Not, BFA was only good when it wasn’t about the faction war. MoP was great overall. The panda stuff was great and the faction war was great but that is because garrosh being the bad guy was being written since TBC. It just didn’t come out of nowhere.
Nah, as if SL wasn’t heavy on Anduin, along with Tyrande doing her whole pointless Night Warrior BS.
You could argue Sylvanas doesn’t count since she was essentially neutral at that point, and then only interacted with alliance characters. The Horde characters who “went” to the shadowlands did nothing.
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lol Jordlen? Holy crap, I haven’t played that character in months my guy. Still a goblin main first and foremostr. Jordlen isn’t even on my warband screen. It is pure goblins. Bigfel, Serum, Totemlove and I forgot which else.
And bad takes? Why? Because gazlowe is getting time to shine instead of thrall?
Right. Blizzard writing a bad story is the problem. That doesn’t mean that faction conflict is dead and there can never be any good story written about faction conflict its a hopeless cause we can’t have faction stories anymore or the game will die.
It just means Blizz needs to write better.
Also, this isn’t an upcoming Horde patch. Its an upcoming neutral patch with one Horde goblin and probably multiple alliance characters.
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They can’t do faction wars because it always revolves around someone being the bad guy and nobody likes that. And it eventually just reverts everything back to zero. It is just bad story telling, especially now.
War can still be in the game but smaller scale war without factions. Bandits, pirates, cultists
Also, this isn’t an upcoming Horde patch. Its an upcoming neutral patch with one Horde goblin and probably multiple alliance characters.
Which has been the thing since DF. Everything has been neutral coded
And Bwomsamdi doing he Loa stuff?
That is just an idiotic line, and you know it. Sylvanas story had a lot to do with the Forsaken as a whole, and you know it. Wrapping up her story was a big part of the Horde story.
That is not the argument. The worst part of BfA was the faction war, no question. But a faction war can never be resolved in a satisfying way, period. There are lots of reasons and they have been discussed repeatedly. Both times the faction war was done it made the game worse. That is not the reason wars are bad, they are just examples of it going badly.
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Aye, faction wars only work in single player games, games were you are only on the side of one faction or a game where you aren’t part of either faction. Once players are involved in a binary faction system, neither side can overtake the other or the players will hate it.
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I’ma try to rerail this in a productive direction.
I think the actual question is: When will Horde get content they can be pumped about again? Horde themes (when they were still acknowledged) have arguably been worse than the absence thereof. Undermined and some Heritage quests are likely the only bones tossed our way, at least that I can recall.
By way of answer: Midnight, maybe? If the expansion that kicks off in a Horde capital can’t deliver, you can probably safely assume, Metzen or no, that the current situation is a feature, not a bug.
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In games like The Old Republic, it works really well because EACH character goes through their own personalized story where the decisions they made only affects them on a personal level.
But even that game had team-ups to take on the games/expansions Big Bad
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Yeah, also works that the overall story telling is contained to your character.
It really is just a single player RPG with MMO elements.
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Because WoW isn’t one story. WoW is a whole bunch of stories. And some of those stories have left a massive number of players who chose to invest in it by the wayside.
When I started getting into the lore, I was a trolly hunter in Vanilla. The story I was following was not just a general world story; there was also a story about my race (though mostly told through Gurubashi trolls) and my faction (Horde).
The story of my faction, the one I became most invested in, went through the next four expansions. And then it stopped. And half of those expansions were less about my faction and more about how we really needed to murder the Alliance.
We got picked back up again for BfA, and it was just… More about how we need to murder the Alliance. But also how we should feel really bad about needing to murder the Alliance.
And then that’s it, the end.
Shadowlands sucked no matter what faction you play. But one side had their king getting corrupted, then uncorrupted. The other had Baine tossed away like a trash bag for not being good enough, and Thrall weirdly and poorly throwing battle axes at demigods, and that’s pretty much it.
Dragonlands was mostly neutral, but then the final patch is very night elf and it’s kinda hard to feel excited about how the night elves are getting a new tree when you burned down the last one. Yay, good for them for getting a thing!
So if you played Horde and were invested in the Horde, your story for the last fourteen years has been about how you should murder the Alliance, how you should feel bad about murdering the Alliance, or how your leaders are trash bags who throw away their melee weapons when facing demigods.
