Friday, August 17, 2012

Speculation on the Aftermath of Mists

Mists of Pandaria is coming out in just a little over a month, so for any future readers - this is all speculation based on what I've seen on the Beta (which is actually not a huge amount) as well as the recently-released cinematic.

Looking back at the cinematic, I think there's actually some really good subtleties, and perhaps even some predictions we can make. First off, notice how the Orc and the Human react to their new surroundings - the human takes the time to craft a weapon (quickly, while watching for an ambush) while the orc grabs the nearest weapon-like object after he's already attacked. This, which is also reflected in the Tushui and Huojin philosophies that divide the playable Pandaren between Alliance and Horde, respectively, kind of sums up the differences between the two factions.

Anyway, what's interesting is that Chen (it is Chen, right?) finds them brutally fighting each other, but then redirects both of them to attack him. It is so effective that when Chen takes away the Orc's improvised mace, the Human hands his mere-moments-ago-a-mortal-enemy his carved-oar spear. Together, the Human and the Orc... well, they don't beat Chen, but they do a bit better.

It's pretty obvious that if there's a moral to World of Warcraft, it's that we'd all be a lot better off if we could just work together for a change, but that old hatreds run very, very deep. Well, that and people tend to get corrupted and go crazy.

One of the people getting corrupted appears to be Garrosh Hellscream (he was crazy from the get-go, such that both sides will spend the final raid removing him from office.

So what happens after that?

If World of Warcraft were a normal, narrative story, or even just a different kind of video game, we could imagine that the Alliance and Horde would finally bury the hatchet (in fact, they did this in Warcraft III, but of course things flared up again.)

The problem is that game mechanics prevent us from ending the conflict between the factions. While I don't PvP, many people - especially those who play on a PvP server - consider it to be integral to the game. If, all of a sudden, you could team up with a Tauren and a Dwarf, and hop on the bat handler in Undercity and land in Stormwind, it would really make it hard to work PvP in there. Even PvE and soloing would cause problems in this regard: you couldn't exactly go in as a Worgen character and do the Forsaken quests in Silverpine.

But there is a middle ground. If Mists is where the War that started with the Wrathgate Incident (or the Battle of Undercity) reaches its climax, what happens afterwards? Garrosh will be gone, and unless each side gets an entirely different version of the raid, we have to assume it's a cooperative effort.

For everything to go back to full-scale war would make this whole escapade seem a bit pointless. So here's what I imagine we'll see:

The Alliance and Horde will sign a treaty and officially end the war (the Fourth War?) But, much as the aftermath of the Third War lead to a kind of Cold War that existed throughout Vanilla and BC, we'll be back to the cloak and daggers and the limited skirmishes.

Ok, so that's the conservative proposal - keeping the status quo on gameplay.

The far more radical thing to do would be this: to truly end the faction war. They say World PvP is dead, well what about if in all future content, the Alliance and Horde are partners? We don't know how many more expansions they've got in them (as long as they're making money, they'll keep making them) but you could imagine that as we go out to A. Finally kill off the Old Gods for real, B. Kill Sargeras, and C. Something else... I know we're supposed to be done with dragons, but what about the Infinites? I want a time-travel expansion, dammit! Anyway, these threats might require some real cooperation. We might all find ourselves within Velen's Army of the Light.

Many would cry foul, but the story kind of demands it.

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