At the end of Mists of Pandaria, we besieged Orgrimmar. Not just the Alliance (though the Alliance definitely did,) but also the Horde, which did create some odd world/lore dissonance as a player who had literally just fought through the city against heavy opposition and then arrested the Warchief could, moments later, walk freely into the Valley of Strength and go talk to Garrosh in Grommash Hold.
But the point is, while Garrosh was, for most of his NPC career, a Horde NPC, by the time he was a raid boss, he wasn't really Horde anymore. He had stepped out of the faction dichotomy and into the ranks of villains like the Lich King and Deathwing. Thus, we had both sides fighting against a common foe. Was it more complex and nuanced? Definitely. While the Alliance had the simpler task of attacking a heavily fortified enemy city, the Horde was forced to fight against former friends and launch an attack on the very city that many of them called home. But the Garrosh's arc as a villain was the ascension of a tyrant, overthrowing what had been a freer Horde, one with room for everyone, one for which Vol'jin and his revolution carried the banner.
In Battle for Azeroth, there does not seem to be the same kind of internal threat to be defeated. Could that change? Certainly. Sylvanas might follow in Garrosh's footsteps, or perhaps Jaina or Genn might overthrow the order of the Alliance and become a dictator that both sides would need to defeat.
But not only is that played out (as described above, they've literally already done that,) it also seems like Battle for Azeroth is trying to keep things balanced. While the faction conflict was important in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, the focus of both expansions was definitely elsewhere - either on Deathwing's apocalyptic natural disasters or the mysterious newly-discovered land of Pandaria. Battle for Azeroth is not only taking us to two places we already knew existed and whose citizens we've already interacted with, but it's putting that faction conflict as the central premise of the expansion.
Now let's be clear, I still expect that the plot of the expansion is going to pivot away from that conflict and toward a third party villain (who I'm 99% sure is actually who will burn down Teldrassil, in order to get the war started,) but one interview really fired up the speculation neurons in my brain:
In a PC Gamer interview with Ion Hazzikostas and Alex Afrasiabi, the latter said that, while they've always danced around the faction conflict, they've never resolved it, and that their goal for Battle for Azeroth is to do just that. While he responded with snark after being asked to clarify that (claiming the losing side would be "deleted," which I'll just say I highly doubt will happen,) the interesting thing here is that this suggests that there will be some, you know, fundamental resolution.
The closest thing we got to that was the end of Mists - in which Varian agreed to pull the Alliance out of Orgrimmar if the Horde would end its aggression. Talking to various NPCs, you even find details of a potential peace treaty - Tyrande mentions allowing the Horde to keep Azshara in exchange for pulling out of Ashenvale, and Varian mentions that the time would come soon for the Alliance to officially re-take Gilneas. None of this was reflected in-game, but that's to be expected, given that the zones as they are exist within a Cataclysm time-bubble.
But we did get two expansions of relative peace between the factions. I don't really consider Ashran to be canonical - just an opportunity for a PvP zone as an evolution of the Wintergrasp/Tol Barad model. And while Genn and Sylvanas clashed in Stormheim, it's pretty clear that the Alliance was only unofficially endorsing Genn's campaign against her, cold-war style.
BFA is going to be all-out war. So how is that going to resolve?
While I'd love to have my Undead Rogue hang out with a bunch of Alliance players, I recognize that the mechanics of the game just kind of require the existence of two opposed factions. So how do you have this war play out in a way that resolves in a way that is more final than the end of Siege of Orgrimmar, but still retains the mechanics of the game?
It's a tough question, and one I don't have a real answer to.
To me, the most natural state of Azeroth is to have the Alliance and Horde in a perpetual Cold War. So often the threat to the world is existential, and ultimately, both sides are seeking the same goal - a world that is still habitable. Indeed, I think most of the character even understand that without old resentments, both factions would make natural allies of one another. But neither side has the trust to put down their sword first - and when it comes to the Alliance, every time they give the Horde the benefit of the doubt, it winds up backfiring, which is why Jaina is so understandably done with the Horde. (For my part, I wish the Horde had a better reason not to trust the Alliance - not since Garrithos has an Alliance person acted crappily to the Horde without the Horde doing something worse first.)
So a Cold War works really well, because there's that mistrust even while people are acting reasonable.
Would "resolving" the conflict simply put the two into a Cold War state? That works, but it's also the end of Mists of Pandaria all over again. Stuff like Ashran and Stormheim, compartmentalized as they are, totally fits within the skirmishes of a Cold War kind of conflict.
But perhaps this only ends after a massive fight between the two sides. That brings up new questions, like "Who is the winner?" Siege of Orgrimmar managed to avoid making the Horde feel like the losers by separating out the "good Horde" and the "bad Horde" and allowing the good one to emerge victorious over its inner demons, ironically taking what might have been a moment of triumph for the Alliance and turning them into supporting players in a family dispute.
But even if it perhaps made the Siege feel less impactful, really only reinforcing a status quo that had been briefly interrupted by Garrosh, it worked with the mechanics of the game - both Horde players and Alliance players got a win out of it.
If BFA ends with one side triumphant over the other, what does that even look like for the losing side? If the Horde wins, how does your Alliance raid group defeating the final boss somehow end with you guys defeated? And furthermore, where do you go?
So it seems to me that there are effectively two ways for this to resolve.
First is the conservative version: that this talk of "resolving" the faction conflict is kind of false, and that what we're really going to see is either a Siege-style rapprochement between the factions that cools down the war into another Cold conflict.
The second, radical version: that the faction conflict truly ends the only way it could really, truly end, namely, with both factions merging, Orcs and Humans, Undead and Worgen, Tauren and Dwarves, Pandaren and different Pandaren, all standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a bright utopian future that only has to worry about the undead Scourge, the Old Gods, the Void Lords, freelance demons, and the other million freaking things trying to destroy all life on the planet.
We'll have to wait and see.
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