There’s also a whole WoD in the middle of this that Horde players understandably don’t want to think of as “Horde story” because if you were a fan of the orcs, and how they got tricked into being genocidally evil by demons? Oh boy, just wait until you realize that they’re just naturally easy to trick into going genocidally evil.
…
The story of the factions is mostly played out through singular NPCs. Anduin, Jaina, Tyrande, Malfurion, Moira, Magni, Dagran, Velen, Turalyon, Alleria and so on.
Or if you’re Horde, Baine and Thrall, and Sylvanas before she called us nothing and flew away to try and kill hope somewhere else. Some others exist in the narrative for a single expansion (Talanji) but pretty quickly disappear after that.
You’re not just X race and Y class. You also play on Z faction. You spend a lot of time around your faction in their cities. It’s natural to want to see them developed.
Horde players would just appreciate seeing out token representative leader proxies for our factions actually doing stuff instead of hanging out in a corner of Oribos, or showing up to console Anduin.
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I realize I’m probably in the minority here. But honestly? The older I get, the less factions mean anything to me. I don’t care if it’s Horde content or Alliance content or X character showed up again!!
Just give me a story that’s enjoyable and that I can tun my brain off and just play without getting beat over the head about War bad mmkay? like BfA tried.
Will Undermine(D) be fun? Sure, I’m gonna hazard a guess and say more people will enjoy it than dislike it. I’m not a goblin fan myself but there is a certain, I dunno, appeal to the next story that certaintly LOOKS fun.
But that’s just me responding seriously to this and voicing my opinion.
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Please imagine me saying this nicely with a smile, but you do wish rather often for worgen content.
Maybe you’re going to say that’s not Alliance content per se, but the difference is academic to me.
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I mean, sure.Would more worgen stories be fun? Of course. Am I going to loose my mind everytime it doesn’t happen? Of course not. 
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And honestly, if worgen content comes out, I’m sure every faction or race will join in now.
And that is absolutely valid.
I’m a Horde main prior to swapping this expansion. I have no investment in dwarf lore or dwarf characters. I have no history with them whatsoever, and often viewed dwarves as “those short guys I have to sometimes kill, who often dig up things they really shouldn’t’ve.”
But like… Dagran, man!! I am so here for my boy!! My scholarly little chunky monkey (all dwarves look chunky to me) can do no wrong, and I don’t care what faction he was part of, he is now my faction, whichever one I’m playing. I have adopted him for both Horde and Alliance.
But at the same time, I’d really like to see what the Horde is even doing since they started feeling bad for murdering elves in BfA. Five years ago. I’d just like to know if we’re still in our required period of genocide reflection, if we have any leaders who aren’t trash bag Baine and sadface, poor aim Thrall. If Thrall and his AU not-sister/fem-self have even discussed that whole can of worms. And like… A whole lot more.
But I also very much understand the perspective of not caring about factions.
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Maybe its precisely because Renzik is Alliance align that he got a spotlight in what otherwise would be a Horde endeavor. Heck, Blizzard added Etrigg in what otherwise would/should have been an Alliance only affair of seeing the Sons of Lothar finally reunite. Like, him being part of said reunion(a reunion Alliance fans have been waiting for decades to happen mind you) was probably in no one’s bingo card.
Also SPOILER, he dies. So do you want Alliance aligned characters to die or not?
Outside of aesthetics, I think The Horde (as of WC3) is what made Warcraft truly unique, especially with a strong foil in the conventionally fantasy Alliance. Night Elves were refreshing at first, but they’ve since been watered down into grape wood elves.
Distancing from factions and Horde themes, to me, is just collapsing back into Tolkien, except no one is ever going to hold a candle to Tolkien in the stock standard fantasy arena. There are too many games to compete for my time, so it is tantamount to telling me to get lost.
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It’s certainly concerning that all we’ve seen cooking in Midnight’s cauldron is Alliance character drama. And if the focus of TWW’s companion lore is any indication, we’ll be lucky if Valeera, the not-Alliance blood elf, takes over Thrall’s role as the plot-irrelevant “Horde” token.
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To me, it was more the fact it was low fantasy with scifi elements in it. Human vs orc WAS the Tolkien aspect for me. The gnomish, goblins and dwarf tech with the Night elves being savages was the difference from Tolkien.