Will It Count This Time?

The Alliance and Horde have a history of warring and then setting aside their differences to fight a common foe.

The first time this happened was the Third War - Jaina and Thrall brokered a truce after Grom was once again corrupted by Mannoroth, and there were a few years (bought with the blood of Daelin Proudmoore and many Kul Tirans) of relative detente. While skirmishes erupted in various places, it wasn't really until the Wrath Gate Incident that Alliance and Horde found themselves truly at war again, which culminated ultimately in the Siege of Orgrimmar.

While far from friendly, relations were more or less good until the battle of the Broken Shore, where the retreat by the Horde was misinterpreted as an opportunistic abandonment of the Alliance, and Sylvanas' elevation as Warchief drove tensions far higher, the Burning of Teldrassil being the atrocity the likes of which we haven't really seen since the First War (at least by either player faction.)

However, while there are way more moving parts than it's easy to track - N'zoth and Azshara being pretty big players here, not to mention whatever mysterious Shadowlands forces A: told Vol'jin to name Sylvanas his successor and B: brought him back as some kind of Loa spirit - we are seeing some members of the Horde turning against Sylvanas and entertaining notions of cooperation with the Alliance.

I know Blizzard will be quick to say it's nothing like the Garrosh situation, but it kind of is - you have a pendulum swing in the Horde toward a more militarily aggressive leader who starts off the expansion after they were named by obliterating a major Alliance city, a couple of charismatic and beloved Horde leaders standing up to them and going into hiding, some morally questionable acts from the Alliance that pale in comparison to the crimes the Horde has committed, and a showdown with the current Warchief, bafflingly named successor by a more popular and peace-minded predecessor, coming down the road.

In the recent War Campaign quests, Baine Bloodhoof is sentenced to execution for returning the reanimated Derek Proudmoore to Jaina (which I still totally think was Sylvanas' plan - not that killing Baine to make it look like it wasn't would faze her,) and members of both factions - Saurfang and Thrall on the Horde side, Jaina and Matthias Shaw on the Alliance side - go and rescue him, with Jaina teleporting everyone to Thunder Bluff.

As Thrall and Jaina - the people who first fostered peace between the two factions - contemplate whether they can truly end the faction conflict, the question raised is this: what's different this time?

After all, this would be the third "peace" between the factions, and it always seems to erupt in war again. Why should we hope this would be any different?

This, of course, also has some implications game-wise. Are we actually going to see some kind of fundamental shift in the way that player factions work?

Blizzard is pretty conservative with this sort of thing, but we have seen some very subtle shifts in recent years to allow a breakdown of the once-impenetrable barriers between the factions. Demon Hunters, for example, can all speak Demonic, which allows them to communicate cross-faction, but only with fellow Demon Hunters.

But the, Void Elves also get Thalassian as a language, which is the Blood Elf (and High Elf, not that it's a playable race) language. That means that Void Elves can speak with Blood Elves (which makes Blood Elf Demon Hunters the ultimate diplomats.)

We saw in Ashran a system to allow players to play as the other faction temporarily to address server imbalances, which is arguably the biggest step toward a post-faction world we've seen.

But one does wonder: how much would have to change for the game to really move past factions?

And should it?

In the pro column: the playerbase of WoW is nowhere near as enormous as it was in its heyday. While shardng and CRZ and the like has allowed them to pour together or separate out players to keep a decent sense of player density in the world, a game where players of different factions could play together would essentially double (on average) the number of players you can group with.

Additionally, it would allow more player agency if we had a plot and world where, say, a Tauren and a Draenei could team up. In the lore, there's tons of examples of people of both sides looking past the divide - we even have a canonical Gnome and Goblin married couple now. If I can periodically team up with Thrall on my Human Paladin, why shouldn't I be able to group up with a friend's Orc Shaman character?

Some would argue in the con column that the Alliance/Horde conflict defines Warcraft. But I'd argue that those people are stuck in the '90s. Threats like the Old Gods, the Scourge, the Burning Legion - these are the big bads that the game's story is built around. Time and time again we're reminded of the humanity (or Orcishness if you're Horde) of all the playable races, and while racial resentment is certainly a very real and very difficult thing to reckon with in the real world, one would think that our player characters, who have spent all this time going all over the world(s), would have learned to stop thinking in such myopic terms.

Or, even if some continue to do so, you'd think a significant number would have moved past it.

To my mind, the best solution would be to accommodate different attitudes. If your Night Elf can never, ever forgive the Horde for what they did to Teldrassil, I get that. If your Blood Elf will never trust the Alliance again after the purge of Dalaran, I get that. (Man, WoW's pretty rough to elves.) But rather than making the assumption for players that they hold those attitudes - that my Tauren Shaman is really jazzed about spreading blight all over Darkshore - it would be great if we could elect to focus on the bigger, irredeemably evil threats.

So what should we expect?

I'm really looking forward to Blizzcon this year, not just because I'm crossing my fingers for a spooky Shadowlands expansion (though I am) but because I want to see if Blizzard is going to do something truly bold with this "resolving the faction conflict" goal they've set for themselves, or if it's just going to be more of the same.

We need some fundamental shift to gameplay mechanics for me to buy it.