World of Warcraft‘s Alliance and Horde conflict is iconic: on one side all your classic “friendly” fantasy races like elves and dwarves, on the other a misfit pack of refugees, outcasts, and bestial creatures. The faction war was a formative keystone for the game, and many others in the genre as well, but for a long time now it seems like Blizzard has been less and less interested in centering it in the story. Worse still, halfway steps towards letting the two factions interact have left the whole system feeling vestigial. It may be time to ask whether the system still has a place in Blizzard’s modern vision of the game.
When WoW first launched, nearly 20 years ago now, the faction war between Alliance and Horde was a pretty inspired design choice. It made obvious sense for those coming from the Warcraft RTS games, while being an immediately intuitive framing device for newcomers. It helped people get invested in their characters by giving them a team to support and a foe to fight against, to say nothing of how conflict of this scale is fertile ground for drama and stories. It even set up for grand moments when the two factions would come together to face a greater foe, though that is in fact where part of the problem arises.
See, this is a trope that Blizzard’s storytellers love. And I don’t blame them, it’s compelling in many of the same ways as the ever popular enemies-to-lovers or shonen rivalry tropes. But after 10 expansions, that particular well has been wrung dry of pathos. After uniting to fend off first the Old Gods, then the Illidari, then the Scourge, the Old Gods again, then more Old Gods, the Burning Legion, then yet more Old Gods, it’s less and less plausible how the petty rivalries and politicking of the Alliance and Horde are still supposed to be WoW‘s status quo. As the announcement trailer for The War Within illustrates well, several of the various faction leaders like Thrall and Anduin are by now personal friends, and more than aware of the larger threats looming.
Of course story is only part of the equation, and implementing this into gameplay is unlikely to be as simple as hitting the “merge the factions button”. WoW is an old game by now, ancient by the standards of the medium, and decisions made during the initial development still influence the shape of the game today. Who knows how deep into the code the faction mechanic is buried. But that point also cuts both ways, as the setup of WoW‘s two-faction system previously required two separate levelling experiences for the Alliance and Horde. Endgame content like raids have traditionally been set against a third party (like those pesky Old Gods) so they could be shared, though 2018’s Battle for Azeroth experimented with faction-variant raids and dungeons. The split is great for flavor but it’s also a lot of extra content to make, especially since those who only play a single side are unlikely to see the rest. But then, playing characters on both sides was also discouraged because you weren’t able to share most money or items between them.
Nowadays, the developers at Blizzard have made fairly admirable efforts to change or at least work around most of these limitations, especially with the new Warband system and its shared bank. Even servers are no longer the impassable barriers they once were, as guilds and groups now work as long as the servers are within the same region. Most of the more recent expansions have also had a (mostly) unified storyline for both factions to follow, which means more development time spent on content accessible to everyone, albeit at the loss of a fair bit of story flavor. But these new conveniences only make the remaining restrictions feel more egregious. Despite guilds, groups, and raids all working cross-faction now, you are still unable to use certain Group Finder features while in a group with friends from the opposite faction.
That’s not to say that WoW wouldn’t lose something by moving on from the Alliance vs. Horde conflict, there’s still plenty of drama to be mined and many players still hold an improbable amount of pride in their chosen faction. Hell, having those two separate levelling paths was a boon for replay value, and in some cases let players see the same storyline from different angles. But losing the current incarnation of the faction system doesn’t preclude the introduction of a new, more flexible one in its place. One perhaps not so rigidly drawn along racial or national lines that has to be swept away when something more important comes up. WoW has even dabbled with similar things in the past with Legion‘s beloved Order Halls system or the (slightly less beloved) Shadowlands Covenants.
That’s really the main point here, not that the Alliance and Horde faction system is bad or unnecessary but that it just hasn’t evolved alongside WoW like it needs to. When the Cataclysm expansion modernized many classic zones some players mourned the loss of areas that they held great nostalgia for, or preferred the old designs of cities like Orgrimmar. Those are entirely valid feelings! But that same modernization also made them flatly more enjoyable and intuitive to play through and let the designers utilize new styles of quest design and technologies like Phasing. In a similar way, putting the old faction system to bed would go a long ways to modernizing the game and, more importantly, open the door for exploring new systems and stories.
World of Warcraft: The War Within is immediately available on PC and Mac.
Published: Sep 29, 2024 12:00 pm