post BFA, that they don’t seem to inform prospective members of what they’ve done. It feels underhanded at best.
2 Likes
Mag’har Orcs , Zandalari and Vulpera … They didn’t took a part in the burning of Teldrassil
Mag’har and Zandalari allied with Sylvanas anyway though. They may not have been part of the horde at the time of the burning, but they still chose to support her for a time. I don’t think that makes them much better.
1 Like
We break the cycle by claiming an Alliance leaders head for a change.
Anduins will do.
These terms are acceptable.
1 Like
No take backs.
2 Likes
The player character is NOT complicit in anything the Horde has done unless the player allows them to be. You do not have to put the sins of the Horde on your back, you can play them however you want <3
7 Likes
I typed up a long post about why I hate WoD’s lore, but the short reply is that the AU Mag’har are honestly probably worse.
4 Likes